Thousands of Rohingya are homeless after a fire in a refugee camp in Bangladesh

A fire broke out at noon on Sunday in a Rohingya refugee camp in southern Bangladesh. Since the house’s structures are mostly composed of a mixture of bamboo and fabrics, it didn’t take long for the flames to spread. Even gas bottles used for cooking caught fire and soon more than 2,000 homes were on fire.

So far, no deaths have been reported from the fire, but about 12,000 people living in the camp are now completely unprotected.

– Everything burned to ashes. Many without a home. I don’t know what will happen to us, says 40-year-old Salimullah Watchman.

In addition to many residences, at least 35 mosques and 21 educational centers were destroyed in the area. People began slowly returning on Monday to try to salvage what was left of the camp.

Fires are spreading in refugee camps. According to a report by the Bangladesh Defense Ministry last month, there were 222 fires between January 2021 and December 2022, of which 60 were considered arson.

In March 2021, the worst fire ever occurred in the Rohingya camps. At least 15 people were killed and nearly 50,000 displaced after an entire cluster of apartment buildings caught fire.

Fleeing the genocide in Myanmar

The refugee facility where Sunday’s fire occurred is located in the coastal city of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, near the border with Myanmar.

More than a million Rohingya live in Cox’s Bazar and most of them fled Myanmar in 2017. The Rohingya are sometimes described as the world’s most persecuted ethnic group and stateless people.

In 2017, Myanmar’s military cracked down on the country’s Rohingya, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee across the border into Bangladesh. Last year, the United States said the crackdown on the Rohingya in Myanmar constituted genocide.

In August 2022, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet stated that the situation in Myanmar remains too unsafe for those who have fled to be able to return home.

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