Life in Cox’s Bazar: The World’s Largest Refugee Camp

With a population of around 1.3 million people, Cox’s Bazar in southern bangladesh is the largest refugee camp in the world.

For the Rohingya people sheltering there, it is a life suspended between a violent past and an uncertain future – as aid organisations warn that their humanitarian situation is reaching a critical point.

Reporter Kate Varley and cameraman Bram Verbeke visited cox’s bazar to hear from some of those affected.

In a makeshift bamboo shelter in the hills of Cox’s Bazar,Nur Haba carefully unwraps a small bundle of keepsakes.

She wants to show us a photograph of her mother Mariam, who was just 44 years old when her life came to a sudden and violent end in Myanmar in 2017.

“She was shot dead in front of me,” Nur tells us.

The faded photo of Mariam is one of the few belongings Nur managed to salvage from her home in Rakhine State before it was set on fire by the military, forcing the surviving family members to flee in terror.

In the chaos that followed, further tragedy struck. Nur’s two-year-old son Mohammed became separated from the family as they attempted to escape across a river.

“He was swept away and drowned,” Nur recounts with tears in her eyes.

‘the moast persecuted minority in the world’

As a member of the Rohingya community – a group described by the United Nations as the “most persecuted minority in the world” – Nur’s story is not unique. It is a collective trauma that shapes generations; a shared history of suffering.

Denied citizenship in their homeland of Myanmar since 1982, the Rohingya have endured decades of discrimination and repression under successive authorities.

The latest wave of violence erupted in 2017 when the military in Myanmar, backed by local Buddhist mobs, attacked the predominantly Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State.

It was a campaign of killing, arson, torture and rape that was later labelled as a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” by UN human rights experts.

The violence forced more than a million people, like Nur, to escape into neighbouring Bangladesh.

Now they remain trapped in Cox’s Bazar – the world’s largest refugee camp, hosting the world’s largest stateless community.

Watch: Life inside world’s largest refugee camp

Cramped and crowded conditions

One of the major challenges facing the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar is overcrowding, with 1.3 million people living in cramped, often unsanitary, conditions.

“It’s unimaginable in such a small area,” s