REUTERS:
Pirates, cyclones and mud: Bangladesh's island solution to Rohingya crisis
Pirates, cyclones and mud: Bangladesh's island solution to Rohingya crisis
By Antoni Slodkowski
THENGAR CHAR, BANGLADESH
The island is two hours by boat from the nearest
settlement. There are no buildings, mobile phone reception or people. During
the monsoon it often floods and, when the seas are calm, pirates roam nearby
waters hunting for fishermen to kidnap for ransom.
Welcome to Thengar Char, a muddy stain in the murky
waters of the Bay of Bengal, identified by Bangladesh as a short-term solution
to the humanitarian crisis unfolding on its border with Myanmar, across which
some 70,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled.
Those refugees, escaping an army crackdown on insurgents
that began in October, have joined more than 200,000 Rohingya already living in
official and makeshift camps, straining resources in one of Asia's poorest
regions. Bangladesh says the refugees bring crime and a risk of disease.
The influx has prompted Dhaka to revive a plan - much
criticized by humanitarian workers when it was first proposed in 2015 - to move
thousands of people to this uninhabited island about 250 km (150 miles)
northwest of their border camps.
While most experts dismiss the scheme as impractical, a
Bangladeshi minister told Reuters this week that it was determined to push
ahead, adding authorities would provide shelters, other facilities and
livestock.
Local administrators, however, say they have not been
informed, and when Reuters visited the island the only signs of activity were a
few buffalo lazily grazing on the yellow grass along its shores.
"We have only heard bad things about the Rohingya.
If they work with the pirates and get involved in crime - we don't want them
here," said Mizanur Rahman, 48, the administrator of Might Bangha village,
the closest settlement to Thengar Char.
Rahman added, however, that if the Rohingya were
"good people", they should be helped on humanitarian grounds. Others
from the village echoed that sentiment, saying they were fellow Muslims and
deserved assistance.
The crisis is the biggest challenge facing the government
of Aung San Suu Kyi, straining Myanmar's relations with the countries of the
region hosting large Rohingya populations such as Bangladesh and Malaysia, but
also the United States.
About 1.1 million Rohingya live in apartheid-like
conditions in northwestern Myanmar, where they are denied citizenship. Many in
Buddhist-majority Myanmar regard them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh,
while the authorities in Dhaka say they are Myanmar nationals and must
ultimately go back.
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| Graphic view of Rohingya refugee’s relocation plan of Bangladesh |
PIRATES AND MACHINE GUNS
It takes about two hours by boat from Rahman's village on
the coast of Sandwip - one of the largest islands in an archipelago in southern
Bangladesh - to Thengar Char.
Reuters journalists were escorted there by a fishing boat
and a coastguard vessel carrying seven officers equipped with Chinese-made
machine guns to stave off potential pirate attacks.
Villagers complain criminals roam the nearby waters,
seizing vessels, stealing the catch and releasing fishermen only after
receiving a ransom.
Thengar Char is flat and featureless, covered by bushes,
grass and windswept trees.
It emerged from the sea about 11 years ago, off Sandwip's
western coast, one of the myriad of shifting, unstable islands formed by
sediment in the mouth of the mighty Meghna river.
While Thengar Char looked calm on a sunny winter
afternoon, the main objection voiced by aid agencies to Bangladesh's plan is
the area's unforgiving climate.
"These areas are cyclone and flood-prone," said
Quamrul Hassan, a meteorologist at the Bangladesh Weather Department, adding
that the islands in the Bay of Bengal were "especially risky" to
inhabit.
"Average rainfall during the monsoon season in the
coastal areas is more than double that of the other parts of the country."
Many people living on the islands are regularly evacuated
during the cyclone season to shelters built on the coast, said local journalist
Saleh Noman.
He thought the relocation plan wasn't realistic.
"There is a similar island in the area and it took
some 40 years for it to develop. Bet even now it's all very basic," said
Noman.
There are currently around 30,000 Rohingya living in
camps run by the United Nations near border with Myanmar, while tens of
thousands more are crammed into slums that have grown up around them, without
proper sanitation or healthcare.
The Rohingya from those settlements sometimes find
employment, but most are sustained by local villagers and rations quietly
distributed by international aid agencies.
"We can operate here, but we can't really talk about
it," said one aid worker based in the border region.
Rohingya refugees Reuters spoke to did not want to stay
where they were - but neither did they want to be moved to Thengar Char.
"We left everything in Myanmar," said Abu Salam
from Kya Guang Taung, a village in northern Myanmar that was destroyed in the
crackdown. He crossed the border in December.
"That's where our home is. If only we could get
citizenship, we would like to go back."
(Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski; Additional reporting by
Ruma Paul in Dhaka; Editing by Alex Richardson)
http://reut.rs/2jElbdG
VIEWS OF ROHINGYA ACTIVISTS
IS IT A RIGHT CHOICE FOR ROHINGYA REFUGEES?
Government of Bangladesh plans to relocate Rohingya in an
unreachable Island
Read detail here: https://mirsdq.blogspot.com/2017/01/is-it-right-choice-for-rohingya.html
ROHINGYA ORGANISATION'S concerned over #Bangladesh’s proposal to relocate
#Rohingya #refugees to the Thengar Char Island
