Home » Bangladesh, fire in a Rohingya refugee camp: children among 15 dead and hundreds of missing

Bangladesh, fire in a Rohingya refugee camp: children among 15 dead and hundreds of missing

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BANGKOK – There were hundreds of children wandering in terror among the flames of the fire of a Rohingya refugee camp, set up in the best way by humanitarian organizations in Cox Bazar in Bangladesh. There is talk of 15 thousand makeshift shelters destroyed and dozens of victims among the members of this Islamic ethnic group, considered by the UN “the most persecuted on earth”, even if officially at noon there were 15 lifeless bodies, including two children who lived in the field called Balukhali. One of those of clayey earth that floods during the monsoons and becomes hot or humid the rest of the year.

This complex of thousands of rammed earth artifacts and reed roofs was the only home left to thousands of families who fled persecution and massacres in Burmese Arakan where they lived for decades. Now together they form the frightening ocean of almost a million refugees in Bangladesh, whose calculation also includes those who preceded them by five years, and for similar reasons, the 800 thousand fleeing the pogroms in 2017 alone.

The testimonies: no escape route

Witnesses and videos document the tall columns of black smoke emanating from burnt plastic in Cox Bazar, and there are reports of many more suffocated or charred bodies among resident guests of all ages and sexes. A man interviewed by a TV invites Allah to find his wife and children that he was unable to snatch from the flames. Others depict hellish scenes of despair of adults and children lost in the chaos, many without finding a way out of the flames and smoke, lacking adequate assistance from ambulances and firefighters.

Also hindering them were high metal security fences on many sides, probably created to control the methamphetamine trafficking of the Rohingya and Burmese gangs through the fields close to the border. However, it proved to be a further diabolical trap for these already unfortunate inhabitants of the camp, who in the past fled from unprecedented violence by the same military battalions that today shoot against the Burmese of the civil disobedience movement.

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According to local sources, the burning started around 3pm yesterday afternoon from a room in camp number 8 in Balakhali and also spread to camps 9 and 11 before the firefighters managed to extinguish the flames around 10.45.

The accusation of the Burmese “shadow government”

Just a few hours before the Cox Bazar fire, the representative of this movement and of the Burmese “shadow government” – or Crhp – at the United Nations had recognized the blame of the Burmese democrats for not having understood in time the gravity of what was happening in the Rohingya villages of Arakan during the massacres of the military three years and a few months ago. The dr. Sasa, a former NLD deputy of the Chin ethnic group now in exile, had come to say that – once democracy and freedom were restored – the future government of national unity would “do justice to the persecuted and killed Rohingya brothers and sisters”. It was a clear and direct message to the generals, a threat, even if only theoretical, of a trial against them for old and new crimes without discounts and forgiveness this time.

Sasa’s statement also implies adherence to the theses of the public prosecution at the International Court of Justice in The Hague which investigates the military for crimes against humanity committed in 2017 in Arakan state. It’s a huge turnaround since the heroine of the movement Aung San Suu Kyi, for those same crimes, he went to defend the generals in the same Dutch classrooms, while his civilian government did not allow foreign diplomats even to use the term Rohingya.

The Rohingya, a stateless and persecuted people

This stateless people of uncertain origin has never been well received even by the countries of their brothers of Islamic faith. Bangladesh itself can’t wait for them to leave the “encumbrance” of their land, even if they have yielded several money and awards with humanitarian aid. But the political importance of the Rohingya, who have no property and no country, is growing in the very country from which they fled.

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On the common front of resistance to generals, Dr Sasa’s statement confirms that many Burmese understood why the world considered Arakan Muslims to be victims of the same cruelty and arrogance as the military caste, made up of half a million trained and indoctrinated men.

For the young and new rebels, after the massacres in the streets of Yangon, Mandalay and elsewhere, it was also easy to understand what had really happened in the numerous regions of the non-Islamic minorities, which have always denounced the expropriation of land and resources amid the general indifference of most of the national media themselves.

The fires in the displaced camps

For now, the tragic fire in the Balukhali camp remains a case in itself, one of many similar incidents that occurred in the past with no apparent link with the current uprisings in Myanmar. Before the coup, the destruction of another large camp led to the more or less voluntary transfer of the first Rohingya refugees from Cox Bazar to a new and “unstable” islet on the Bay of Bengal. It is an atoll formed a few years ago and declared “unlivable” by the United Nations, but already thousands of pioneers tired of the crush on the mainland crowd it.

The return of the Rohingya to Arakan

The statement by the Burmese dissident opens – for now utopian – the prospect of one day bringing together all the Rohingya exiles within their old territory of north-eastern Arakan, giving them a regular identity card and rights equal to those of other citizens. The difficulty of carrying out the enterprise is demonstrated by the fact that – perhaps precisely to avoid this prospect – the Buddhist Arakan Army has chosen to take the side of the military against the national disobedience movement.

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The representative of the Crhp or shadow government is an ethnic Chin – a state north of Arakan – who was elected with the Suu Kyi League and knows well the disruptive value of opening up to the Rohingya. Not only. Sasa personally launched a series of online political searches among various ethnic groups, including armed ones, to find an agreement on the unity government and the federalist future of the Union, an ideal so far neglected by Suu Kyi herself.

The promises of justice made to Rohingya and other minorities by the representative of the shadow government CRHP are a formidable challenge to the military who will oppose with all their might the programs of restoration of democracy, as they are already demonstrating with the increasing levels of violence against the movement. democracy in all regions of the Union.

The faults of Aung San Suu Kyi

The Rohingya case remains the most embarrassing in the eyes of the world because it demonstrates the consequences of the strategic and intentional complicity that lasted five years between the same Nobel Peace Prize Aung San Suu Kyi and the generals. It was she who also convinced her followers that the foreign accusations against the soldiers were exaggerated, because in Arakan the army had to prevent an armed attack by terrorists who came from outside with the complicity of the locals.

But today, while his portrait continues to stand out in the streets of the revolt, the influence of his politics of silence, complicity and compromise begins to wane, giving way to the desire for justice towards the victims of the despots themselves. His previous line of non-violence has already been replaced by young militants with that of self-defense. No submissiveness against the violence of what the movement calls “the soldiers-terrorists”. No forgiveness.

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