MOTIJHARNA: The threat of landslides has turned shanty towns into death traps for poor Bangladeshis who huddle in squalid temporary homes at the foot of hills that often turn to mud during torrential rains.

“We are too poor to afford our own house,” said Raibul, 57, a mason who lives with his family in a slum on the outskirts of the Chittagong port city, nearly 300 km southeast of the capital Dhaka.

Some 130 people were buried alive in a massive mudslide at Chittagong in June last year following a storm that turned the soft sand of the hills into unstable slopes of mud.

A year later, hundreds of squatters still live in squalid camps on the same hills. Pushed out from low lying homes by floods, they often have nowhere else to go.

“No one wants to keep his or her family at the mouth of death, but where shall we go? Who will give us shelter or money?,” Rabiul, 57, said as he looked suspiciously at clouds in the sky.

Authorities blame the landslides in Chittagong last year largely on construction companies that cut up hills to build apartment blocks and industrial complexes, stripping them bare of the foliage that would ordinarily absorb rain.

Out of the city’s 4.5 million people, at least one million live in slums, built illegally on state-owned lands, Chittagong City Corporation officials said.

The slum dwellers are labourers, rickshaw pullers and casual workers. Most of them took refuge in the slums after their homes were destroyed by floods or other natural calamities, disasters to which low-lying Bangladesh is tragically prone.

Official statistics show that an average of 50,000 Bangladeshis are rendered homeless by flooding every year.

“My father settled here after his ancestral home in the offshore island of Sandwip (off Chittagong coast) was washed away by giant waves from the Bay of Bengal,” said Golam Rasul, a fruit vendor.

After last year’s fatal mudslide, the Chittagong authorities promised to relocate families living in hillside shanty towns to safer places.

“But we have seen no implementation of that promise yet,” said Fatema Begum, an employee at a non-governmental organisation.

During heavy storms last month, the authorities temporarily evacuated hundreds of families from several hillside slums but they returned soon after the rains had stopped.

“Some 10,000 people had been taken away ... but they all came back,” said Manzur Alam, acting mayor of Chittagong city.

He said rescuers and law enforcers were now deployed at 10 vulnerable spots to evacuate people if heavy rains occurred.

Deadly landslides have struck more frequently in recent years as hills are eroded for construction and more people move upground for safety from rising rivers.

“Our hills are made of soft soils, so these slide down after soaking huge rain waters,” Alam said.

Slum dwellers say the government is responsible for their fate.

“We are ready to die, but will not agree to leave the land unless the government relocates us permanently to safer places,” said Mohammad Nazim, a self-proclaimed slum owner.—Reuters