For Rohingya in Bangladesh, No Place is Home

Rohingya children Kutu Palong — Rohingya children shelter from the rain in Kutu Palong makeshift refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo: Misha Hussain

By Misha Hussain in KUTU PALONG |
Bangladesh | 19 Feb 2010

Some 30,000 unregistered Rohingya refugees live in a camp, with crude huts thrown together with bin liners, sticks and mud. Sanitation is minimal. Sewage facilities, hugely inadequate in the monsoon season, run alongside the housing. In March 2009, MSF found that 40% of deaths were as a result of diarrheal diseases.

Hundreds of children flock at the site of a stranger in the Kutu Palong makeshift camp in southeastern Bangladesh, near the border with Burma. Some are wearing salvaged clothes; mostly, they are naked. “Hello, how are you?” they shout, repeating the one phrase they have picked up from the few aid workers that have gained permission from the Bangladesh authorities to enter the unregistered camp.

In recent months, Kutu Palong has become a refuge from a brutal crackdown on the Rohingya, according to a report issued Thursday by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). More than 6,000 people have arrived in the camp since October as police and border authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown in Bangladesh, pushing over 2,000 Rohingya back across the border into Burma. More than 500 were arrested around the country in January alone. MSF doctors working in Kutu Palong say they have been treating Rohingya who have been beaten and raped.

“[Border guards] broke my fingers and then they threw me into the river and told me to swim back,” says Ziaur Rahman, a 23-year-old who managed to escape and walk for three days to get medical care at the MSF clinic based outside the Kutu Palong makeshift camp.