Rohingya in refugee camps in Bangladesh fear being forced to move

(Baonghean.vn) - More than 20 years after the first wave of Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar, fear of being forced to move again is spreading in the suffocating refugee camps of dark houses where they are sheltering in southern Bangladesh.

Rupban, a Rohingya woman with her family photo at a refugee camp in Kutupalong.

The refugees worry that the Bangladeshi government wants to move them out of sight, perhaps to one of the islands in the Bay of Bengal. “This is our home now, peace is here,” said Nur Alam, who crossed the Naf River in a small boat in 1991. “We are not sure if we will be safe elsewhere.”

About 33,000 men, women and children live crammed into two dilapidated camps in the villages of Kutupalong and Nayapara, near the Myanmar border, supported by the United Nations and the Bangladesh government. They are the lucky ones.

In any one of the refugee camps and nearby hills are between 200,000 and 400,000 Rohingya — people the government refuses to accept as temporary refugees for fear of undermining its ability to send them back to Myanmar, where it says they face persecution.

HTImam, a political adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said the presence of so many foreigners without proper identification or jobs was causing problems for locals and hampering development. “The Rohingya are citizens of Myanmar and they have to go back,” he said. “We sympathize with them, but we cannot allow them to stay any longer.”

The plight of the Rohingya has drawn international concern in recent weeks as more than 4,000 migrants have drifted in rickety boats off the coast of Southeast Asia. The migrants, mostly Rohingya and Bangladeshis fleeing poverty in their homelands, were abandoned at sea by human traffickers after Thailand launched a crackdown on human trafficking gangs across its southern border with Malaysia.

Phuong Thao

(According to Reuters)