Panic As Fire Guts At World’s Largest Refugee Camp (Watch Video)
Authorities in Bangladesh are looking into what started a large fire that left 12,000 Rohingya refugees without a place to stay.
There have been no recorded injuries, but according to officials, the fire on Sunday destroyed 2,000 shelters after quickly spreading through cooking gas cylinders.
Authorities are looking into whether the fire was intentionally set. According to local media, one individual has been detained.
The camp in the southeast is thought to be the biggest refugee camp on earth.
The majority of its more than a million Rohingya refugees lived there after fleeing persecution in neighboring Burma.
Several people had visited the Cox’s Bazar region again on Monday to see what they could save from the ruins.
An official reported that the fire broke out around 14:45 local time on Sunday (08:45 GMT) and spread fast to the bamboo and tarpaulin shelters.
Some 12,000 forcibly displaced Myanmar citizens are now without shelter due to the burning of 2,000 shelters, according to Mijanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner, speaking to AFP.
The blaze was brought under control within three hours but at least 35 mosques and 21 learning centres for the refugees were also destroyed, he added.
Photos are now emerging that show the extent of the devastation.
Many of those who lived there can be seen picking through the charred area, where only metal struts and singed corrugated roofing remains.
Hrusikesh Harichandan, from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told the BBC there had been “massive damage” to the camp.
He said basic services such as water centres and testing facilities had also been affected.
“My shelter was gutted. [My shop] was also burnt,” Mamun Johar, a 30-year-old Rohingya man, told AFP.
“The fire took everything from me, everything.”
Thick black clouds were seen rising above Camp 11, one of many in the border district.
It will be difficult to relocate the estimated 12,000 people affected by the fire – given the already overcrowded conditions in the “mega camp”, said Hardin Lang from Refugees International.
Delivering basic services to those people in other parts of the camp would also be a challenge because many services – health clinics, schools – have been destroyed.
“This is in essence an acute incident on what was already a chronically very vulnerable and precariously poised population,” he told the BBC.
The camps, overcrowded and squalid, have long been vulnerable to fires.
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.
The refugee camp houses people who fled from Myanmar following a military crackdown against the Rohingya ethnic minority.
The Rohingya are Muslims in largely Buddhist Myanmar, where they have faced persecution for generations.
The latest exodus of Rohingya escaping to Bangladesh began in August 2017, after Myanmar’s military brutally retaliated when a Rohingya insurgent group launched attacks on several police posts.
