THE UN refugee agency has once again put out a call for Bangladesh to arrange for more land for the construction of shelters for the 150,000 Rohingyas who have freshly entered Bangladesh from Myanmar between November 2023 and April 27, 2025. The Office of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Committee has said that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has placed the demand before Bangladesh, which is yet to accept or decline the UN call. With the new arrivals, the number of the Rohingyas sheltered in Bangladesh stands at 1.3 million, estimated on the basis of an average birth rate of 30,000 a year, since the major influx that began in August 2017 amidst a military crackdown on the Rohingyas in Rakhine State in Myanmar. The Rohingyas are now sheltered in 33 camps at Ukhiya and Teknaf in Cox’s Bazar and another large camp set up on the island of Bhasan Char, historically administered under Noakhali but put under Chattogram in January 2026. The Myanmar wing at the Foreign Office says that intense crowding in camp areas is a concern of the donors. The managers of the camps should see what better they can do to manage the situation.
But such a state of the camps, with a declining international financial support and facing the threat of curtailment, should not be the basis for the UN refugee agency, which is, along with Myanmar and the international community, largely blamed for the failure to send the Rohingyas back to Rakhine State, to make such a call. Because, with Dhaka willing to make more spaces for the Rohingyas, this will not only encourage Myanmar to cause further exoduses of the Rohingyas but also dampen any prospect for the repatriation of the Rohingyas. UN agencies involved in the process for the Rohingya return have so far only limited their efforts to holding consultations and putting out calls for international financial support for the Rohingyas, which have mostly faltered. The United Nations in March 2025 announced a reduction in the monthly food aid, from $12.5 to $6 per person for more than a million Rohingyas, beginning on April 1 that year. UN agencies and the world community in 2021 also sought Dhaka’s engagement to encourage the adoption of government policies guaranteeing the Rohingyas administrative, civil and legal status and rights, which would in all likelihood create their permanence and local integration in Bangladesh.
Dhaka rightly stood up to the UN call then. It should stand up to the UN call now with similar steadfastness so as not to squander away any chance for the return of the Rohingyas. The world community, including the United Nations, must rather put in meaningful efforts to make Myanmar take back the Rohingyas. Any solution to the crisis that originated in Myanmar lies there.
