Bangladesh floods leave 12,000 homeless

BANGLADESH: More than 12,000 people are homeless and receiving emergency relief in makeshift camps after flash floods and landslides hit Bangladesh’s southeast, officials said Thursday.

Dry food rations and bottles of water were given to thousands of people left homeless in the country’s southeastern tip, which borders Myanmar, after the worst rains in decades struck Tuesday, killing 55 people.

Across the border in Myanmar, 46 have been killed, according to state media.

“We’ve set up 15 camps where 12,000 victims of the floods and landslides are staying — they have lost their homes. We are providing them with shelter and food rations,” Cox’s Bazaar district administrator Giasuddin Ahmed told AFP.

Ahmed said 50 people had died in his district, and police said another five people were killed in the neighbouring Bandarban district.

“It was the worst rain in three decades and was particularly devastating as 12 centimetres (4.5 inches) of rain fell in just three hours,” Ahmed said, adding that hundreds of houses had been destroyed.

The country’s flood warning centre said Thursday that heavy rain had stopped in the southeast, with no expectation of further rain in the next 24 hours. Rescue workers have cleared debris from roads and accessed the hardest-hit area, Teknaf, which is home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya refugees.

Around 15,000 Rohingya refugees living in camps both legal and illegal around Teknaf have been affected by the floods, Firoz Salauddin, the government’s spokesman on Rohingya issues told AFP.

Described by the United Nations as one of the most persecuted minorities on Earth, thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state stream across the border into Bangladesh every year.

“We have ordered repairs for the houses of the legal refugees,” he said, but declined comment on what would happen to the illegal refugees whom Bangladesh maintains must be sent back to Myanmar.

Cox’s Bazaar, Thursday, AFP