Bangladesh transfers Rohingya refugees to controversial Bhasan Char island
The Bangladeshi navy is due to transfer some 922 refugees from the port of Chittagong to the isolated island on Friday, which will become their new address indefinitely.
AP - Shafiqur Rahman
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
As of Friday, Bangladesh will relocate more than a thousand Rohingya refugees to an island in the Bay of Bengal.
This first phase of a often postponed process is raising concern among the United Nations and human rights groups, which deem the island unsuitable for receiving refugees.
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Bhasan Char
is a 52 square kilometer island that is regularly flooded and hit by cyclones.
Despite this, the Bangladeshi authorities have decided to build camps there that can accommodate up to 100,000 refugees, as well as a three-meter high dike supposed to protect them from flooding.
This is the only way found by the authorities to try to relieve the unsanitary and overcrowded camps of Cox's Bazar in southern Bangladesh, where nearly a million Rohingya refugees have lived since 2017 and have fled
persecution by the Burmese army
.
Despite the concerns of UN agencies, including the High Commission for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration, the Bangladeshi navy is due to transfer some 922 refugees from the port of Chittagong this Friday to the isolated island which will become their new address for an indefinite period.
Several NGOs denounced forced relocation, which Dhaka refutes, claiming to have carried out a selection on a voluntary basis.
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To read: The UN raises 600 million dollars for Rohingya refugees
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