Foreign Desk Report
GENEVA: Fifteen people have so far been confirmed dead and 400 are still missing in the huge blaze at the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, the United Nations said Tuesday.
“What we have seen in this fire is something we have never seen before in these camps. It is massive. It is devastating,” Johannes van der Klaauw, the UN Refugee Agency’s representative in Bangladesh, told reporters in Geneva via video-link from Dhaka.
“We have so far confirmed 15 people dead, 560 injured, 400 are still missing and at least 10,000 shelters have been destroyed. That means at least 45,000 people are being displaced and for whom we now seek provisional shelter.” While, firefighters brought the blaze under control around midnight on Monday, with the Refugees International saying at least 50,000 people fled their shanties as the fire reduced thousands of shelters made of tarp and bamboo to ashes.
“We have learned seven people have died including two children, a woman and four adult men,” Shahdat Hossain, the local fire service chief, told foreign media. The government’s refugee office and police, however, had yet to confirm any deaths. “It was the biggest fire since the influx of Rohingya in August 2017. Some 1,500-2,000 shanties were completely gutted,” the government’s deputy chief refugee commissioner Shamsud Douza, told media. Douza said food had been delivered to the displaced refugees and aid workers were trying provide all necessary humanitarian support. Gazi Salahuddin, a police inspector, said the “fire displaced about 50,000 people who took refuge in the homes of their relatives in other camps”.
What made the fire so deadly?
While officials said the cause of the fire remains unknown, barbed-wire fencing put up around parts of the camp likely made it difficult for some people to escape from the flames. “We do know that the fencing has taken place and is surrounding large parts of the of the camps,” he said. “That certainly hasn’t made it easier for refugees to flee or to escape a fire.” Police inspector Gazi Salahuddin said the fire grew after gas cylinders used for cooking exploded.
A fire at a Rohingya camp in January also gutted several UN-funded schools. The frequency of blazes in the camps led Amnesty International’s South Asia campaigner, Saad Hammadi, to tweet that “frequency of fire in the camps is too coincidental, especially when outcomes of previous investigations into the incidents are not known and they keep repeating.”
Rohingya leader Sayed Ullah demanded an immediate probe. “It is not clear why these fire incidents are happening repeatedly in the camps. It needs proper and complete investigation,” he said.
