Staff Reporter:
Dhaka yesterday reiterated its position that it cannot accommodate any new influx of Rohingyas, urging countries and organizations that recommend further intake to share the burden themselves.
“We have made it clear to the UNHCR that it is not possible for us to take in more Rohingyas,” Foreign Adviser Md Touhid Hossain told reporters at the foreign ministry yesterday.
He noted that the UN Refugee Agency had requested Bangladesh to shelter new arrivals, which the gov-ernment has firmly declined.
Hossain pointed that Bangladesh has already extended more support than expected, hosting 1.2 million Rohingya on humanitarian grounds.
“Those who come to us with advice or those who want to advise us – let them take the Rohingyas,” he said.
The Adviser also mentioned that the government is working to prevent further Rohingya entries where possible, though sealing the border with Myanmar completely remains a challenge.
On September 3, Hossain noted that around 8,000 Rohingya had recently entered Bangladesh, fleeing armed conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
Hossain noted that the border with Myanmar has been sealed, but acknowledged the difficulty of com-pletely securing the frontier.
Since August 25 in 2017, Bangladesh has been hosting over million forcefully displaced Rohingyas in Cox’s Bazar district and most of them arrived there after a military crackdown by Myanmar, which the UN called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and other rights groups dubbed it as “genocide”.
In the last seven years, not a single Rohingya went back home.
Myanmar agreed to take them back, but repatriation attempts failed twice due to trust deficit among the Rohingyas about their safety and security in Rakhine state
