Dhaka:
Several thousand Rohingyas staged “unruly” protests Monday against living circumstances on a cyclone-prone island off Bangladesh exactly where they had been moved from vast camps on the mainland, police stated.
Since December, Bangladesh has shifted 18,000 out of a planned one hundred,000 refugees to the low-lying silt island of Bhashan Char from the Cox’s Bazar area, exactly where some 850,000 people today live in squalid and cramped circumstances.
Most of them had fled a brutal military offensive in neighbouring Myanmar in 2017 that United Nations (UN) investigators concluded was executed with “genocidal intent”.
Monday’s protest involved up to 4,000 people today, police stated, and coincided with an inspection take a look at by officials from the refugee agency, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
“The Rohingyas, who are there, became unruly the moment the UNHCR representatives landed (on the island) by helicopter today,” regional police chief Alamgir Hossain told AFP.
“They broke the glass on warehouses by throwing rocks. They came at the police… Their demand is they don’t want to live here.”
One Rohingya man confirmed to AFP that bricks had been thrown and that police prevented them from getting into a creating exactly where the UNHCR officials had been present.
After the initially transfer on December 4 to the flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal, various Rohingyas told AFP that they had been beaten and intimidated into agreeing to be relocated.
The claims have been echoed by rights groups.
The Bangladesh government has rejected the allegations, saying the island was protected and its facilities far superior than these in the Cox’s Bazar camps.
The UN stated it has not been involved in the procedure.