Fatal elephant attacks on Rohingya refugees push Bangladesh to act

Young boy becomes latest in series of casualties at Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar, which lies on migration route long used by elephants.

Bangaldesh has pledged to step up its response to a series of deadly elephant attacks at a refugee camp housing hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees after a 12-year-old boy was trampled to death.

Shamsu Uddin died instantly when an elephant attacked him after he had fallen asleep while guarding paddy fields with friends in Uttar Shilkhali village in the coastal town of Cox’s Bazar.


Three days later, a young girl was critically injured when elephants attacked Nayapara refugee camp, to the south of Cox’s Bazar.

Both attacks occurred outside Kutupalong, temporary home to 700,000 Rohingya refugees. The rising number of fatal elephant attacks – at least a dozen in the six months from October 2017 – tell a wider, tragic story of how deforestation, monsoons and the refugee crisis have left some of the world’s most vulnerable people at the mercy of wild animals.

Crowded together on a bare hillside at the mercy of the approaching rainy season, residents of the sprawling Kutupalong camp – mainly Rohingya muslims who have fled a brutal campaign of violence in Myanmar in August – already live in difficult conditions. But it also sits on several important migration corridors between Myanmar and Bangladesh that elephants have used for centuries.


This year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) began a programme to raise awareness, setting up 56 watchtowers and 30 volunteer elephant response teams to warn residents when elephants enter the camp. As part of the initiative, people are made aware of what they should do if they encounter an elephant.




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IUCN warns of rise in man-elephant conflict

There is a high risk of elephant encounters in coming days unless immediate and long-term measures are taken, including freeing elephant corridors that have been blocked by the creation of Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. According to experts, human–elephant conflicts in and around the Kutupalong camp will increase if the movement of wild elephants and their migration corridors are blocked for long.

As of January 2018, Bangladesh hosted almost one million forcibly displaced persons from Myanmar, who are meeting their basic needs, such as food and shelter, by using resources from the adjacent forests in Cox’s Bazar. As a result, indiscriminate deforestation is affecting the biodiversity and forest resources in that area, according to a report prepared by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature).

The Rohingyas are burning about 50,000 kg of firewood by cutting trees for cooking every day in Ukhiya, Teknaf and Naikhangchhari areas. This is destroying the ecosystem of Cox’s Bazar, forest officials say.

The government has already allocated 3,000 acres of forest to build sheds to accommodate the Rohingyas in and around Cox’s Bazar.

According to a report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), deforestation and degradation of forests due to uncontrolled fuel wood collection could result in an irreversible loss of productivity and extinction of plants and and animals in Cox’s Bazar.

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