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Mizzima: Nearly twenty thousand Roh



Nearly twenty thousand Rohingya refugees still left in the camps in
Bangladesh

Dhaka, March 13, 2000
Mizzima News Group

Geneva-based UNHCR's Assistant High Commissioner Mr. Soren Jessen
Petersen along with two members arrived Rangoon yesterday. According to
UNHCR sources, during his stay in Burma for a few days, Mr. Soren Jessen
Petersen is going to discuss with the Burmese authorities among other
subjects the matter of delay in repatriating the Rohingya Muslim
refugees from Bangladesh to Burma.

According to records of UNHCR office in Bangladesh, there are still
19,814 Rohingya Muslim refugees left in two camps Noryapara and
Kutuplong situated at Phalongchake Township of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.
The last group of refugees who went back to Burma was on 9th February,
about forty refugees were voluntarily repatriated to Burma through
UNHCR's repatriation program.

After the military took over power in Burma in 1988, about two and half
lakhs Muslims living in Arakan State of Burma fled to the south eastern
region of Bangladesh in 1991 and 1992. Most of them have taken refugee
stealthily in the two camps of Noryapara and Kutuplong of Cox's Bazar.
Many among than have been repatriated to Burma since 1993 under a
UNHCR-assisted repatriation program. UNHCR's records show that total
211,273 refugees have been so far repatriated.

But there are about twenty thousand refugees still left in the two
camps. Out of them, Burma government agreed to take back only 7,000
saying that the remaining are not Burmese nationals. The work of
repatriation of refugees was suspended temporarily in 1997 by questions
of identification and clearance by the Burmese government. Then, the
repatriation work resumed in November 1998 following UNHCR's
interventions. But up till now, the number of returns have been very
limited.

In the past nine years, about 7,500 refugees died in the camps during
their stay, and over thirty thousand children have been born to the
refugees.

UNHCR office in Cox's Bazar said that they want to complete the
repatriation (of registered refugees) by June this year. But this is
quite impossible, as the current repatriation pace is slow and only a
few hundreds were repatriated in the last one and half year.

Apart from these registered refugees in the camps, there are estimated
twenty thousand Muslim refugees who are scattered in the Chittagong
Hills and other areas of Bangladesh having run away from the two refugee
camps.