A new humanitarian crisis looms in the Rohingya refugee camps along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, with the region’s annual cyclone and monsoon season predicted to threaten lives and shelters, food and water supplies.

More than 668,000 Rohingya have fled across the Myanmar border since August, swelling numbers in the camps strung along the border to more than 800,000.

The majority are children.

“As we get closer to the cyclone and monsoon seasons, what is already a dire humanitarian situation risks becoming a catastrophe,” said Oliver White, senior policy adviser for forced migration at Unicef Australia. “Hundreds of thousands of children are already living in horrific conditions, and they will face an even greater risk of disease, flooding, landslides and further displacement.”

The first of Bangladesh’s two cyclone seasons begins in March, while the monsoon rains typically start in June. Last May, Cyclone Mora destroyed 20,000 shelters in the Rohingya refugee camps, as well as damaging wells, toilets and roads.

White warned that dirty water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene conditions could lead to outbreaks of cholera and hepatitis E, a deadly disease for pregnant women and their babies, while standing water attracted malaria-carrying mosquitoes.



“Keeping children safe from disease must be an absolute priority,” he said.

Heavy rain will threaten the makeshift shelters where Rohingya families are living. Most of the new campsites have been built on and around the hillsides of a former wildlife reserve.

Those shelters built in the valleys face the threat of flooding, while those higher up, carved into hills stripped of the vegetation that formerly held them together, are at risk of landslide. Water supplies face inundation or destruction, and people could be cut off from food, water and services.

Tasmanian Labor senator Lisa Singh and Nationals MP for Mallee Andrew Broad at Unchiprang refugee camp. Photograph: Ben Doherty/The Guardian

An estimated 100,000 people will have to move from their makeshift homes in the largest camp, Kutupalong-Balukhali, alone.

Tasmanian Labor senator Lisa Singh and the Victorian Nationals MP Andrew Broad, the co-chairs of the parliamentary friends of Unicef group, visited the Rohingya camps last week.

“It’s a human tragedy beyond belief,” Singh told the Guardian from Unchiprang camp. “The scale of the camps is so confronting, but also the massive number of children.”

Singh said the international community had a responsibility, and an interest, in finding a durable solution for Rohingya refugees.

“The international community need to urge the government of Myanmar to provide repatriation with safety, with human rights, peace and reconciliation. That pressure needs to be applied to the Myanmar government right now,” she said.

“The Bangladesh government has been incredibly generous, but if we are going to consider a long-term option of Rohingya remaining in Bangladesh, then there needs to be a chance for work and they need to have rights to education, because otherwise they’ll have no hope for their future.”

Broad has a large Karen migrant population from the eastern side of Myanmar living in the town of Nhill in his Mallee electorate in Victoria. He said the Rohingya who had fled had found safety, but now needed hope for a future.

“You’ve fled, you’ve built shelter and got food for your children, so there’s a bit of stability here. But if it starts raining and you have mudslides and you start having another major disease outbreak, people then begin to feel the world’s forgotten them, and we’ve got another humanitarian crisis.”

He said the longer people were forced to live in refugee camps “the more they become institutionalised”.

“The sooner you start to provide clear direction on something that’s going to work, you start to provide hope. So whatever the world is going to do, it needs to be done as quickly as it can, to give it a direction.”

Broad said visiting a “child-friendly space” in Balukhali refugee camp and seeing the pictures children had drawn of their lives in Myanmar, revealed to him the scale of the atrocities committed there.

“Pictures of children don’t lie, children don’t have that filter, to see those pictures, particularly ones where the houses are burning, the people are hanging from the trees, and the soldiers are firing machine guns into the bodies hanging from the trees, that’s a pretty confronting thing.”

The Guardian travelled with the assistance of Unicef Australia - Rohingya appeal