International
oi-Briti Roy Barman
Dhaka, Feb 16: Bangladesh on Monday despatched round 2,000 Rohingya refugees to the remote Bhashan Char island, which is designed to accommodate 1 lakh individuals.
More than 7,000 refugees, together with Monday’s group, have been relocated to the island since December.
Human rights teams have criticised the transfer and claimed that refugees are being relocated towards their will.
They boarded boats on the port of Chattogram and headed to Bhasan Char – an island 21 miles off Bangladesh’s southeast coast, M Mozammel Haque, a commander of the Bangladesh Navy, advised reporters.
Bhasan Char was solely found round 20 years in the past and has been largely uninhabited since then.
It is usually submerged by monsoon rain however now has flood protections, which the Bangladeshi authorities insists make it protected.
Officials have spent more than £80m on constructing houses, hospitals and mosques there for the Rohingya Muslims, who fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar in 2017.
The island has sufficient services to accommodate 1,00,000 refugees, simply 10 per cent of the million Rohingyas now dwelling in Bangladesh after army crackdowns of their native nation.
