COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh / ISLAMABAD: Almost every Rohingya refugee that Arab News met in Kutupalang camp on Monday suffered from some type of skin disease. Facing torrential rain, many lack shelter. Children are malnourished.
Zaed Alam, 45 — formerly a rich farmer in Kumarkhali village in Rakhine state, Myanmar — reached Kutupalang Monday morning empty-handed.
His journey across the border into Bangladesh involved hiding in caves by day with 13 of his family members, and traveling by night, without food or water. They had walked more than 175 km in 10 days, with nothing to eat but tree leaves.
Sayed Nur, 22, lived in Shaheb Bazar village in Rakhine. A poor farmer who used to cultivate his neighbors’ land, he arrived in Kutupalang with a bullet injury on his left arm, sustained while fleeing his village with four of his family members.
Four fellow villagers were killed by the Myanmar Army. “I’m very fortunate. By the grace of Almighty Allah, I was able to save my life,” he told Arab News.
It took him six days to reach the refugee camp, arriving five days ago. He also had to hide in caves by day from the Myanmar Army.
During those six days in hiding, the four-member family only had 2 kg of rice. On Sunday, fellow Rohingya who have been in the camp for longer gave the family a small quantity of cooked rice.
Nur and his family arrived with nothing. When asked what he will do, he replied: “I don’t know. Only Allah Almighty can help us.”
Meanwhile, two blasts rocked an area on Myanmar’s side of the border with Bangladesh on Monday, accompanied by the sound of gunfire and thick black smoke, as violence that has sent nearly 90,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh showed no sign of easing.
Border Guards Bangladesh said a woman lost a leg from a blast about 50 meters inside Myanmar, and was carried into Bangladesh for treatment. Reuters reporters heard explosions and saw black smoke rising near a village in Myanmar.
A Rohingya refugee who went to the blast site — on a footpath near where civilians fleeing violence are huddled in no man’s land on the border — filmed what appeared to be a mine: A metal disc about 10 cm in diameter partially buried in the mud. He said he believed there were two more such devices buried in the ground.
Border Guards Bangladesh said they believed the injured woman stepped on an anti-personnel mine, although that was not confirmed. Two refugees told Reuters they saw members of the Myanmar Army around the site just before the blasts.
Separately, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was pressing world leaders to do more to help the Rohingya, who face what he has described as genocide.
“You watched the situation that Myanmar and Muslims are in. You saw how villages have been burned... Humanity remained silent to the massacre in Myanmar,” he said.
“There are some leaders we can achieve results with and some that we cannot. Not everyone has the same sensitivity. We will do our duty,” Erdogan said, adding that Turkey is continuing to deliver aid to the region.
In another development, Khawaja Mohammed Asif, Pakistan’s foreign minister, said he “expressed deep anguish at the ongoing violence against the Rohingya Muslims.”
He added: “The plight of the Rohingya Muslims was a challenge to the conscience of the international community.”
Rohingya who fled violence to Bangladesh recount horror
Rohingya who fled violence to Bangladesh recount horror
Afghan returnees in Bamiyan struggle despite new homes
- More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan: Sitting in his modest home beneath snow-dusted hills in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, Nimatullah Rahesh expressed relief to have found somewhere to “live peacefully” after months of uncertainty.
Rahesh is one of millions of Afghans pushed out of Iran and Pakistan, but despite being given a brand new home in his native country, he and many of his recently returned compatriots are lacking even basic services.
“We no longer have the end-of-month stress about the rent,” he said after getting his house, which was financed by the UN refugee agency on land provided by the Taliban authorities.
Originally from a poor and mountainous district of Bamiyan, Rahesh worked for five years in construction in Iran, where his wife Marzia was a seamstress.
“The Iranians forced us to leave” in 2024 by “refusing to admit our son to school and asking us to pay an impossible sum to extend our documents,” he said.
More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as neighboring Iran and Pakistan stepped up deportations.
The Rahesh family is among 30 to be given a 50-square-meter (540-square-foot) home in Bamiyan, with each household in the nascent community participating in the construction and being paid by UNHCR for their work.
The families, most of whom had lived in Iran, own the building and the land.
“That was crucial for us, because property rights give these people security,” said the UNHCR’s Amaia Lezertua.
Waiting for water
Despite the homes lacking running water and being far from shops, schools or hospitals, new resident Arefa Ibrahimi said she was happy “because this house is mine, even if all the basic facilities aren’t there.”
Ibrahimi, whose four children huddled around the stove in her spartan living room, is one of 10 single mothers living in the new community.
The 45-year-old said she feared ending up on the street after her husband left her.
She showed AFP journalists her two just-finished rooms and an empty hallway with a counter intended to serve as a kitchen.
“But there’s no bathroom,” she said. These new houses have only basic outdoor toilets, too small to add even a simple shower.
Ajay Singh, the UNHCR project manager, said the home design came from the local authorities, and families could build a bathroom themselves.
There is currently no piped water nor wells in the area, which is dubbed “the dry slope” (Jar-e-Khushk).
Ten liters of drinking water bought when a tanker truck passes every three days costs more than in the capital Kabul, residents said.
Fazil Omar Rahmani, the provincial head of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation Affairs, said there were plans to expand the water supply network.
“But for now these families must secure their own supply,” he said.
Two hours on foot
The plots allocated by the government for the new neighborhood lie far from Bamiyan city, which is home to more than 70,000 people.
The city grabbed international attention in 2001, when the Sunni Pashtun Taliban authorities destroyed two large Buddha statues cherished by the predominantly Shia Hazara community in the region.
Since the Taliban government came back to power in 2021, around 7,000 Afghans have returned to Bamiyan according to Rahmani.
The new project provides housing for 174 of them. At its inauguration, resident Rahesh stood before his new neighbors and addressed their supporters.
“Thank you for the homes, we are grateful, but please don’t forget us for water, a school, clinics, the mobile network,” which is currently nonexistent, he said.
Rahmani, the ministry official, insisted there were plans to build schools and clinics.
“There is a direct order from our supreme leader,” Hibatullah Akhundzada, he said, without specifying when these projects will start.
In the meantime, to get to work at the market, Rahesh must walk for two hours along a rutted dirt road between barren mountains before he can catch a ride.
Only 11 percent of adults found full-time work after returning to Afghanistan, according to an IOM survey.
Ibrahimi, meanwhile, is contending with a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) walk to the nearest school when the winter break ends.
“I will have to wake my children very early, in the cold. I am worried,” she said.
