Since late August 2017, approximately 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have been forced to flee Myanmar’s (formerly known as Burma) Rakhine State to escape the military’s large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing. The atrocities performed by Burmese security forces, include mass killings, sexual violence, widespread arson and other atrocities. Myanmar has been accused of crimes against humanity by many governments and charity organizations. Military and civilian officials in Burma have repeatedly denied that security forces committed abuses during the operations, claims which are contradicted by extensive evidence and witness accounts.
The Rohingya (predominately Muslim) have faced decades of discrimination and repression under successive Burmese governments. The predominately Buddhist country has denied citizenship to the Muslim minority under the 1982 Citizenship Law. They are one of the largest stateless populations in the world. Restrictions on movement and lack of access to basic health care have led to dire humanitarian conditions according to relief agencies.
The Rohingya have fled all of this violence to Bangladesh where they were followed by the Burmese military armed with machetes and other weapons of terror and mass murder. Bangladesh created refugee camps in what was once forested land as hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees crossed the border. The land has been cleared of all vegetation and the roots that once held the clay soil together is now gone. The land as a result, has been flooding and the sloping hillsides are now highly susceptible to landslides. The refugee camps are really just militarized internment camps. They can not leave for safer ground as the camps are patrolled by armed guards.
Bitter experience has taught Bangladesh how to manage cyclones and floods. The government has detailed procedures for warning the public and reducing the loss of life. But two responses are key: moving to higher ground and hunkering down in sturdy shelters. Neither are available to the Rohingya.What haunts me, as one who follows the climate crisis, is the terrifying conclusion that I along with the rest of humanity will be watching the population in the global south wiped out from global warming impacts such as increasing heat, floods, droughts and stronger and stronger storms.
In the camps of southeast Bangladesh, the monsoon rains which last for months have begun to fall. We just might observe one such mass casualty event of climate chaos come to pass in the next few months. How are we going to stomach these unfolding events in the future?
Michael Safi in a post for The Guardian, has the compelling tale of the camps that all of us should read and understand. If a cyclone hits the camps, hundreds of thousands will die.
As well as heightening the risk of floods, Bangladesh’s geography also makes for extraordinarily deadly storms. A cyclone in 1970 killed 300,000 people. Another in the same area in 1991 left an estimated 10 million people homeless. Cyclone Sidr, a decade ago, killed as many as 10,000 people.
Should cyclones bear down on the region again, as they have in the past two years, they could collide with nearly 700,000 new residents sleeping in tents of bamboo and tarpaulin. Aid agencies fear a second catastrophe is about to strike the Rohingya. “Lives will be lost,” says Daphnée Cook, Save the Children’s communications manager. “It’s just a question of how many.”
As many as 200,000 refugees are estimated to be at direct risk from landslides or floods and require urgent evacuation, separate assessments by the Bangladesh government and aid groups have concluded. Most have nowhere to go.
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The sudden influx of so many new arrivals on the shores of Cox’s Bazar has fundamentally altered its geography. Rohingya settlements have so far chewed through 1,900 hectares of undeveloped forest given up by the Bangladesh government.
Root systems that once held the clay soil together, reducing landslides, have vanished. Major waterways are being dredged. Heavy machinery deployed by the government is levelling whole hillsides, heap by heap.
Safi notes that building strong homes and shelters are not going to happen. The Bangladesh population has turned against the Rohingya. “Bangladeshi public sentiment is starting to tire of the burden of more than a million displaced people, and it is an election year. Bricks roads and cement drains have been allowed, but not concrete homes. Like the presence of schools, they might suggest the refugees are in Cox’s Bazar to stay”. So the camp’s population are left to protect themselves in the only way they are able to, with tarps, bamboo and sandbags against the fury and power of a barreling cyclone armed with the weapons of storm surge, ferocious winds and flooding debris laden white water rivers.