Island to be home for 100,000 Rohingya

A BANGLADESHI island regularly submerged by monsoon rains is ready to house 100,000 Rohingya refugees, but no date has been announced to relocate people from the crowded and squalid camps where they have lived for years, officials said.

Flood protection embankments, houses, hospitals and mosques have been built on Bhasan Char, or floating island, in the Bay of Bengal, officials said.

“Bhasan Char is ready for habitation. Everything has been put in place,” Bangladesh refugee, relief and repatriation commissioner Mahbub Alam Talukder said.

The island is built to accommodate 100,000 people, a fraction of the million Rohingya Muslims who have fled violent persecution in their native Myanmar.

About 700,000 people came after August 2017, when the military in Buddhist-majority Myanmar began a harsh crackdown against Rohingya in response to an attack by insurgents.

Global rights groups and the UN called the campaign ethnic cleansing involving rapes, killings and torching of thousands of homes. Foreign media have not been permitted to visit the island.

Bangladesh is a low-lying delta nation. The island, 21 miles from the mainland, surfaced only 20 years ago and was never inhabited. The Bangladesh navy has been implementing a multi-milliondollar plan to bolster the swampy island, which is submerged for months during monsoon season.

International aid agencies and the UN have vehemently opposed the relocation plan since it was first proposed in 2015, expressing fear that a big storm could overwhelm the island and endanger thousands of lives.

Mostofa Mohamamd Sazzad Hossain, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangladesh, said the agency is not ready to endorse the relocation.