"A Bangladeshi official and political observers on Friday criticized a statement by the Chinese ambassador, who suggested this week that the Rohingya refugee crisis could be solved through economic development in neighboring Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Linking the plight of Rohingya Muslims to trade and infrastructure investments in the sub-region would be tantamount to disregarding the human rights issues that led to a massive exodus of refugees from Myanmar, the official and analysts told BenarNews. “Development alone could not resolve the Rohingya crisis,” Mohammad Abul Kalam, Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, told BenarNews on Friday. “The political will of Myanmar’s government is most crucial,” he said. “Unless the rights of the Rohingya people in Rakhine are not ensured, the crisis will not be over.” BenarNews asked Kalam and others in Bangladesh for their views on a remark made by Chinese Ambassador Zhang Zuo on the Rohingya during a news briefing the envoy gave in Dhaka on Wednesday about Beijing’s massive One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure initiative. “The real solution of the problem lies in development,” Zuo said, referring to the 740,000 Rohingya refugees who fled their homes and crossed into Bangladesh at the height of a Myanmar military crackdown in 2017. “We hope that after the violence is stopped and the people are repatriated, the Rakhine state could be further developed.” “We also hope that in the process of implementing the BCIM economic corridor, we could come up with a very good solution to the Rohingya problem,” the ambassador added. BCIM is an acronym for the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Forum for Regional Cooperation, a sub-regional organization also known as the BCIM Economic Corridor. It was conceptualized in the early 1990s to improve trade between the four Asian nations. Without elaborating, Zuo said repatriation was “only part of the overall solution proposed by China.” As proposed, the BCIM Economic Corridor would connect Kunming, the capital and largest city of Yunnan province in southwest China, with Kolkata in the Indian state of West Bengal. The connection would run through the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka and Mandalay, the second-largest city of Myanmar..."