Huge fire devastates over 500 shanties in Rohingya camp

A huge fire overnight swept through a crammed Rohingya camp in Cox’s Bazar destroying at least 500 ramshackle shelters leaving hundreds of people without homes, officials and aid workers said on Thursday.

They said the fire erupted in predawn hours on the day at Rohingyas makeshift Nayapara camp but reported no casualty while fire officials said it took them some two hours to extinguish the blaze, reports news agency BSS and AFP.

“The blaze burnt into ashes at least 500 structures... we have launched an investigation to ascertain what caused the fire alongside assessing the extent of damage and losses,” Bangladesh government’s relief commissioner Shamsuddoza Nayan told newspersons at the scene.

Fortunately, he said, the blaze claimed no life or left none severely wounded and the affected people were shifted to another place and provided with food and necessary items.

The fire started around 2:00am and was suspected to have been caused by a cooking cylinder, according to Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner Rezwan Hayat, who said about 10 people had suffered injuries.

Witnesses and camp residents said flames quickly spread from one edge and enveloped the entire camp prompting people in the adjacent camps as well to flee their shanties amid the chaos.

“We have immediately supplied hot food and bamboo and tarpaulins to the affected people to reconstruct their homes,” Hayat said.

Nayapara is one of a string of camps in the Cox’s Bazar district of southeast Bangladesh where more than 900,000 Rohingya now live. About 700,000 fled across the border in 2017 after the Myanmar crackdown that the United Nations has said could be genocide.

Save the Children’s Bangladesh director Onno van Manen said the fire was “another devastating blow for the Rohingya people who have endured unspeakable hardship for years”.

He called it “another ghastly reminder” that children in the camps “face a bleak future with little freedom of movement, inadequate access to education, poverty, serious protection risks and abuse including child marriage.”

Over a million Rohingyas fled their homeland in Myanmar to Bangladesh since a military clampdown began there to oust the predominantly Muslim ethnic group from their homeland at Rakhine state which is described as a campaign of killing, rape and arson.

The United Nations called it a textbook example of ethnic cleansing while rights group called the campaign genocide.

Bangladesh opened its border for the fleeing Rohingyas on humanitarian ground and since then Cox’s Bazar district that borders Myanmar’s Rakhine state has turned into a makeshift home for hundreds of thousands of the refugees.

The military and mobs of Buddhists, who make up the majority in Myanmar have continued to persecute the Rohingyas.

A nearly identical blaze in May last year reduced to ashes over 400 shelter homes in the nearby Kutupalang Rohingya camp while officials said the crammed camps in hillocks with exposed the Rohingyas to enhanced risk of fire and landslides.