Cox’s Bazar | At least six Rohingya have died in a fire that broke out in a massive refugee camp in south-eastern Bangladesh, forcing at least 50,000 people to flee, officials and aid workers said.
“Nearly 10,000 shelters have been set on fire,” Mohsin Chowdhury, disaster management and relief secretary, who came to the scene from the capital Dhaka, told AFP.
“We have assembled a committee of seven members to investigate the fire” which broke out on Monday, he added, “at least six people perished”.
The firefighters finally brought the disaster under control around midnight.
This is the third fire to break out in the Rohingya camps in four days, firefighter official Sikder told AFP, stressing that the origin of the disaster remains unknown at this time.
Already on Friday, two fires had destroyed dozens of Rohingya shelters, according to the authorities.
Nearly one million members of Burma’s Muslim minority live in precarious conditions in camps in Cox’s Bazar district, after fleeing military repression in their country in 2017.
Authorities said the blaze started in one of 34 camps, covering more than 3,000 hectares, before spreading to three other camps forcing refugees to flee, taking what they could save with them.
According to the organization Refugees International, at least 50,000 people have fled after the fire reduced thousands of makeshift huts made of tarpaulins and bamboo to ashes.
“Children running in tears”
Gazi Salahuddin, a police inspector, also estimates that “around 50,000 people” had fled to seek refuge with “relatives in other camps”. According to him, the fire has escalated with the explosion of gas stoves used by refugees for cooking.
Thick columns of smoke billowed from the burning shelters where hundreds of firefighters and aid workers battled the flames and helped evacuate the refugees. The fire raged for more than 10 hours, Mohammad Yasin, a Rohingya man, told AFP.
“This is the biggest fire since the influx of Rohingyas in August 2017,” Deputy Commissioner for Refugees Shamsud Douza told AFP, adding that food had been provided to the displaced and that aid workers were trying. to provide them with all the necessary humanitarian support.
“People were running away because the fire was spreading quickly. Many were injured and I saw at least four bodies, ”said Aminul Haq, another refugee.
“The children were running, crying,” recalls Save the Children NGO aid worker Tayeba Begum.
“Trop big coincidence ‘
Rohingya representative Sayed Ullah calls for “an immediate investigation”, saying the nature of the fires raised serious concerns.
“We do not know why these fires are repeated in the camps. We need a proper and complete investigation, ”he told AFP.
“Many children are missing, and some have not been able to flee because of the barbed wire installed in the camps,” he also lamented in a statement.
“We couldn’t flee because of the fence, my youngest daughter was seriously injured,” Myo Min Khan, a Rohingya man, testified on Facebook immediately after the fire.
The police, however, dismissed the accusation, saying only a very small part of the camp was fenced.
The NGO Refugees International is concerned that the fire is reviving traumatic memories of the persecution suffered by the Rohingyas in Burma in 2017.
“This tragedy is a terrible reminder of the vulnerable position of the Rohingya refugees caught between increasingly precarious conditions in Bangladesh and the reality of a homeland now ruled by the military responsible for the genocide which forced them to flee,” he added. ‘organization.
Two large fires have already broken out in these camps in January, leaving thousands of Rohingyas homeless and four schools erected by Unicef destroyed.
For Saad Hammadi, responsible for the South Asia region for Amnesty International, “the frequency of fires in the camps is too great a coincidence, especially as the results of previous investigations into these incidents are not known and they are repeat ”.