Nowhere to run: Rohingya hunker down as monsoon arrives
UKHIYA, Bangladesh — The hill on which the young woman’s shelter is being built is so unstable that the earth crumbles under your feet. The threat of landslides is so dire that her neighbours have evacuated. Though living here could spell doom as the monsoon rains fall, she will live here anyway.
For Mustawkima, a Rohingya woman who fled Myanmar for the refugee camps of neighbouring Bangladesh, there is no other option.
Hers is a dilemma repeated over and over for many of the 900,000 Rohingya refugees living in ramshackle huts across this unsteady landscape: With the long-dreaded monsoon season now upon them, they have run out of places to run.
For months, officials raced to relocate the most at-risk families to safer areas that had been bulldozed flat, but there simply isn’t enough available land. Most refugees believe it is too dangerous to return to Myanmar, where the military launched a brutal campaign of violence against the minority Rohingya Muslims last year. And so, as the rains begin to flood parts of the camps, many Rohingya find themselves trapped — by geography, by poverty and by fear.