Left in limbo Rohingya live in fear, stripped of their rights

In the 31 years since Anuara Begum’s family moved into their bamboo shelter in the Nayapara refugee camp, the only improvement they have been able to make was replacing its tarpaulin roof with tin sheeting – less flimsy but hammer loud when the rains come.

After they had run from Myanmar’s military, their new home was built to be temporary, and so it proved when it took only 30 minutes for a fire last year to incinerate a whole block of the camp near Cox’s Bazar.

Fires in the camp have become commonplace since more than 700,000 Rohingya people fled to Bangladesh in August 2017, joining approximately 300,000 already there , living in fragile shelters, banned from education, work and travel .

Begum, 23, was born in Bangladesh without any prospect of a safe return to the Myanmar she has never seen. “The camp is like an open prison,” she said. “I have spent my entire life as a refugee, since 1999, and still I can’t find peace. I cry when I see a fire. My family can’t sleep properly through the night because of our fear after the fire.”

Rohingya people and aid workers say the refugees who arrived five years ago have been abandoned to the same fate as those before them and accuse humanitarian agencies of decades of failure to ensure basic rights or to secure a safe return.

One aid worker for an international NGO said the UN had consistently failed to challenge the Bangladeshi government over restrictive policies and the relocation of tens of thousands of people to Bhasan Char, an island