Bangladesh’s Rohingya problem: The refugee population is exploding
The Rohingya have suffered systematic discrimination, disenfranchisement, and targeted persecution for decades — and small and large groups have been coming to Bangladesh from at least the 1970s following violence in Rakhine.
Five years after Bangladesh took in hundreds of thousands of Rohingya driven out of Myanmar, the refugee population is exploding — with serious security implications. Bangladesh warns that the consequences of potential crime and extremism will not leave India untouched. The Indian Express visited the Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Cox’s Bazar, the world’s largest refugee camp.
From the 40-foot-high watch tower at the highest point of the winding, up-and-down mud-and-brick road, the shantytown is seen stretching in all directions, until it fades into the monsoon mist. Tin and bamboo huts, some of them lined with blue or grey plastic sheets, cling to red mud hillsides, along with clusters of trees, palms and shrubbery.
The lanes radiating from the main road are numbered, with UNHCR and Bangladesh government signs, and the names of international aid organisations and humanitarian nonprofits.
This is Kutupalong in the Ukhiya upa-zila of Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, the world’s largest refugee camp. Here, a million of perhaps the world’s most unwanted people live cheek by jowl on a little more than 6,000 acres — 24 sq km — of denuded forest in which elephants roamed until recently.
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