In the hills of Cox’s Bazar, inside a shelter pieced together with bamboo and tarpaulin, Nur Haba unwraps a bundle of keepsakes. At its center is a faded photograph of Mariam. “She was shot dead in front of me,” Nur says quietly. The picture is one of the few belongings she salvaged from their home in Myanmar’s Rakhine State before, she recalls, soldiers torched it and the family fled. In the chaos of escape, as they waded across a river, her two-year-old son, Mohammed, was swept away and drowned.
For the Rohingya—described by the United Nations as “the most persecuted minority in the world”—Nur’s story is heartbreakingly familiar. Denied citizenship in Myanmar since 1982, the predominantly Muslim community has faced decades of discrimination, culminating in a 2017 military offensive that UN human rights experts later called a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing.” More than a million people crossed into Bangladesh, where today Cox’s Bazar hosts the world’s largest refugee settlement and the world’s largest stateless community.
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With an estimated 1.3 million people living in a patchwork of camps, Cox’s Bazar is a place where life is suspended: not home, not a future, and not safe. Aid groups warn the humanitarian situation is edging toward a breaking point as resources thin and new arrivals continue to push an already crowded system to its limits.
Overcrowding defines daily life. “It’s unimaginable in such a small area,” says Manish Kumar Agrawal, Bangladesh country director for Concern Worldwide. “The population density in the refugee camp is 45,000 people per square kilometre, and if I can put that into perspective, Ireland has 73 people per square kilometre. So we’re talking about people living in such a congested environment, and 75% of them are women and children.” In these conditions, privacy is nearly impossible. A cough in one shelter becomes a clinic queue the next day.
Public health is in a constant state of alert. Over the past year, Cox’s Bazar has seen repeated outbreaks of cholera and dengue fever and spikes in severe diarrhoea—preventable diseases that flourish when sanitation systems are overstretched and clean water is scarce. Humanitarian workers hustle to expand latrines, chlorinate water points, and roll out vaccination campaigns, but the pace of need outstrips the resources on hand.
Climate hazards are relentless. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who visited the camp earlier this year, warned that the settlements and nearby host communities are “on the frontlines of the climate crisis.” Heat drives up the risk of fires; monsoon rains trigger floods and landslides that level the fragile shelters. Even in the dry season, the scars are visible: gouged hillsides, debris fields where homes once stood, families squeezed into new corners as they rebuild again and again.
For 23-year-old refugee Aziz Ullah, who fled in 2017, the seasons dictate survival. “(In the) hot seasons, we have difficulty to drink fresh water. We are also facing the (lack of) warm clothes in the winter season, and in the rainy season the landslide and the flooding,” he says. “I’m thinking of the people of my community, the young generation—the future is absolutely dark.”
The Rohingya are barred from working outside the camp and cannot move freely. Most depend entirely on aid for food, water, shelter and health care—“everything,” as Agrawal puts it. Idleness paired with deprivation fuels protection risks. Reports of kidnappings, gang violence and armed clashes inside the camps have mounted in recent years, alongside concerns about trafficking and sexual exploitation.
As fighting continues inside Myanmar, the exodus hasn’t stopped. Humanitarian agencies estimate roughly 150,000 Rohingya arrived in the past year alone, intensifying competition for services, space and attention. Aid budgets, stretched thin by multiple global crises, are struggling to keep up. Relief agencies are forced into trade-offs: ration cuts here, reduced education support there, until a sense of permanence takes root in what was meant to be temporary.
Bangladesh, which opened its borders at a moment of emergency, says its capacity is nearing the limit. “Bangladesh is a small country, it is also a land-hungry country,” says Shamsud Douza, a government official overseeing refugee affairs. “So our main target or task is to send (them) back to their country.” For now, he acknowledges, large-scale repatriation is unlikely given Myanmar’s volatile security and the absence of guarantees for safe return or restored rights.
That gap between what is possible and what is needed defines life in Cox’s Bazar. Children are growing up stateless, tethered to an emergency that has become an era. Community leaders and aid groups push for expanded education programs, skills training and safer spaces for women and girls—investments that could help shield a generation from exploitation and create pathways for dignity. But without legal status or freedom of movement, the horizon remains low.
For families like Nur’s, the trauma of flight bleeds into the monotony of waiting. They navigate daily hazards—smoke from cookstoves, steep paths worn slippery by millions of footsteps, the sudden collapse of a hillside after a night of rain—while clutching the remnants of a past that keeps receding. The camp’s narrow lanes are lined with shops and social centers that hint at normalcy; inside the shelters, the keepsakes tell a different story.
International attention spikes when violence flares or storms hit, then recedes. Yet Cox’s Bazar is not a frozen crisis. It is moving—expanding, aging, adapting—without the legal or political solutions that could change its trajectory. The choices now, from funding basic services to strengthening protections against crime and climate shocks, will shape the safety and futures of more than a million people who cannot go home and cannot move on.
Back in her shelter, Nur folds the photo of Mariam back into its wrappings. She has described what cannot be undone; now she returns to the tasks that fill the day. In Cox’s Bazar, the world’s largest refugee camp, an entire community waits—visible in its enormity, and too often invisible in its need.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
