Bangladesh plans to allocate more land for camps housing Rohingya refugees as concerns grow over a possible outbreak of disease in crowded, makeshift settlements clustered at the country’s southern tip.
About 625,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to sanctuary in Bangladesh from violence, looting and destruction in Myanmar after government forces launched a counter insurgency following attacks by Rohingya militants on Aug. 25.
The swift exodus has taken the Rohingya refugee population to 837,000, making Bangladesh one of the world’s largest, most crowded settlement of asylum seekers.
Photo: Reuters
More than 60 percent of the water supply in the camps is contaminated with bacteria as temporary latrines overflow into hastily-built, shallow wells, a WHO survey showed.
Fecal sludge in the settlements goes largely untreated.
“There is a high risk of a public health event, not just cholera and acute watery diarrhea,” said Naim Talukder of the group Action Against Hunger, who is coordinating the efforts of 31 groups and agencies to manage water, sanitation and hygiene.
Most refugees live in flimsy bamboo and canvas shelters in an area crowded well beyond emergency standards, International Organization for Migration (IOM) official Graham Eastmond said.
“You are talking a third of the international standard,” he said. “We need to decongest urgently and obviously, to do that, we need more land.”
The IOM is among the bodies that have urged Bangladesh to free up more land and allow a wider spread of settlements.
“The government already allocated 3,000 acres [1,214 hectares] of land for the Rohingya,” said Shah Kamal, a disaster management official. “Considering the current situation, the government is planning to allocate 500 acres more land for them.”
Bangladesh last week approved a US$280 million project to develop an isolated and flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal to temporarily house 100,000 Rohingya, despite criticism from rights groups.
The overcrowding spells health and safety risks, Eastmond said, from rapidly spreading water-borne and communicable diseases to landslides and flooding, besides swelling the threat to vulnerable children and women.
Single women or children head about a fifth of households, preliminary findings of a population survey by the UN refugee agency and Bangladesh show.
By Nov. 11, there were 36,096 cases of acute watery diarrhea since Aug. 25, as infection rates climbed, UNICEF said last month.
Bangladesh, in partnership with UN agencies and charities, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in responding to the crisis.
New roads built by the army will open this month, boosting access for camp-dwellers, Eastmond said.
Yet just 23 percent of funding needs for water, sanitation and hygiene services are being met, Talukder said.
Bangladesh and Myanmar vowed to begin the voluntary return of the Rohingya to Myanmar in the next two months, but the Rohingya will have to present identity documents in order to be accepted, Burmese officials said, and relief officials fear that few Rohingya carried such documents when they fled.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS