On a weekday in the world’s largest refugee camp, dozens of women and men form two rising queues and urged to reach the front of the line to edit their official aid registration cards.
The crowd consists of refugees from neighboring Myanmar’s Muslim minorities -Rohingya community, which recently came in the extensive complex in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, more than a million people.
“You are all Rohingya who arrived here last month. You need more support,” said Abu Osman, program manager at an NGO called Agrajattra, who vaccinates thousands in the warehouse and offers thousands in the mother’s warehouse, mentally and shared.
“But now the support has stopped, so that’s very difficult.”
He talks about the latest executive order of US President Donald Trump and signed the day on which he took up his office for his second term, which suddenly inspired most US foreign aid for 90 days.
The decision caused turbulence and confusion in the global humanitarian sector, and the Bazar camps of Cox, which have been anchored since August 2017, fled hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees across the border to escape a brutal military approach in their home country, Myanmar.
The United Nations have referred to the persecution of the ruling military junta of the Rohingya, which is refused citizenship in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” against the “most persecuted minority in the world”.
While A Judgment of the Supreme Court in the United States On Wednesday, the Trump administration blocked from the Abentren of Payments for the USID contracts for international development (USAID).
But an already bad situation has deteriorated in the Rohingya refugee camps because suddenly many health staff and medication have said goodbye.
“All activities suddenly stopped”
In the abroad in Washington, some crucial aid measures in the Rohingya camps, especially among smaller NGOs, which have mainly specialized in community programs and door-to-door visits to try to identify and prevent illnesses.
While the distribution of emergency food is exempt from the financing break and other health services such as vaccination clinics and neonatal care are intact, freezing has also led to a disturbance in the sanitary and waste management in the entire massive warehouse complex.
“The program of our organization is completely closed and 120 employees (lost their work),” Osman told CBC News before the decision of the Supreme Court was published.
“All activities suddenly stopped, and (we can no longer offer ambulances or our regular services,” he said, adding that around 24,000 refugees in the camp were dependent on these services.
The decision on Wednesday, which only applied to the already completed financing work and did not state a schedule for the publication of this money, there is also a flood of other complaints that strain the mining of USAID by the President, whereby further decisions were expected in the coming weeks.
The United States has long been the largest donor of the serious humanitarian Rohingya crisis and has a total of $ 301 million in the past year.
Bangladesh as a whole received more than 450 million US dollars from US foreign assistance last year last year, so Government dataThe second highest sum in the region, to Afghanistan.
“Funding cuts have already disrupted key services, including but not limited to health, water and sanitation, protection, education, and livelihoods, increasing vulnerabilities and protection risk,” Wrote Syed Md. For the many humanitarian agencies Helping Rohingya Refugees at Cox’s Bazar, in an emailed response to a questions from CBC News.
He added that different groups tried to fill the “urgent gaps” that the financing frier created by moving the available resources.
When US President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze the most foreign help for 90 days around the world, Salimah Shijvi from CBC examines how these cuts make life for persecuted Rohingya refugees in the Bazar of Cox, Bangladesh, the world’s largest refugee camp.
“Where am I born?”
For Roshida, in eighth month pregnant and a refugee who has been living in one of the Cox bazaar camps for more than seven years, it was a few weeks.
“I’m worried. If the service is no longer, where will I give birth?” Said Roshida, who only has a name when she kept her one -year -old toddler in her tight tent, which is surrounded by barbed wire to comply with the refugees.
She said that social workers and hospital employees visited her regularly to check her health and should offer an ambulance when she went to work, but you have not appeared since the end of January.
“In the past, they offered adequate care, medicine and services. Now they don’t come,” the 22-year-old told CBC News.
Osman said that the effects of his program were noticeable in a few weeks. Before closing, almost all – 95 percent – could create pregnant women in the camps with the help of their social workers in a hospital bed.
It has now dropped to 40 and 50 percent, he said.
Many other NGO directors hesitated to talk about financing freezing in the hope that a calm would remain a difference, while the US authorities were working on re -evaluating their selection of foreign help.
Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), recently alluded to the prevailing fear of further cuts during a visit to Cox ‘Bazar.
“If the support of the donor decreases dramatically – which may happen – the enormous work of the government of Bangladesh, aid agencies and refugees will be affected, which exposed thousands of hunger, illness and uncertainty,” Grandi wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
Fear, uncertainty in camps
Muhammad Khan, 13 and a rare degenerative nerve disorder that causes muscle weakness, which means that it can no longer run, is also a victim of the financing freezing after the organization that was handled with its treatment.
“All of these problems increase my stress level,” said his mother Yasmin, who has seven other children.
Muhammad has to take his pills in order to be a bit mobile, said his mother, but at least 10 days after signing the Trump Executive Order, he received no treatment and was with the needy. His illness has no healing.
Somehow the NGO, who administered its treatment, was able to find funds from elsewhere due to the severity of its condition to restart its care – for the time being.
Yasmin is still concerned that the nurses will take care of their second eldest son.
This fear penetrates the refugee camps, in which many helpers try to guess what could happen next.
“There was the initial shock and now we are trying to absorb the shock,” said Mohammad Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee and return commissioner, who heads the government authority who is responsible for the processing of Rohingya refugees.
He said that the entire auxiliary community had waited “for good news” from the United States, hoping that financing freezes would be reversed, but the problem goes deeper than just a country.
Support for Rohingya fall
The total financing of foreign donors intended for the stateless and vulnerable Rohingya Rohingya decreases every year, with the current lack of financing exceeding around 35 percent.
The World Food Program, which is financed exclusively by voluntary donations, announced on Thursday that it was forced to shorten its food rations for the Rohingya in Bangladesh in half after attempts to collect more means. The agency was unable to cover a lack of financing to keep the entire rations in order.
According to Rahman, the world is distracted by other crises that make the headlines, such as the war in Ukraine or the conflict in Gaza.
Like the United States, the United Kingdom recently announced that it had withdrawn from foreign humanitarian aid and plans to reduce the budget of the country’s foreign aids by 40 percent in order to prioritize defense expenditure.
“The United States played a key role in this critical area of (help from the Rohingya),” said Rahman.
“Hopefully countries like the United States and others … don’t forget the Rohingya crisis,” he added.
Rahman said even if the aid employees try to move the financing to do the best with the available resources that they can do, “the actual victims are the Rohingya patients.”
