As a head count of the undocumented Rohingyas in Bangladesh goes on, the government has recently rejected a US request to resume the process of resettling the Myanmar refugees in a third country.
Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) launched the head count in April and it is scheduled to continue until June next year.
The Tk21.75 crore project is titled “Census of the Undocumented Myanmar Nationals Staying in Bangladesh 2015” and under this, the BBS will give a count of the Rohingya population in five districts.
The news of the rejection is sourced from the minutes of a recent meeting of a national task-force at the Foreign Ministry.
The list of “third countries” include Canada, Australia, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, the USA and Norway.
In 2012, the government of Bangladesh decided to put the resettlement process on hold in the wake of a major Rohingya influx. The government said that if the process continued, it would have acted as a “pull factor” and would have encouraged more refugees to cross the border and illegally enter Bangladesh.
Before the process was stalled, 309 Rohingyas went to Canada, 242 to Australia, 190 to the UK, 82 to Ireland, 56 to New Zealand, 19 to Sweden, 14 to the USA and four to Norway between 2006 and 2010.
Rather, the Bangladesh government wanted the interested third countries to adopt a comprehensive approach to facilitate the resettlement of the entire refugee case-load, which is 32,713 at present.