A landslide triggered by torrential rains killed three Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar District on Friday, according to rescue workers and a leader of the camp where the incident occurred.
The victims—a man and his two children—were living in Camp 14, one of 33 overcrowded camps in Cox’s Bazar housing more than a million Rohingya refugees.
They were among tens of thousands of refugees severely affected by downpours caused in part by remnants of Cyclone Yagi, which devastated a wide swathe of Southeast Asia, including central Myanmar, last week.
“I received a call from some people, who informed me of the landslide,” said Mohammed Noor, a rescue worker from Camp 14.
“We worked so hard, searching until around midnight. But two of the people we were able to find in the mud were already dead,” he told Myanmar Now.
He added that one victim was pulled out alive, but later died of his injuries while being taken to the hospital.
Three other members of the family—the mother and two children—survived, but also had to be hospitalised.
Landslides and flooding caused significant damage to the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, the Internal Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a post on social media on Friday.
“The IOM teams are relocating the most vulnerable, assessing the damage and delivering urgent humanitarian aid,” the post said.
Hafsa Begum, 44, was among the displaced. She was relocated to an NGO-run school in the camp, where she and at least 30 others spent the night sitting on tables instead of sleeping.
“We couldn’t sleep because it’s so wet. So we spent the entire night sitting on the tables,” she told Myanmar Now.
Food has also been in short supply, but camp sources said that the World Food Programme has distributed biscuits to the flooding victims.
Although the rain subsided over the weekend, water levels remained high, and it was unclear when the displaced would be able to return to their shelters.
“It looks like we will have to stay here a while longer, because our shelters are still flooded,” said Begum, adding that people in the school are facing a lack of food, water, and medicine.
U-Shobbir Ahmed Head Majhi, head of Camp 14’s E Block, confirmed the deaths of the three refugees, and said that such losses were almost routine in the camps.
“These kinds of tragedies keep happening over and over again in the Rohingya refugee camps,” he said.
“I want to urge the international community to pay more attention to our suffering,” he added. “We desperately need a solution. Please, do not turn a blind eye to our pain.”
Most of the Rohingya refugees currently sheltering in Bangladesh fled northern Rakhine State in 2017, when they were the targets of “clearance operations” by Myanmar’s military ostensibly aimed at Rohingya militants.
Senior leaders of the military, including the head of the current coup regime, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, are facing criminal charges at the International Court of Justice for that wave of violence, which has been widely condemned as genocide.
More recently, the Arakan Army, which has been fighting for full control of Rakhine State since late last year, has also been accused of carrying out attacks against the Rohingya, forcing thousands more to flee across the border.
