Several thousand Rohingya staged “unruly” protests Monday against living conditions on a cyclone-prone island off Bangladesh where they were moved from vast camps on the mainland, police said.
Since December, Bangladesh has shifted 18,000 out of a planned 100,000 refugees to the low-lying silt island of Bhashan Char from the Cox’s Bazar region, where some 850,000 people live in squalid and cramped conditions.
Most of them had fled a brutal military offensive in neighbouring Myanmar in 2017 that UN investigators concluded was executed with “genocidal intent”.
Monday’s protest concerned as much as 4,000 individuals, police stated, and coincided with an inspection go to by officers from the United Nations refugee company (UNHCR).
“The Rohingya who’re there grew to become unruly the second the UNHCR representatives landed (on the island) by helicopter immediately,” local police chief Alamgir Hossain told AFP.
“They broke the glass on warehouses by throwing rocks. They came at the police… Their demand is they don’t want to live here.”
One Rohingya man confirmed to AFP that bricks have been thrown and that police prevented them from getting into a constructing the place the UNHCR officers have been current.
After the primary switch on December 4 to the flood-prone island within the Bay of Bengal, a number of Rohingya instructed AFP that they have been overwhelmed and intimidated into agreeing to be relocated.
The claims have been echoed by rights teams.
The Bangladesh authorities has rejected the allegations, saying the island was protected and its amenities much better than these within the Cox’s Bazar camps.
The UN stated it has not been concerned within the course of.
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