Horrific Rohingya stories of sufferings still vivid in my memory: UN chief Guterres

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, recalling his visit to the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, says that the horrific stories of sufferings he heard during the tour are still “vivid” in his memory.

“The horrific stories of suffering I heard last month from Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh remain vivid in my memory,” he tweeted on Saturday.

“A year has passed; we must act globally to stop this crisis.”

Saturday marked the first anniversary of Myanmar’s military operation in Rakhine State, following which over 700,000 Rohingyas fled into Bangladesh. The UN described the crackdown as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

The latest exodus has taken the number of refugees in Bangladesh to around 1.1 million.

The UN resident coordinator in Dhaka, Mia Seppo, in an interview with bdnews24.com on Saturday said the world should never forget why the Rohingyas have crossed the border and that’s why there should have been continued pressure on Myanmar for human rights accountability.

She said it is important to use every opportunity “to keep the spotlight on” to make sure no-one forgets the crisis.

Dr Peter Salama, Deputy Director-General of Emergency Preparedness and Response for the UN World Health Organization (WHO), told journalists in Geneva that “thousands of lives” had been saved so far thanks to the joint efforts of the Bangladesh government, WHO and partners.

Deadly disease outbreaks have also been held at bay in Cox’s Bazar despite “all the conditions being in place for a massive epidemic”, he said, noting that outbreaks of measles, diphtheria, polio, cholera and rubella have been contained thanks to preventive inoculation campaigns that have required four million doses of vaccine.

“We need to sustain the vigilance for early warnings of infectious diseases,” Dr Salama said.

“That is still a major risk due to the environmental situation, the poor sanitation, the massive overcrowding, the way these people are being housed and we need to maintain our ability to scale-up outbreak response as required.”

His call to scale up help was echoed in Geneva by Joel Millman, spokesperson for IOM, the UN migration agency.

“This was the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world and the challenges have been immense,” he said, highlighting comments by the agency’s Chief of Mission in Bangladesh Giorgi Gigauri.

“Countless lives have been saved thanks to the generosity of the Government of Bangladesh, the local community and donor s and the hard work of all those involved in the humanitarian response. But we now face the very real threat that if more funding is not urgently secured, lives will once again be at risk.”

One of the camps, Kutupalong, shelters more than 600,000 refugees, making it the largest and most densely populated refugee settlement in the world, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In addition to the challenge of providing people’s basic needs – shelter, water and sanitation and healthcare – the agency has carried out huge engineering work to reduce the risk of landslides and flooding.

This also involved mobilising and training hundreds of refugee volunteers to serve as first responders in the event of a natural disaster, although the camps have largely withstood the adverse weather.