Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh’s “at-risk areas” will be evacuated on Saturday, ahead of the arrival in the country and neighboring Burma of the most powerful cyclone in nearly 20 years, officials said. Cyclone Mocha was accompanied by winds blowing up to 175 km/h and meteorological officials in Dhaka classified it as “very violent”, while their Indian counterparts described it as “extremely violent”.
It should make landfall on Sunday morning between Cox’s Bazar, where nearly a million Rohingya refugees live in camps made up largely of precarious shelters, and Sittwe, on the west coast of Rakhine State, in Burma. Bangladeshi authorities have banned Rohingyas from building permanent concrete houses, fearing this could encourage them to settle permanently rather than return to Myanmar, which they fled in 2017.
“We live in houses made of tarpaulins and bamboo,” said Enam Ahmed, a refugee who lives in Nayapara, near the border town of Teknaf. ” We are scared. We do not know where we will be sheltered. We are panicked,” he added. Authorities said thousands of volunteers were evacuating Rohingya from “at-risk areas” to stronger structures such as schools. But “all the Rohingyas in the camps are in danger”, warns the Deputy Commissioner for Refugees of Bangladesh, Shamsud Douza.