UNB, Cox’s Bazar :
Concerns over what the annual rainy season in this part of the world, the southwest monsoon, may hold for the multitudes of Rohingya refugees who started streaming across the international border from Myanmar last August mainly into three upazilas of border district Cox’s Bazar, have been voiced from the start of the influx.
The sheer scale of the influx, the pattern that developed in settling them, and a sense of alarm raised by flashfloods and mud-or-hill-slides in the same areas during last year’s monsoon, which caused some of the most disastrous and fatal incidents in living memory, all served to reinforce them. The scale of the influx was recognized quite early on by international bodies like the UN as the fastest-growing refugee crisis they had dealt with since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. On September 15, just three weeks after the first movement of people fleeing a crackdown by the Myanmar army was reported on August 25, the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR reported a whopping 380,000 Rohingya had entered Bangladesh.
After 5 weeks, this had swelled to 512,000 -maintaining the rate of over 100,000 per week. Thereafter the momentum eased somewhat. The Inter Sectoral Coordination Group, a cluster of groups working in the area convened by the UN’s migration agency IOM, in their last update of 2017 reported 655,000 refugees entrants since August 25, including 628 in the week preceding the report. Now it is commonly estimated that some 700,000 Rohingya entered Bangladesh as part of the influx – pushing the overall Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh to 1.1 million. It is important to consider the numbers in the context of the 1.1-1.3 million that was estimated to have been the size of the entire Rohingya population in Myanmar prior to 2015. Coming to the pattern, it was the cutting down of hills and trees in the name of building safe settlements for
the persecuted Rohingya, that bothered most observers familiar with the region’s problems, seeing that those are the two acts most likely to exacerbate the dangers of landslides. Initially 5,500 acres of forest land was allotted for the Rohingyas to shelter in Ukhia and Teknaf, although locals say eventually over 6,000 acres of forest land owned by Cox’s Bazar South Forest Department was destroyed.
Concerns over what the annual rainy season in this part of the world, the southwest monsoon, may hold for the multitudes of Rohingya refugees who started streaming across the international border from Myanmar last August mainly into three upazilas of border district Cox’s Bazar, have been voiced from the start of the influx.
The sheer scale of the influx, the pattern that developed in settling them, and a sense of alarm raised by flashfloods and mud-or-hill-slides in the same areas during last year’s monsoon, which caused some of the most disastrous and fatal incidents in living memory, all served to reinforce them. The scale of the influx was recognized quite early on by international bodies like the UN as the fastest-growing refugee crisis they had dealt with since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. On September 15, just three weeks after the first movement of people fleeing a crackdown by the Myanmar army was reported on August 25, the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR reported a whopping 380,000 Rohingya had entered Bangladesh.
After 5 weeks, this had swelled to 512,000 -maintaining the rate of over 100,000 per week. Thereafter the momentum eased somewhat. The Inter Sectoral Coordination Group, a cluster of groups working in the area convened by the UN’s migration agency IOM, in their last update of 2017 reported 655,000 refugees entrants since August 25, including 628 in the week preceding the report. Now it is commonly estimated that some 700,000 Rohingya entered Bangladesh as part of the influx – pushing the overall Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh to 1.1 million. It is important to consider the numbers in the context of the 1.1-1.3 million that was estimated to have been the size of the entire Rohingya population in Myanmar prior to 2015. Coming to the pattern, it was the cutting down of hills and trees in the name of building safe settlements for
the persecuted Rohingya, that bothered most observers familiar with the region’s problems, seeing that those are the two acts most likely to exacerbate the dangers of landslides. Initially 5,500 acres of forest land was allotted for the Rohingyas to shelter in Ukhia and Teknaf, although locals say eventually over 6,000 acres of forest land owned by Cox’s Bazar South Forest Department was destroyed.
