DHAKA: The Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Yunus, on Sunday supported the early Third-Country Resettlement for Rohingya Muslims in the South Asian country as thousands of new refugees escape the growing violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine region.
More than 8,000 Rohingya Muslims have crossed the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh in recent months amid spiraling violence between Myanmar’s ruling military and the Arakan Army, a powerful militia hailing from Myanmar’s Buddhist population.
More than a million Rohingya already stay in the over-crowded camps in Cox’s Bazar of Bangladesh, most of whom had fled a military operation in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017.
Despite its bleak prospects, the Rohingya have nowhere else to go since they have been rendered stateless in their homeland. They are denied passports, voting rights, and other civil liberties. Yunus emphasized this in a meeting with the International Organization for Migration IOM: “The resettlement process should be easy, regular, and smooth.”
Resettlement of Rohingya in third countries started in 2022. However, no activity was initiated for 12 years. It started only in 2022,” Abdusattor Esoev of IOM said in a statement released by the Chief Adviser’s office, which stated that thousands of Rohingya are to be reset in the United States. However, the speed of such a process has not been increased, it said. The fresh bout of violence is the worst the Rohingya have seen since the Myanmar military crackdown in 2017, which the United Nations found was genocidal.
Bangladesh’s de facto foreign minister, Mohammad Touhid Hossain, told Reuters in an interview last month that his country couldn’t take any more Rohingya refugees and urged India and others to admit more of the fleeing Muslims.
He further demanded that more force be applied to the Arakan Army for them to stop their attacks against the Rohingya people of Rakhine state.
