At least seven people, including five Rohingyas, died in landslides triggered by heavy rains in Cox’s Bazar on Tuesday. The landslides hit Ukhiya, Moheshkhali, and Teknaf Upazilas in the morning following overnight heavy rainfall. The Cox’s Bazar met office recorded 134 mm rainfall in 24 hours on Tuesday. Landslides have become a common feature in the greater Chattogram area during the monsoon and there’s no effective measure on the card to address the disaster except for some piecemeal steps.
Over one lakh people live on hills and their slopes in greater Chattogram, including Chattogram, Cox’s Bazar, Rangamati and Bandarban. Politically influential people have grabbed the hills, built makeshift homes, and rented those out to lower-income people at low rentals. In Chattogram, the district administration identified 30 landslide-prone hills, on which around 10,000 people live. Every monsoon, the authority makes efforts to relocate the people to safer places, but the initiative goes in vain largely due to poor and unhygienic conditions of shelters.
Around 170 people died in massive landslides in June 2017 in Chattogram, Rangamati, and Bandarban districts, disconnecting regional communication for days. A high-powered committee, formed after 127 people died in a landslide in the port city in 2007, put forward 30 recommendations, including permanent rehabilitation of the people exposed to landslides, afforestation on hills so they can ward off landslides, stopping hill cutting, and building fences around the hills to protect them from grabbers.
It has been 13 years since the recommendations were forwarded. None of those has been executed yet. So, we can say the people killed over the years in landslides are not mere accidents, rather these are institutional killings as the administration pays no heed to the life of people exposed to the disaster. The relevant local administrations must be made accountable for their utter negligence over the years.
