The Bangladesh government plans to relocate more than 30,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees, who have lived in the country's southern region for over two decades, to an isolated island in the Bay of Bengal.
Bangladesh's BDNews24 reported that Sheikh Hasina, the country's prime minister, and the government will move the Rohingya refugees from two heavily crowded camps in Cox's Bazaar to the island Upazila of Hatiya in Noakhali.
"The relocation of the Rohingya camps will definitely take place. So far informal steps have been taken according to directives of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina," chief of Bangladesh's Myanmar Refugee Cell Amit Kumar Baul said, according to the AFP.
Government officials say Hatiya has been chosen for relocation after Hasina ordered officials to shift the camps to a "suitable" place six months ago.
"The government wanted to know if big, suitable spaces were available. We proposed a 500-acre shoal area at Hatiya," Noakhali district official Badre Munir Firdaous told BDNews24 on Wednesday.
Local officials say more than 30,000 unregistered Rohingya refugees live in Cox's Bazar and adjacent districts, The Guardian reported. The unregistered Rohingyas live scattered, often within the local communities, moving about freely in the region and carrying out criminal activities, local administration sources told The Daily Star.
The Bangladesh government fears that the persecution faced by Rohingya may lead to their radicalisations, BDNews24 reported.
"They are already very vulnerable and if radicalised, they may be recruited by terror networks.The Rohingyas are being forced to register as Bengalis," the country's foreign minister, Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali, said recently
The ethnic Myanmar refugees fled to Bangladesh after facing persecution in Myanmar. The governments of the Bangladesh and Myanmar had been engaged in consultation for repatriation of the Rohingyas to Myanmar, according to the DPA.
