DHAKA: On Thursday, the first group of Rohingya refugees left Bangladesh for the US. This action is said to be opening the door for other members of the persecuted minority to be resettled in other countries. The majority of the 1.2 million Muslim Rohingya refugees live in filthy camps in Cox’s Bazar district, the world’s largest refugee settlement, which is located in the country’s southeast and is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. The majority fled Rakhine State in neighbouring Myanmar during a military crackdown in 2017.
Despite repeated efforts from Bangladesh, a UN-backed repatriation and resettlement process has been failing to take off for the past few years, and only individual relocations have taken place in exceptional cases. At the same time, pressure on the South Asian country has been growing as hosting the Rohingya refugees costs Bangladesh an estimated $1.2 billion a year, adding to the difficulties the developing country already faces after being hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This week, Bangladesh’s foreign minister, A. K. Abdul Momen, told reporters that he had asked the US government to accept 100,000 Rohingya, and that similar requests had also been made to the governments of the UK and Japan. ‘In the first batch, 62 Rohingyas will be taken by the USA government,’ he said. 24 refugees have already flown to their new country. ‘The first batch of 24 Rohingyas left Bangladesh on Thursday as part of the relocation to the USA,’ Mainul Kabir, director general of the Myanmar wing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, confirmed to Arab News. ‘It’s expected that 300 to 800 Rohingyas will be relocated to the USA every year’.
While the number of refugees resettled is not large, it is seen as the first step to formalise their transfer from Bangladesh to places where they would be granted not only permanent residence but also the right to employment and access to formal education. ‘The date of the next batch is yet to be determined as it involves the other parties also — the US embassy and International Organization for Migration’.
‘Despite being a relatively small number, the relocated Rohingyas have some symbolic meaning. It would be nice if these Rohingyas could go to a third nation’. According to famous Bangladeshi rights campaigner and migration specialist Mohammad Nur Khan, the important issue is that the process got started. ‘ We’ve been debating the relocation of Rohingyas to other countries for a while. In fact, it seems unlikely that these Rohingyas would soon be able to return home in a dignified manner given the current state of affairs in Myanmar. Moving to any third nation in this situation, regardless of the number, can be a viable solution’.
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