Dhaka has reaffirmed its stance that it cannot take in any more Rohingyas, urging nations and organisations advocating for further intake to shoulder the responsibility themselves.
“We have clearly informed the UNHCR that we are unable to accept additional Rohingyas,” said Foreign Adviser Md Touhid Hossain, speaking to reporters at the foreign ministry on Sunday.
He mentioned that the UN Refugee Agency had requested Bangladesh to shelter new arrivals, which the government has firmly declined.
Hossain pointed that Bangladesh has already gone above and beyond, currently hosting 1.2 million Rohingyas on humanitarian grounds.
“Those who come to us with
advice or those who want to advise us – let them take the Rohingyas,” he said.
The Adviser also mentioned that the government is working to prevent further Rohingya entries where possible, though sealing the border with Myanmar completely remains a challenge.
On September 3, Hossain noted that around 8,000 Rohingya had recently entered Bangladesh, fleeing armed conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
Hossain noted that the border with Myanmar has been sealed, but acknowledged the difficulty of completely securing the frontier.
Since August 25 in 2017, Bangladesh has been hosting over a million forcefully displaced Rohingyas in Cox’s Bazar district and most of them arrived there after a military crackdown by Myanmar, which the UN called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and other rights groups dubbed it as “genocide”.
In the last seven years, not a single Rohingya went back home.
Myanmar agreed to take them back, but repatriation attempts failed twice due to trust deficit among the Rohingyas about their safety and security in Rakhine state.
