The Organisation for world Peace
26 May, 2019 by
Henry Whitelaw
The Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh, more widely known by the anglicised name of its nearest town, Cox’s Bazar, is currently the world’s largest refugee camp. It is thought that over 1 million Rohingya Muslims currently live there, having fled persecution in their native state of Rakhine in Myanmar. Alongside all the well-documented sanitary and hygiene challenges faced by all such densely packed temporary settlements, Cox’s Bazar has the added misfortune of facing its own unique environmental problems. A large portion of the camp lies on previously forested land, which has been cut down in order to build dwellings as the camp has grown. This land is also considerably hilly but is lacking in any rock foundations. As Atiq Rahman, the executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) has said, “In Bangladesh these are not rocky hills, they are soft soil hills.
