The monsoon and cyclone season is coming
Richard Burden MP Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield
Even before visiting the Bangladesh/Burma border area
last week, my work as a member of the House of Commons International
Development Committee meant I knew a fair amount about the scale of the
Rohingya crisis. But nothing quite prepares you for the enormity of the
humanitarian emergency that you see for yourself when you go there and which
could, within weeks, still claim the lives of thousands of those who have
managed to survive and escape the ethnic cleansing taking place in
Burma/Myanmar itself.
According to the Inter-Sector Coordination Group
overseeing humanitarian relief operations in the area, over 671,000 men, women
and children fled across the border into Bangladesh in just six months since
the latest military onslaught on the Rohingya people began in Myanmar’s Rakhine
State on 25th August last year. Already traumatised by seeing their villages
torched and friends and family either killed or missing, an estimated 589,000
of those refugees are today crammed together in the Kutupalong-Bakukhali
Expansion Site down the road from Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar resort.
The area used to be a forest, but now trees are nowhere
to be seen. They have been replaced by flimsy shacks made of wood, plastic
sheeting, bamboo and – occasionally - tin. The shacks in which the refugees now
live are everywhere, precariously perched on the loose earth that deforestation
has left behind.
Much has already been written about the horrors unfolding
inside Rakhine state as well as the emergency relief effort going on to provide
the Rohingya refugees with food, shelter and urgent medical care. Now, though,
another killer is just weeks away. The coming monsoon rains and the likelihood
of cyclone will cause floods, mudslides and landslips that will simply sweep
away many of the makeshift shacks. Aid
agencies have estimated that shacks currently housing over 100,000 Rohingyas in
Kutupalong-Bakukhali could be destroyed during the rains, with 23,000 refugees
living on the slopes at high risk of landslide. The dirt roads that are the
only access into the camp will also turn into quagmires impassable to rescue
vehicles trying to reach those buried or cut off by mudslides and flood.
Refugees that are cut off will, in turn, become still more vulnerable to
disease than they already are in the crowded conditions of the camp.
Aid agencies are doing their best to dig what drainage
channels they can and to shore up at least some structures in the camps. They
are also urgently bringing in aggregate to strengthen access roads. But neither
the time that is left before the rains come nor the topography of the area will
allow those efforts to be enough. If thousands of lives are not to be lost, the
urgent infrastructure work now going on will have to be supplemented by an
emergency evacuation of those living in the most exposed shacks to safer
ground. And it has to happen before the rains come.
The Bangladesh government say that land has been
identified to relocate over 100,000 refugees most at risk from landslide and
flood, but progress in turning promise into reality is still painfully slow.
Bangladesh deserves huge credit for opening its borders
to Rohingya refugees fleeing the latest and worst of a series of pogroms in
Rakhine state that have brought the total number of Rohingya refugees in the
country to over a million. Many thousands of Rohingya refugees would not be
alive today but for the generosity of Bangladesh and its people in offering
them sanctuary. What the medium-term future holds for the Rohingya raises
massive issues for Bangladesh. And facing those issues requires action from the
international community as a whole - to hold to account those responsible for
the pogroms against the Rohingya and to redouble pressure on Myanmar to end the
persecution so that the Rohingya can at last return to their homeland as full
and equal citizens.
These are all vital and long term issues to address. But
they should not obscure the fact that there is a different and immediate
disaster also looming and that time is running out to save lives from the
coming monsoon and cyclone season. Clarity of strategy and practical action
from the Bangladesh Government in conjunction with the United Nations are
needed if that disaster is to be averted.
And that action is needed now.
Richard Burden MP is a Labour member of The
House of Commons International Development Committee. The Committee visited
Bangladesh between 3rd and 7th March 2018