By MUKTADIR
RASHID 25 July 2018
COX’S BAZAR,
Bangladesh — Bangladesh’s Department of Immigration and Passports (DIP) says
there are 1,118,578 Rohingya living in Cox’s Bazar after completing its first
official count of the population, which has mushroomed since a crackdown by the
Myanmar military in Rakhine State in August that drove hundreds of thousands
across the border.
Bangladesh is now
working with the UN to register the refugees by household.
“We have so far
completed joint verification of over 11,649 Rohingya from 2,538 families and
are continuing our work. It’s complicated and time consuming because of [the
need for] proper documentation,” a senior government official in Cox’s Bazar
told The Irrawaddy on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to
speak to the media.
Muhammad Habibul
Kabir Chowdhury, Chief of refugee affairs at the Ministry of Disaster
Management and Relief, told The Irrawaddy last week that the government and UN
were aiming to complete the joint registration by November.
He said they were
hopeful that repatriation could begin very soon and would give Naypyitaw a list
of 15,000 “forcedly displaced Myanmar nationals” ready and willing to return by
the end of the month.
In February,
Bangladesh gave Myanmar a list of 8,032 Rohingya refugees prepared to
repatriate. Myanmar has since cleared about 2,500 of them for return.
None of them has as
yet made the trip back to Myanmar, however. Bangladesh will send a delegation
to Naypyitaw next month to follow up.
In a statement on
June 26, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said it was
working with Bangladesh to verify the identities and documents of the Rohingya
refugees who have fled Myanmar. The refugee agency had recently signed deals with
both countries to help with the repatriation process.
“The verification
exercise, which is expected to take approximately five to six months to
complete, will help to consolidate a unified database for the purposes of
identity management, documentation, protection, provision of assistance,
population statistics and solutions,” the UNHCR said.
All refugees over
the age of 12 will be issued plastic identification cards with anti-fraud
features including their photographs and biometric data collected from iris
scans and fingerprints.
The cards will be
issued jointly by Bangladesh and the UNHCR and help the refugees access
assistance services in Bangladesh.
“This exercise is a
major step forward to establish the legal identity of Rohingya refugees from
Myanmar,” said Kevin Allen, the UNHCR’s head of operations in Cox’s Bazar.
A senior government
official in Cox’s Bazar, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the
sensitivity of the issue, told The Irrawaddy that the data already collected by
the DIP were of no help with repatriation because the department registered the
refugees only as individuals.
“The data collected
by the DIP will not help us in the repatriation process because we need
household-based data of the Rohingyas. It was a hurried decision and the
existing data are now worthless,” the official said.
The DIP’s director
general, Major-General Masud Rezwan, declined to comment.
The Bangladesh army
and board guard began registering the refugees on Sept. 11, soon after the
exodus from Myanmar began in late August.
Maj-Gen Rezwan and
Home Affairs Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal both claimed last year that the
UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration were assisting with the
process.
The UNHCR estimates
that 721,732 people crossed into Bangladesh from Myanmar since Aug. 25 and that
the total number of Rohingya, including those who had come earlier, now stood
at 887,661 from 204,354 families.
It says about 67
percent of the Rohingya are from Rakhine State’s Maungdaw Township and that 80
percent of the Rohingya refugees arrived between August and December.
The last Rohingyas,
a group of 28, arrived on May 10.
Nur Khan Liton, an
independent rights campaigner, said he was disappointed by the DIP’s
registration drive and blamed its shortcomings on inexperience.
Now, he said, “We
expect the government and UN bodies to complete a flawless registration.”
The DIP had
previously told The Irrawaddy that its registration drive would prevent the
refugees from obtaining Bangladesh passports and national identification cards.
On July 6, however,
five Rohingya refugees were caught at an immigration checkpoint near the Indian
border with newly issued Bangladesh passports and visas for India.
‘We thought their
documents were suspicious because one of them could not give us details of the
place he claimed to be coming from. And we started checking the passports of
two others, and two more arrived at the queue at the same time,’ said
Sub-Inspector Abdul Alim, who was running the checkpoint at the time.
He said police
launched an investigation to find out how they obtained the passports and
learned that four were issued in Cumilla District in May and that the other was
issued in Feni District on Feb. 20. Both districts are in Chittagong Division,
which borders Myanmar.
“I became suspicious
once I checked his passport and saw he used an address in Darshana but his
passport was issued in Cumilla,” which lies more than 300 km away, the
sub-inspector said.
The five refugees
were sent to a local police station.
Emdad Hossain, the
station inspector, told The Irrawaddy that they had all arrived from Myanmar
earlier this year and lived in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar.
“They are all in our
custody and we are discussing what action should be taken against them,” he
said.
Cox’s Bazar police
authorities say they have foiled the attempts of more than 54,761 Rohingya
refugees to flee the camps since September, and that 3,348 refugees who tried
to evade registration have been sent back to Cox’s Bazar from across the
country.
“We rescued them and
sent them to camps where they have to live under our supervision,” said Afruzul
Hoque Tutul, an assistant police superintendent for Cox’s Bazar.
He said police were
also holding regular meetings with passenger bus owners to prevent Rohingya
from leaving the camps.
Since September,
Bangladeshi authorities have set up several checkpoints in Cox’s Bazar to
monitor and control the movement of the Rohingya, but many have still managed
to leave.
At a press
conference on July 17, Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, the home affairs minister, said
many Rohingya refugees were obtaining and using false identification numbers
but added that “as soon as we are informed we are cancelling them.”