/ 24 March 2021

Deadly fire at Rohingya refugee camps

Fifteen people have died, 400 are missing, and 45,000 people have fled a fire that engulfed large parts of a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh earlier this week. It was the 3rd blaze in the area in 4 days, and officials say the causes have not been determined. An official from Amnesty said the “frequency of fire in the camps is too coincidental” with pressure being put on refugees to relocate to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal. So far, 13,000 Rohingya have moved to the flood-prone island that critics say is in a cyclone alley. Almost a million people live in 34 squalid camps covering more than 3,000 hectares of the Cox’s Bazar district. Most fled from Myanmar after a military crackdown against the Muslim minority in 2017 – a dark chapter the United Nations described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

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