Six years ago, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees left Rakhine State in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Roughly 200,000 had already fled to Bangladesh when the Burmese army launched a cleansing operation against the Rohingyas in 2017. By the end of that year, more than 700,000 more had arrived in Cox’s Bazar, a coastal district in south-east Bangladesh. To accommodate the Rohingyas, hills were levelled, thousands of hectares of trees were felled, tens of thousands of shelters were erected, latrines were dug, boreholes were drilled and clinics were set up. Kutupalong-Balukhali – or just Kutupalong, as uprooted Rohingyas and long-term residents of Cox’s Bazar refer to it – is the largest refugee camp in the world. It consists of several contiguous camps with central thoroughfares in brick and cement leading off into narrow alleyways where families live in small dwellings made from bamboo and tarpaulin; some are built on slopes, at risk of landslides during the monsoon season.
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