Rohingya Muslims who recently entered Bangladesh fleeing persecution in Myanmar continued to starve at packed makeshift camps or under the open sky as the government provided no relief to them.
Dozens of children and their mothers, some of whom were pregnant, were found starving at Leda makeshift refugee camp on Friday while injured ones were groaning in pain without any treatment for injuries they sustained a month ago.
The situation worsened further when 300 more Rohingyas sneaked into the country on Friday while the Bangladesh Border Guard pushed back 100 others. The new arrivals added to 10,000 people of the religious minority community of Myanmar who entered Bangladesh since October 9, according to a UN estimate.
‘Distribution of relief among the refugees will encourage more Rohingyas to enter the country,’ said Cox’s Bazar acting deputy commissioner Kazi Mohammad Abdur Rahman.
The district administration also barred local Awami League leader Anisur Rahman from distributing blankets among the Rohingyas.
‘It is inhuman that you cannot distribute food and medicine to starving refugees,’ Anis said immediately after he was denied permission to distribute relief.
Earlier, in the last week of November, a five-month-old baby died of cold-related diseases at Leda a few hours after entering the country along with his mother, according to newspaper reports.
Not fed for three days in a row, ribs of the baby could easily be counted from the photograph taken by an international photojournalist.
‘Still no help has been offered to the refugees…No food, no medicine, no shelter, no clothes, nothing…’ said Zafarullah, 47, Rohingya at Leda camp that sheltered 20,000 Rohingyas.
Zafarullah oversees one of the six blocks of the camp. The block shelters several thousand Rohingyas of 370 families.
Sayeda Khatun, 25, one of the Rohingyas at the block, said that before crossing the river Naf two weeks ago she and her kids were stranded at a point along the coast in waist-deep.
‘There, in waist-deep water, I kept standing for two days…So did my kids, including the youngest son, who is only one year and a half,’ said Sayeda.
The youngest son,
Ibrahim, caught a very bad cold and he was now suffering from high fever.
Sayeda was lucky to be hosted by a family that cooked two kilograms of rice for 27 people, mostly women and children.
Mohammad Rafiq, 23, said that he had nothing to eat till Friday afternoon after he entered Bangladesh three days ago.
The five children of his family were starving too and they joined many who stayed in the local mosque.
Rafiq had the right leg fractured from beating by Myanmar military 20 days ago.
‘The thought of treatment for the injury is a dream to me,’ said Rafiq.
‘These people need urgent humanitarian support,’ said International Organisation for Migration national programme officer Saikat Biswas.
The recent Rohingya influx in Bangladesh started following a military operation to uproot Myanmar’s Muslim minority community after miscreants attacked border outposts of Myanmar’s Border Guard Police along Bangladesh border in Rakhine state on October 9 that killed several border guards of Myanmar.
The military operations intensified with helicopter gunship firing from the sky on Rohungya villages. Satellite image obtained by Human Rights Watch showed that over 1,000 houses at Rohingya villages in north-eastern Myanmar were razed in the second week of November.
Rohingyas started to come to Bangladesh in larger groups in November. Despite tightened watch along the border, they continued to sneak through its porous border into the country.
Leaders at the Leda camp believed several thousand refugees entered the country even beyond their knowledge.
Local Awami League leaders believed that relief distribution would have been useful in keeping the Rohingyas together.
‘Desperate for food, shelter and safety, the new arrivals are trying to find a place to live outside refugee camps,’ said Teknaf’s Rajapalang union parishad chairman Jahangir Kabir Chowdhury.
– See more at: http://www.newagebd.net/article/4010/rohingyas-starve-as-influx-continues#sthash.P9XI3ROv.dpuf
Source: New Age
