Bangladesh Begins Controversial Transfer Of Rohingya To Island

Angladesh began transferring hundreds of Rohingya refugees on Thursday to a low-lying island in an area prone to cyclones and floods, with rights groups alleging people were being coerced into leaving

Cox's Bazar (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Dec, 2020 ) :Bangladesh began transferring hundreds of Rohingya refugees on Thursday to a low-lying island in an area prone to cyclones and floods, with rights groups alleging people were being coerced into leaving.

Almost a million Rohingya -- most of whom fled a military offensive in neighbouring Myanmar in 2017 -- live in a vast network of squalid camps in south-eastern Bangladesh.

With many refusing to return, and with violent drug gangs and extremists active on the sites, the Bangladeshi government has grown increasingly impatient to clear out the camps.

On Thursday more than 20 buses carrying almost a thousand people left the camps in the Cox's Bazar region, headed for the port city of Chittagong, said Anwar Hossain, regional police chief.

"Twenty buses left in two shifts. There were 423 people in the first 10 buses and 499 in the second 10 buses," he told AFP.

From Chittagong the refugees were due to be taken by military landing craft to the island of Bhashan Char, officials said.

The island, measuring 13,000 acres (52 square kilometers), is one of several silty strips to have surfaced in the Bay of Bengal in recent decades.

The Bangladesh Navy has built shelters there for at least 100,000 Rohingya refugees as well as a nine-foot (three-meter) flood embankment.

But locals say high tides flooded the island a few years ago and that cyclones, a regular occurrence in the region, can cause storm surges of four or five meters.