The Bangladesh government has called for international community’s assistance and cooperation, stating that they do not have the capacity to provide food and humanitarian aid to the Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar. The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group who have migrated to Bangladesh to escape the genocide carried out by Myanmar’s military government and extremist forces. Statistics show that over 1.3 million Rohingya are living in the refugee camps established in Cox’s Bazar. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya migrated to Bangladesh in 2017. Of the approximately 1.3 million Rohingya currently living in Cox’s Bazar, half are children.
Speaking about the situation of the Rohingya living in Cox’s Bazar, Mohammad Yunus, a senior advisor to Bangladesh’s caretaker government, said that the country’s government does not have the capacity to provide food and humanitarian assistance to them. He also stated that the efforts made by the Bangladesh government to provide humanitarian assistance to them have placed significant economic and environmental burdens on the country. “Given the challenges we face at the moment, there is no hope that domestic resources can be used to provide assistance [to Rohingya refugees] in the future. The Rohingya issue, and finding a permanent solution to it, is not something that can be erased from international headlines,” Yunus said. He also called on the international community to provide assistance in supporting them and creating opportunities for their repatriation.
Yunus made these remarks to mark the eighth anniversary of the migration of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to Bangladesh. In 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya migrated to Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government has established a large refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar to provide shelter for them, which is currently the largest such camp in the world. Myanmar’s military government and Buddhist extremists continue to carry out genocide against the Rohingya Muslims living in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. To escape this violence, an additional 150,000 Rohingya have migrated to Bangladesh in the past year. In addition to Bangladesh, Rohingya people are also migrating to some other countries in East Asia.
