A second batch of Rohingya refugees, comprising between 700 and 1,000 individuals, will be relocated to the Bhashan Char island under the district of Noakhali on December 29.
The refugees will be transported to Chittagong on December 28 where they will be accommodated for the night. They will be shipped to Bhashan Char from Chittagong on December 29.
An official deeply involved with the process confirmed the matter to the media.
“Hopefully we will reprieve more people from
the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar at the end of this month,” Commodore AA Mamun Chowdhury, project director of Ashrayan -3 Project (the official name of the Bhashan Char project), told this correspondent. He assured that those who were relocated in the first batch are doing very well.
Different government agencies led by the office of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner (RRRC) are taking necessary preparations for the scheduled relocations.
The source indicated that apparently, the success of the first batch of relocations, comprising 1,642 Rohingyas, enthused the government to go ahead with the second batch of relocations.
The first phase of relocations took place on December 4. Some 80 buses, five navy ships and an army ship were used for transporting the Rohingyas at different parts of the journey.
The Bhashan Char project is ready to receive as many as 100,000 Rohingyas, according to Commodore Chowdhury.
Over 750,000 Rohingyas fled a military crackdown in Myanmar starting in August 2017, finding refuge across the border in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar.
They joined some 300,000 Rohingyas, who had fled decades of violence in the Rakhine state before and had been living in Cox’s Bazar. More than 1.1 million refugees are now living in Cox’ Bazar. The navy prepared the Tk3,100 crore housing project in Bhashan Char to ease the congestion in the Cox’s Bazar camps.
