The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has recently pressed the Office of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner to ensure accommodation of 1.13 lakh more Rohingyas amid uncertainty of repatriation.
RRRC officials said that Rohingyas continued to enter Bangladesh as conflicts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state went on.
‘We received a letter from the UNHCR in the past week about ensuring accommodation of 1.13 lakh more Rohingyas who entered Bangladesh between November 2023 and April 27, 2025,’ RRRC top official Mohammed Mizanur Rahman told New Age on Tuesday.
Mizanur said that accommodating new arrivals of Rohingyas was impossible in the camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf upazilas in Cox’s Bazar.
He said that they had taken fingerprints of 1.13 lakh Rohingyas but yet to collect their iris images.
Mizanur also said that many newly arriving Rohingyas were staying at their relatives, learning centres and under the open sky. Some were living outside the camps.
Local people said that new arrivals were now living in villages and Cox’s Bazar town.
Ekramul Karim Bablu, a local resident at Balukhali in Ukhiya, told New Age that many Rohingyas were living outside the camps, in villages and towns.
‘We, the local people, are now cornered as the pressure of Rohingyas is increasing,’ he said.
The Armed Police Battalion’s 16th Battalion commanding officer Kawser Shikdar, also an additional deputy inspector general of police, said that the Rohingyas were living in the camps in an extremely crammed condition with at least eight people living in a tiny room.
‘I don’t see any place to allow new arrivals in the camp. We need to create new sheds for them,’ Kawser.
Cox’s Bazar deputy commissioner Mohammad Salahuddin declined to comment on the accommodation of the new arrivals, saying that he had to first hold a meeting the RRRC.
Myanmar has identified 1,80,000 Rohingya refugees from a list of 8,00,000 sheltered in Bangladesh as eligible for repatriation, said a recent press release from the chief adviser’s press wing.
The information was disclosed on April 4 to Khalilur Rahman, high representative of the chief adviser of Bangladesh, by U Than Shew, deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Myanmar, at a meeting on the sidelines of the 6th summit of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, BIMSTEC in short, in Bangkok.
Many Rohingyas, however, have said that they are not willing to return to Rakhine until peace is restored.
Dhaka University international relations professor Syeda Rozana Rashid said that the repatriation process would not start overnight until a conducive environment for relocation in Myanmar was restored.
‘Our main goal is to repatriate them and we have been trying this for the past eight years. It will take time and let’s see what happens next,’ said Rozana, having more than twenty years of research experience on forced and voluntary migration.
She said that the Rohingya people could not be sent in Rakhine until the current volatile situation in which killings, setting fire to homes and tortures were being perpetrated, forcing them to cross the border to enter Bangladesh with whatever means they could manage.
The Rohingyas are using land and river routes along the border in Ukhiya and Teknaf upazilas in Cox’s Bazar and Naikhongchhari upazila in Bandarban to reach Bangladesh, community people and officials in Cox’s Bazar said. To enter Bangladesh they are paying local boatmen and brokers on both sides of the border.
More than 1.3 million (13 lakh) Myanmar nationals of the Rohingya community fled to Bangladesh amid brutal atrocities by the Myanmar military since 2017, according to government data.
On March 7, the United Nations World Food Programme in a press release warned of a critical funding shortfall for its emergency response operations in Bangladesh that might affect over one million displaced Rohingyas.
The monthly rations must be halved to $6 per person, down from $12.50 per person, it said.
RRRC chief Mizanur said that the UN shifted from its previous position and extended to providing $12 for per person till August this year.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi on Tuesday told the UN Security Council that the Bangladesh interim government chose to engage with the parties to the conflict in the Rakhine state to pursue a solution to the Rohingya crisis that remained stagnant for the past eight years.
