Pope can help, but Rohingya must go back, says Bangladesh cardinal
VATICAN CITY: The top Catholic official in Bangladesh hopes Pope Francis’s visit to the country and Myanmar will bolster moves to alleviate the Rohingya refugee crisis that has put the nations in the global spotlight.
Despite last week’s deal to return to Myanmar some of the hundreds of thousands of people housed in the world’s largest refugee camp on the Bangladesh side of the border, Cardinal Patrick D’Rozario warned that the situation remained both explosive and tough to resolve.
“I am hopeful the Rohingya can be returned to Myanmar,” D’Rozario, Archbishop of Dhaka, said in an interview ahead of Francis’s visit.
“The international community wants it, and the Holy Father’s visit will prepare the minds and hearts of many.”
The United Nations refugee agency had said the conditions for a safe return of Rohingya to Myanmar’s Rakhine State were not in place, and Bangladesh indicated on Saturday that the plan was for them to be housed in temporary shelters initially.
Despite the difficult backdrop, D’Rozario looked forward to the visit of the pontiff who made him a cardinal last year, in a first for Bangladesh and its tiny community of 360,000 Catholics.
Francis arrives in Myanmar today and will fly to Bangladesh on Thursday. His schedule does not include a visit to the vast refugee camp, but he is due to meet a group of Rohingya in Dhaka.
“The cries of the Rohingya are the cries of humanity,” D’Rozario said. “These cries ought to be heard and addressed.”
The archbishop spent two days in the camp, speaking to families forced from their homes in Rakhine State by a campaign of orchestrated violence and intimidation condemned as ethnic cleansing by much of the international community.
“The main thing is to tell the people, ‘We are on your side’,” he says, adding that he took inspiration from Francis’s oft-repeated description of the Church’s role as being like that of a field hospital.
Caritas, the Church’s humanitarian arm, helps feed 40,000 families at the camp, which has more than 300,000 people. AFP