US wants postponement of Rohingya relocation to Bhashan Char

The Daily Star  

Thursday, October 24, 2019 

UNB, Dhaka

In this January 22, 2018, file photo, Rohingya children and refugees raise their hands and shout that they won't go back to Myanmar during a demonstration at Kutupalong near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo: AP

Appreciating the country for opening its borders to huge Rohingya refugees, the United States has urged Bangladesh to "postpone" its Rohingya relocation plan to Bhashan char until independent experts can determine it a suitable location, though Bangladesh is looking for a voluntary nature of relocation.

"We urge Bangladesh to postpone any refugee relocations to Bhashan Char until independent experts can determine it is a suitable location," said Alice G Wells, US acting assistant secretary at the Bureau of South and Central Asia.

ေရၾကီးမႈ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ေျခမ်ားတဲ့ကြ်န္းကို ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ဖို႔ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ေထာင္နဲ႔ခ်ီ သေဘာတူလို႔ဆို

SBS
21 October 2019

An October 15, 2018 photo showing a structure constructed on Bhashan Char island as it is being prepared for the relocation of Rohingya refugees Source: Getty

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွိႏိုင္ငံမွာ ေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ ေထာင္နဲ႔ခ်ီတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြဟာ ဘဂၤလားပင္လယ္ေအာ္ မွာ ရွိတဲ့ ကြ်န္းတစ္ကြ်န္းဆီကို ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ေနထိုင္ၾကဖို႔ သေဘာတူထားၾကၿပီလို႔ တနဂၤေႏြေန႔မွာပဲ ဘဂၤ လား ေဒ့ရွ္ အစိုးရ အရာရွိက ေျပာပါတယ္။

အဲဒီကြ်န္းဟာ ေရၾကီးမႈဒဏ္ ခံရေလ့ရွိတဲ့ေနရာ ျဖစ္လို႔ စိုးရိမ္မကင္းမႈေတြ ျဖစ္ေနေပမယ့္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုက ၡသည္ ေထာင္နဲ႔ခ်ီက အဲဒီေနရာသစ္ကို ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ေနထိုင္ဖို႔ သေဘာတူၾကတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Bangladesh to move Rohingya to flood-prone island next month

REUTERS
October 20, 2019

Ruma Paul

DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladesh will start relocating Rohingya Muslims to a flood-prone island off its coast next month as several thousand refugees have agreed to move, a government official said on Sunday.

Dhaka wants to move 100,000 refugees to Bhasan Char – a Bay of Bengal island hours by boat from the mainland – to ease overcrowding in its camps at Cox’s Bazar, home to more than 1 million Rohingya Muslims who have fled neighboring Myanmar.

Bangladesh to UN: 'Support Rohingya island relocation or leave the country'

DW

In an interview with DW, Bangladesh's Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen expressed disappointment over "inadequate" international pressure on Myanmar to take back the Rohingya refugees currently camped in Cox's Bazar.

Bangladesh prepares to move Rohingya to island at risk of floods and cyclones

The Guardian

Sarah Marsh
Fri 19 Jul 2019 

Foreign minister defends controversial proposal as ‘only solution’ despite misgivings of human rights campaigners

A satellite view of Bhasan Char, the Bay of Bengal island to which the Bangladesh government plans to move Rohingya refugees currently living in camps. Photograph: Gallo Images/Getty Images  

Between Squalid Camps and Ethnic Cleansing, Rohingya Are Still Trapped

albawaba News
Ty Joplin
Published June 10th, 2019

Rohingya men and boys stuck behind fences in the "no-man's land" (AFP/FILE)

We cannot escape anywhere,” says Mohammed Salam, who is the chairman of a local Rohingya Welfare Committee in Rakhine, Myanmar.

“Even those who try to bribe guards at checkpoints are arrested and then disappear.”

The Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority population hailing mostly from the Rakhine sate, are facing growing pressure in Bangladesh to resettle back into Myanmar.

Resettling the Unsettled

The Daily Star 

Farzana Misha and Dimple T Shah

June 09, 2019 

Practicalities of relocating Rohingyas to Bhasan Char

Rohingya refugees gather at a market inside a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. Photo: REUTERS/MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN

The Rohingya influx into Bangladesh, described by the United Nations (UN) as the “world’s
 fastest growing refugee crisis,” has been one of the most discussed humanitarian crises of recent times. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Bangladesh, prior to the latest exodus, had already been hosting more than 300,000 Rohingya refugees.

Dividing any party isn't my policy: PM

The Daily Star

April 26, 2019

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina today said it is not her policy to divide any party or do anything that leads a party to a split.

"To divide a party or to do anything (harmful) to any party isn't my policy. We usually get many proposals...I'm very much rigid about it," she said while responding to a question at a press conference at her official residence Gono Bhaban.

The press conference was convened to brief the media about the outcomes of the official visit of the prime minister to Brunei from April 21 to 23 last.

Anti-Bhasan Char campiagners must take liability for Rohingya casualty: FM

theindepedent

Independent Online Desk 

25 April, 2019  

Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen on Thursday said those who are opposing the relocation of Rohingyas to Bhasan Char Island should take the responsibility if there is any casualty in Cox's Bazar camps during monsoon.

While talking to reporters, Dr Momen said he conveyed this message to visiting three top UN officials during his meeting with them.

Northern Rakhine refugees resist relocation to Bangladesh island.

MYANMAR TIMES
KYODO | 24 APR 2019

Bangladesh is facing a dilemma over the planned transfer of thousands of Muslims from northern Rakhine State crowded into makeshift camps along the country’s border with Myanmar to an uninhabited island in the Bay of Bengal.

To ease social, economic, environmental and internal security hazards, the government plans to relocate nearly 100,000 refugees from the camps in Cox’s Bazar to Bhasan Char, which is about an hour by motor boat from the nearest shore.

Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar resist plan to be relocated to island.

Kyodo News⁺

23rd April, 2019
By Zahiduzzaman Faruque,

DHAKA - Bangladesh is facing a dilemma over the planned transfer of thousands of Rohingya Muslims crowded into makeshift camps along the country's border with Myanmar to an uninhabited island in the Bay of Bengal.

To ease social, economic, environmental and internal security hazards, the government plans to relocate nearly 100,000 Rohingya refugees from the camps in Cox's Bazar to Bhasan Char, which is about 1 hour by motor boat from the nearest shore.

U.N. Bureaucrats Just Want the Rohingya Off Their Plate

FP

Argumen 

By Azeem Ibrahim 

| April 18, 2019,

Dumping refugees on a doomed island in Bangladesh is as callous as it is predictable.

 

Rohingya refugees shout slogans at a protest against a disputed repatriation program at the Unchiprang refugee camp near Teknaf on Nov. 15, 2018. (Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images)

The United Nations recently announced that it would help fund Bangladesh’s initiative to move at least some of its Rohingya refugees, who fled Myanmar, from Cox’s Bazar to the island of Bhashan Char in the Ganges delta. Given the population pressures in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, this seems like a good idea—but it’s anything but. Stranding the Rohingya on the island could have catastrophic consequences.

ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္ေတြ အနာဂတ္အေရး ၀ါရွင္တန္မွာ ေဆြးေႏြး

VOA

ဗြီအိုုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)

ေအာင္ေအာင္ ၊03 ဧၿပီ၊ 2019

 Woodrow Wilson Center မွာ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္ေတြ အနာဂတ္အေရး ၀ါရွင္တန္မွာ ေဆြးေႏြးစဥ္

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွာ ၂၀၁၇ က ျမန္မာလံုၿခံဳေရးတပ္ေတြ နယ္ေျမရွင္းလင္းမႈေၾကာင့္ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံဘက္ ထြက္ေျပးသြားတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ေတြရဲ႕ အနာဂတ္အေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲကို ၀ါရွင္တန္ဒီစီၿမိဳ႔ေတာ္က Woodrow Wilson Center မွာ ဧၿပီလ ၂ ရက္ေန႔က က်င္းပပါတယ္။ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမွာ O.P. Jindal Global တကၠသိုလ္၊ အေရွ႔ေတာင္အာရွေလ့လာေရးဌာန ဦးေဆာင္ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴး Dr. Nehginpao Kipgen က ဦးေဆာင္ ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တာပါ။ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏိုင္ငံက ဒုကၡသည္ စခန္းမွာ ေနထိုင္ေနၾကတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေနနဲ႔ ရင္ ဆိုင္ ရႏိုင္တဲ့ အေျခအေနနဲ႔ ပတ္သတ္ၿပီး ကိုေအာင္ေအာင္က ေမးျမန္းရာမွာေတာ့ သူက အခုလို စေျပာပါ တယ္။

Refugees International Warns Against Relocating Rohingya to Bhashan Char Island

REFUGEE

INTERNATIONAL

Refugees International | March 28, 2019  

RI STATEMENTS

Refugees International Warns Against Relocating Rohingya to Bhashan Char Island — Refugees International

Refugees International is deeply concerned about plans announced by the government of Bangladesh to begin relocating Rohingya refugees to Bhashan Char, an isolated island more than 30 miles off the coast of Bangladesh. Serious questions about safety and voluntariness of such a relocation remain unanswered.

UN To Fund Rohingya Relocation To Island

INDEPENDENT

By Agency Report
- March 27, 2019 

 

The United Nations is prepared to financially help Bangladesh in relocating Rohingya refugees, the UN resident coordinator’s office in Bangladesh said on Monday after Bangladesh said it could no longer bear the refugee burden on its own.

ရိုဟင်ဂျာဒုက္ခသည်သိန်းချီ Bhasan Char ကျွန်းပို့ ရေးကူညီဖို့ ကုလစူးစမ်း

VOA
ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန)
26 မတ်၊ 2019

  Bhasan Char ကျွန်း

ဘင်္ဂလားဒေ့ရှ်နိုင်ငံရောက် ရိုဟင်ဂျာမူဆလင်ဒုက္ခသည်တွေထဲက လူဦးရေတသိန်းကို လူမနေတဲ့ ကျွန်းတခု ဆီပြောင်း ရွှေ့ဖို့ ဘင်္ဂလားဒေ့ရှ် အစိုးရဘက်ကစီစဉ်နေတာနဲ့ ပတ်သက်ပြီး ကုလသမဂ္ဂဘက်က ဘယ်လိုကူ ညီနိုင်မလဲဆိုတာကို စုံစမ်းလေ့လာနေ ပါတယ်။

UN weighs assisting with Rohingya island relocation plan.

Frontier
MYANMAR
Tuesday, March 26, 2019

People get off a boat on Bhashan Char island off the Bangladesh coast in October 2018, as it was being prepared for the relocation of Rohingya refugees. (AFP)

By AFP

DHAKA — The United Nations said Monday it was examining how to assist Bangladesh in relocating thousands of Rohingya refugees to a remote island despite warnings it could trigger fresh humanitarian upheaval.

Dhaka says shifting 100,000 refugees to a muddy silt islet in the Bay of Bengal will take pressure off overcrowded camps along its southern border, where almost a million Rohingya Muslims live in cramped tent cities.

No hurry to relocate Rohingyas to Bhasan Char, says Junior Minister Enamur.

bdnews24.com
26 Mar 2019 10:14 AM BdST

Bangladesh is not in a hurry to relocate Rohingya refugees to a Bay of Bengal island, a minister told Reuters on Monday, after the United Nations sought more details on the government's plan, criticised by some human rights groups.

Bangladesh wants to move 100,000 of the nearly 1 million Rohingya Muslims sheltered in cramped camps in its southeastern district of Cox's Bazar to the remote island, known as Bhasan Char which it has been developing for the past two years.

The United Nations is making plans to help Bangladesh with the move, Reuters reported last week.

Govt unlikely to begin process on April 15

NEWAGE
ROHINGYA RELOCATION TO BHASANCHAR
Shahidul Islam Chowdhury | Published:  Mar 26,2019 |

It is highly unlikely that the government would be able to begin the relocation of Rohingya people living in camps in Teknaf to Bhasanchar, an island under Noakhali district, on April 15, as it would take time to complete preparations including assessing voluntariness of the refugees, a senior member of the national taskforce, or NTF, on Rohingya issues said. 

Don’t move Rohingyas sans consensus: UN

theindepedent 
Bhasan Char relocation plan
Diplomatic Correspondent, Dhaka
26 March, 2019

The United Nations (UN) yesterday urged the government not to relocate any Rohingyas to Bhasan Char before reaching a consensus with the international community on the modalities of any such relocation. Appreciating the government’s move to decongest the overcrowded settlements of Rohingyas in Cox’s Bazar, the UN in a press release said they were discussing with the government the “critical protection and operational issues” and these matters should be considered before any such relocation.