Government has shut the largest private school for Rohingya refugees, officials said on Monday, in a further blow to the educational prospects of thousands of children stuck in vast camps in Cox’s Bazar.
Bangladesh has been sheltering about 850,000 Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar since a military offensive in 2017 that the United States this month designated as genocide.
Since December, authorities have been shutting down schools set up by the Rohingya, and late last week it closed Kayaphuri School.
"One cannot simply open up and operate a school without having adequate permission. This is unacceptable," a senior government official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Rohingya refugee children collect drinking water in a school in Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia in on March 27, 2022 AFPThe school was set up by Mohib Ullah, a prominent Rohingya community leader who was gunned down in September, allegedly by a Rohingya militant group that is accused of murdering opponents in the camps.
The private school, funded by teachers and better-off refugee families, taught around 600 older pupils the same curriculum as is taught in Myanmar, with the hopes that the students will one day return home.
'Wanted to be a doctor'
Mohammad Mosharraf, 19, said he was in the middle of his final exams when the school was closed, with armed elite police taking away the only computer -- as well as benches and whiteboards.
"I wanted to be a doctor," he told AFP.
Unicef runs schools in the camps but they offer education to children aged four to 14, leaving older pupils to go to private schools or Islamic seminaries -- called madrassas -- in the settlements.
Nur Khan Liton, former secretary-general of Ain O Salish Kendra, said that education is a "basic human right."
"When they go back to their homeland, the Rohingya people won't get any good jobs
