Bangladeshi authorities searched for survivors on Tuesday amid the smoking ruins of an extensive Rohingya refugee camp, the day after a fire killed at least 15 people, injured hundreds and left tens of thousands homeless again.
The carnage at the camp in Cox’s Bazaar, near the Myanmar border, was the latest tragedy for residents, who have lived in their squalid huts for years since they fled their homes in Myanmar after a massacre by the military.
About 400 people are missing and many are presumably dead, according to officials from the Intersectoral Coordination Group, an international aid organization that oversees the camp. Some victims, witnesses said, were trapped between the flames and barbed wire fences around the camp’s perimeter.
“Nobody helped us,” said Ro Arfat Khan, 21, who fled Myanmar with his family in 2017 after the military razed his village. “If the Bangladeshi government wanted to, they could have stopped the fire.”
Khan, who lost a family member in the fire on Monday, said the fire brought back painful memories of seeing his home in western Myanmar burn to the ground.
His family walked for days before arriving in Bangladesh, where he took shelter under a canvas sheet. They had little in the camp. “Now,” he said, “it’s over.”
Satellite images released on Tuesday showed vast tracts of blackened land in the Kutupalong Balukhali area, where the camps were located. About 250 acres were burned, said a government official.
The fire started around 2 pm Monday in one of the shelters, witnesses said. He quickly got out of control, powered by strong winds and hundreds of cylinders of cooking gas that exploded as flames ran through the camp.
Many of the dead, including Khan’s sister’s 73-year-old father-in-law, failed to escape the storm. “He was not well and he couldn’t walk,” said Khan.
Shahriar Alam, the junior foreign minister in Bangladesh, said on Tuesday that a member committee would investigate the fire and we’ll send you a report in the next few days.
But for many Rohingya, the fire is another reminder of the international community’s failure to ensure its safety.
The Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority from the state of Rakhine in Myanmar, are one of the most persecuted people on the planet. Since 2017, more than 730,000 Rohingya have crossed into Bangladesh, fleeing a cruel military campaign of murder, rape and arson in mostly Buddhist Myanmar, who saw them as foreign intruders.
The United Nations called Myanmar’s persecution of Rohingya Muslims “a classic example of ethnic cleansing”, unleashing the greatest forced migration in history since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
“Everything we have now is gray,” said Ro Anamul Hasan, whose shelter was set on fire on Monday. “This is the second time I have lost everything in my life.”
Some of the nearly 100,000 displaced people sought shelter in nearby camps. Others were seen trying to rebuild shelters amid the ashes of their homes, using everything they could find – bamboo, plastic scraps and polyethylene sheets.
Any hope of a possible return to Myanmar was dashed in February, when the military who oversaw the genocidal campaign took power with a coup.
“This tragedy is a terrible reminder of the vulnerable position of Rohingya refugees who are trapped amid the increasingly precarious conditions in Bangladesh and the reality of a homeland now ruled by the military responsible for the genocide that forced them to flee,” the humanitarian group Refugees International said in a statement.
For Mr. Hasan, the fire was a brutal reminder of Rohingya’s “bad fate” that he experienced throughout his life.
“My bad luck is following me wherever I go,” he said.
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting.