A UN official said the move would “further isolate and victimise' the refugees, and could lead to crime, violence and extremism
travelling beyond the confines of their over-crowded, ramshackle camps on a sliver of land in Bangladesh’s border district of Cox’s Bazar, about 1m Rohingya refugees have hitherto had to rely on mobile phones as virtually their sole link to the outside world. Yet on September 2nd the Bangladeshi government abruptly ordered all telecommunications companies to shut down mobile services and stop sellingThe surprise move was greeted with dismay and anger in the camps, and beyond.
The Bangladeshi government’s frustration with the refugees is mounting. It has, rightly, been praised for accepting the Rohingyas, but the mobile-phone ban is just one more bit of evidence that its patience is wearing very thin. In February the government announced that it would no longer take in any more Rohingyas. A particular source of irritation has been the utter failure of the repatriation schemes painfully negotiated with the Myanmar government. In the latest attempt, on August 22nd, not one of 3,450 nominated Rohingya refugees turned up for the buses laid on to take them back to Rakhine state.
The Bangladeshi foreign minister, Abul Kalam Abdul Momen, has blamed the UN for not putting enough pressure on Myanmar to take the Rohingyas back. In an interview on September 4th with, a German broadcaster, he argued that this is an “international issue”, and that “it is time for others to come forward...We cannot afford to keep them for years.
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