Fifteen people have so far been confirmed dead and 400 are still missing in the huge blaze at the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, the UN said yesterday.
“What we have seen in this fire is something we have never seen before in these camps. It is massive. It is devastating,” Johannes van der Klaauw, the UN High Commissioner for Refugee’s representative in Bangladesh, told reporters in Geneva via video link from Dhaka.
“We have so far confirmed 15 people dead, 560 injured, 400 are still missing and at least 10,000 shelters have been destroyed. That means at least 45,000 people are being displaced and for whom we now seek provisional shelter,” he said.
Photo: AFP
Nearly 1 million of the persecuted Muslim minority — many of whom escaped a 2017 crackdown that UN investigators concluded was executed with “genocidal intent” — live in squalid conditions at the camps in southeastern Cox’s Bazar District.
It was just the latest blaze in recent weeks — and the biggest since 2017. Bangladesh has ordered an investigation.
“People ran for their lives as it spread fast. Many were injured and I saw at least four bodies,” said Aminul Haq, a refugee.
Bangladeshi disaster management and relief official Mohsin Chowdhury put the death toll at seven people.
Officials said the blaze appeared to have started in one of the 34 camps — which cover about 3,200 hectares — before spreading rapidly to three other sites, despite desperate efforts to put out the flames.
Thick columns of smoke could be seen billowing from blazing shanties in video shared on social media, as hundreds of firefighters and aid workers pulled refugees to safety.
Firefighters finally brought the blaze under control around midnight.
Police inspector Gazi Salahuddin said the fire grew after gas cylinders used for cooking exploded.
Mohammad Yasin, a Rohingya helping with the firefight, said the blaze raged for more than 10 hours and was the worst he had seen.
“Children were running, crying for their families,” Save the Children volunteer Tayeba Begum said.
“Many children are missing, and some were unable to flee because of barbed-wire set up in the camps,” Refugees International said in a statement.
“We were unable to flee because of the fence, my youngest daughter got injured badly,” Myo Min Khan, a Rohingya, wrote on Facebook.
Agence France-Presse was not independently able to verify the claims about the fence.
Police rejected the accusation, saying only a tiny part of the camp was fenced.
“This tragedy is an awful reminder of the vulnerable position of Rohingya refugees who are caught between increasingly precarious conditions in Bangladesh and the reality of a homeland now ruled by the military responsible for the genocide that forced them to flee,” Refugees International said.
It was the third blaze to hit the camps in four days, said fire brigade official Sikder, who only goes by one name.
Two separate fires at the camps on Friday destroyed scores of shelters, officials said at the time.
Sikder said the cause of the blaze was not yet known.
Two big fires had also hit the camps in January, leaving thousands homeless and gutting four UNICEF schools.
The “frequency of fire in the camps is too coincidental, especially when outcomes of previous investigations into the incidents are not known and they keep repeating,” Amnesty International’s South Asia campaigner Saad Hammadi wrote on Twitter.
The government has been pushing for the refugees to be relocated to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, saying the settlements were too crowded.
So far, 13,000 Rohingya have been moved to the flood-prone island, which critics say is also in the path of deadly cyclones.
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