DHAKA: Bangladesh is unable to allocate additional resources for the growing number of Rohingya refugees, the country’s leader said on Monday, as he called on the international community to deliver on UN commitments to address the crisis.
The chief of Bangladesh’s interim government, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, was addressing a two-day conference in Cox’s Bazar, held by the Bangladeshi government ahead of a high-level meeting at the UN General Assembly in September.
It comes eight years after hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced to flee a military crackdown in Myanmar and take shelter in neighboring Bangladesh.
Today, more than 1.3 million Rohingya are cramped inside 33 camps in the Cox’s Bazar district on the country’s southeast coast, making it the world’s largest refugee settlement.
While the number of refugees arriving from Myanmar has increased by some 150,000 since last year, international aid is dwindling. The latest Joint Response Plan for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis in Bangladesh has only 36 percent funding from the requested 2025-26 amount of nearly $935 million.
Bangladesh, which is already grappling with domestic challenges, does not “foresee any scope whatsoever for further mobilization of resources from domestic sources” to sustain the refugees, Yunus said.
“During the last eight years, people of Bangladesh, in particular the host community here in Cox’s Bazaar, have been making tremendous sacrifices. The impacts on our economy, resources, environment and ecosystem, society and governance have been huge,” he told attendees.
“(The) Rohingya issue and its sustainable resolution must be kept alive on the global agenda, as they need our support until they return home.”
Despite multiple attempts from Bangladeshi authorities, a UN-backed repatriation and resettlement process has failed to take off for the past few years.
Efforts have been stalled by armed conflict in Myanmar since the military junta seized power in 2021, and the number of refuges has been steadily increasing. In 2024, it grew sharply as fighting escalated in Rakhine state between junta troops and the Arakan Army, a powerful local ethnic militia.
Yunus called on the international community to draft a practical roadmap to end the violence, enable the Rohingya’s return to Rakhine, and hold perpetrators of violence and ethnic cleansing accountable.
“We urge upon all to calibrate their relationship with Myanmar and Arakan Army, and all parties to the conflict, in order to promote an early resolution of the protracted crisis,” he said.
“We urge all of the international community to add dynamism to the ongoing international accountability processes at the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court and elsewhere.”
As the UN conference on Rohingya nears, with another scheduled to take place in Doha in December, the meeting in Cox’s Bazaar — where donors will also visit the Rohingya camps — is seen as an attempt to find a new strategy to address the crisis. Regional efforts are also being encouraged, with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations earlier this month vowing to send a peace mission to Myanmar — its member state.
“We’ve seen during the last few months, especially during the interim government, that they have been trying to see if there could be some alternative ways of advocacy or getting Myanmar to accept certain positions through the ASEAN,” Asif Munier, a rights and migration expert, told Arab News.
“We know that it would be very difficult to get a common understanding at the UN Security Council to vote against Myanmar authorities. But if there could be other efforts to provide some sort of justice — that’s something that also should come up.”
