Dispossessed Rohingya refugees are living in vast, sprawling, underfunded camps in Bangladesh. What does the future hold for them?
Words and Photographs by Gabriele Cecconi
In August 2017, as many as 700,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar to Bangladesh to escape what the UN has defined as genocide. Today, the vast majority are still there, most living in the world’s largest refugee camp. While conditions in what has become a cluster of camps have, in some ways, significantly improved in the past five years, they’re still dire. Many of the refugees are malnourished; violent gangs rob and loot their few meagre possessions; fires sweep through the flimsy buildings; and the political chaos across the Naf River in Myanmar offers little prospect for them to return home.
In March, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced that it was cutting the financial assistance paid to those sheltering in the sprawling complex of camps near Cox’s Bazar because of a lack of funding. The monthly ration that families can spend in the 40 WFP food outlets in the camps was cut from US$12 to US$10.
‘These rations cuts are a stain on the conscience of the international community,’ said Tom Andrews, UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, who reports to the Human Rights Council in the Hague. ‘I have spoken with desperate families in the camps who have already had to cut back on essential food items due to a price spike. Reversing these food aid cuts is a matter of life and death for Rohingya families.’
More than 25 refugee camps housing more than 900,000 people are now packed into the region, including Kutupalong, the largest in the world with a population of more than 600,000. When I first visited the camp in March 2018, about seven months after the great exodus, I walked along a main road hastily built by the Bangladeshi army that, after a few hundred metres, rose over a ridge of sandy hills to reveal thousands of shelters that had been built on top of each other, piled in makeshift positions surrounded by a landscape that was quickly turning into a desert. The forest had been completely cleared and the soil was exposed to the harsh, burning light of the Bengali sun.
The Bangladesh authorities and the world’s aid agencies were desperate to provide shelter for the vast influx of refugees. Thousands had died in vicious pogroms, with the Myanmar army burning villages and indiscriminately killing the Muslim population of the state of Rakhine. The Rohingya have suffered generations of persecution by the military governments that have run Myanmar for the past 60 years. Many had fled across the Naf River before, only to be encouraged to return to Myanmar by the Bangladeshi authorities with false assurances that the violence had ended.
In Bangladeshi terms, the area around Cox’s Bazar was sparsely populated, and it was a lush landscape of rich farmland with a backdrop of densely vegetated, sandy hills. Usually, when people talk about environmental migration, they refer to the movement of people as a consequence of climate change. However, in this case, the situation was reversed, and the question was, what would the impact of mass migration be on the environment? During a mass migration, as was the case with the Rohingya in southern Bangladesh, thousands of people concentrate in a more or less restricted area with basic needs to be met and, especially during the emergency phase of the crisis, these needs collide with already fragile ecosystems. The pressure on the environment and local resources becomes unsustainable, and in a few months, irreversible changes threaten and destroy biodiversity, and the existence of the resources themselves.
Of course, this has severe consequences for the living conditions of the refugees. In the sub-districts of Ukhia and Teknaf more than 3,200 hectares of nature reserve were lost in the first year alone, due to the construction of refugee camps and the Rohingya’s need to collect wood to use as fuel for cooking the little food available, inside often overcrowded shelters.
The immediate consequences were the felling of ancient forests, which in turn led to soil erosion and an increase in the likelihood of land- and mudslides. Water resources were degraded and there was a significant loss of biodiversity. There were also indirect repercussions on the health of the refugees.
While exploring the camp, I came across a funeral. The deceased had died due to complications arising from a respiratory infection contracted through exposure to smoke produced by burning wood during food preparation. The man, who couldn’t walk, was forced to stay inside the shelter while food was being cooked and had become ill. The infirm, the elderly, infants and the women who did the cooking were the most exposed to the wood smoke.
According to a World Health Organisation (WHO) study, between August and December 2017, there were 273 deaths related to respiratory tract infections, the leading cause of death among the population.
It was awe-inspiring at dawn, not only to see the camp covered in a blanket of smoke coming out of thousands of shelters but also to witness the thousands of men, women and children heading out to what was once a lush forest to collect wood from as far as 20 kilometres away. During the early months of the migration, the population depended on the Teknaf Nature Reserve for survival. A UN study estimated that more than 7,000 tonnes of wood were being collected daily. In addition, water resources were rapidly degrading. Despite dozens of wells being dug daily, the water was insufficient to meet needs and soon became contaminated due to the absence of a sewage system. A WHO report in December 2017 said that about 80 per cent of the water samples taken from the camps were contaminated with E. coli.
In addition to these problems, there was, and still is, the issue of waste disposal, as the camps produce about 120 tonnes of rubbish daily. The soil erosion, which exposed the sandy and hilly terrain to possible landslides, put thousands of refugees at risk, especially during the monsoon seasons. As if that weren’t enough, dozens of people were killed or injured by Asian elephants, which were accustomed to using the reserve as part of their migration route but now found themselves surrounded by refugees and, when frightened, attacked the people.
Environmental issues, inextricably linked to the refugees’ survival, only exacerbated the already traumatic condition of the migrants: the camp was a huge, open-air, dangerous, unsanitary construction site.
While the situation has improved in recent years, a strong sense of estrangement enveloped me when, last year, I found myself walking the same streets, visiting the same camps. The Kutupalong-Balukhali mega-camp is virtually unrecognisable from what it was in 2018. Some landmarks were familiar, but the landscape had completely changed. The work of international aid agencies assisted by local NGOs has been impressive, especially in reforesting the area and building infrastructure such as bridges, roads and an efficient water-distribution system. While the first seed and small plant distribution programmes were beginning to be implemented among the local population during my previous visit, today, the once-barren hillsides are covered with dense vegetation thanks to the planting of fast-growing native trees. Tens of kilometres of roads connecting each area of the camp to the main artery have also been built, as well as stairs and solid bridges that enable the movement of people between the hills and wider canals.
What was a construction site four years ago is now a fully-fledged city with a water-distribution system and an illegal but tolerated internal economy. The Rohingya lack a legally recognised status from the Bangladeshi government, and in the absence of documents, they can’t fit into the local economic and social fabric. Any form of activity or subsistence conducted by them within the camps that doesn’t relate to the work programmes implemented by the various NGOs is considered illegal, although its partially tolerated. One significant achievement has been the shift to LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas) for energy needs. Refugees no longer have to venture into the forest to collect wood, which has helped preserve what’s left of the reserve.
However, the overall conditions remain critical for the refugees, who depend on humanitarian aid. Four in ten Rohingya children in Bangladesh suffer from stunted growth. Anaemia affects more than half of the youngsters in the camps and more than four in ten pregnant and breastfeeding Rohingya women. The US$125 million shortfall in funding the food programme can only make matters worse.
Some of the environmental issues remain unresolved. The problem of waste management is still significant, and hygiene in some parts of the camp remains poor. In the six months leading up to August 2022, thousands of people contracted dengue fever. Although a rudimentary sewage system has been built, it covers only a small part of the camp. All of the canals remain open, encouraging the spread of disease, especially in the most congested areas. Moreover, while the condition of the main camp, in which the majority of refugees live, has improved, the same can’t be said for all of the refugee camps in the sub-districts of Ukhia and Teknaf. Some of the smaller and more densely populated camps, such as Unchiprang, for example, located about 30 kilometres south of the Kutupalong-Balukhali camp, seem to have remained in the same condition as four years ago. Although some services have been improved, sanitation remains terrible. Small and overcrowded, the camp is still unfit for a decent human life.
Conditions have become so desperate that the number attempting dangerous sea crossings to Malaysia or Indonesia increased fivefold last year to more than 3,500 – it’s reported that more than ten per cent died during the attempts.
Fires are becoming an increasing problem inside the camps. In March this year, a blaze swept through Camp 11. There were no casualties, but the blaze ripped through homes and destroyed key infrastructure – schools, medical clinics and service points. It left 15,000 Rohingya refugees without a roof and gutted some 2,800 shelters. Between January 2021 and December 2022, there were 222 fire incidents in the Rohingya camps including 60 cases of arson, according to a Bangladesh defence ministry report released last month. In March 2021, at least 15 people were killed and some 50,000 displaced after a huge fire tore through a camp in the settlement. The fires have been blamed on the armed gangs that menance, rob and murder the inhabitants in the camps. Rohingya complain that Bangladeshi police have failed to root out the violence, and instead themselves harass and extort the refugees.
The Bangladeshi government has come up with a plan to move some of the Rohingya to Bhasan Char, a small island in the Bay of Bengal that’s highly vulnerable to cyclones. Officials claim this could be a fresh start for the refugees. More than 25,000 Rohingya have been transported to the island. However, there have been complaints that the island is more like a prison and conditions no better than in the camps.
If, during the emergency phase of the crisis, the families’ priority had been to flee the persecution they had suffered in Myanmar and then, upon arriving in Bangladesh, to think about their own survival within a difficult and battered ecosystem, five years later, the inhabitants are seriously concerned about their own future and even more so for their children’s futures. A young man from the local community, one of the very few Rohingya who has been fortunate enough to be able to gain a college education, expressed this clearly: ‘If in Myanmar the Rohingya community suffered a real genocide, now five years later, without the prospect of a repatriation agreement between the two governments, what we are witnessing is another kind of genocide, the cultural genocide.’
The man was referring to the tens of thousands of children who have grown up in the camps, in conditions denying human dignity, with no real education and no prospects for the future. Another man, Mohammed Yonus, a father of three children, one of whom was a victim of a huge fire that devastated hundreds of shelters in February 2022, told me: ‘I don’t care what will happen to me personally, I keep going for my remaining children. Even if I see no prospects of a decent life in front of them, that is my only concern.’
