Arakan News Agency
Bangladesh authorities, relief workers and Rohingya refugees said desperation, unrest, fear of repatriation or being taken to a desolate island led to an increasing number of Rohingyas fleeing refugee camps in Bangladesh despite tightened movement restrictions.
In an interview with the Irrawaddy newspaper last week, several Bangladeshi government officials said many Rohingyas were leaving the camps in search of a “better life” and that many were trying to obtain Bangladeshi passports from various regional offices of the Immigration and Passports Department.
Last Thursday, police arrested a 16-year-old Rohingya girl from Cox’s Bazaar camp in a passport office in Narayanangan, 30 km from Dhaka.
A 55-year-old man from the eastern commune of Comila arrived with the girl on Wednesday and they went to the police office to obtain documents and the next day to get a passport, said Aziz al-Haq, an inspector at the Siddhurjanj police station in Narayanangan.
“The man presented himself as her father and applied for a passport,” Aziz al-Haq said.
But the staff saw that the girl could not speak Bengali and noted that the request had been filed with a false title in Narayanangan province.
On March 3, police arrested another teenage Rohingya girl in a passport office in Rajshahi, northern Bangladesh.
Officials told Irrawaddy that similar events took place in Mymensingh , Noakhali, Chittagong and elsewhere.
In Chittagong, passport officer Abu Noman Mohammed Zaker Hussein said 11 Rohingyas had submitted forged documents in the past five and a half months to obtain a passport.
“The main reason for this is – the desire for passports – to go abroad,” Abu Noman Mohammed Zaker Hussein said. “He asked us to tighten our verification process, and we decided not to issue a passport without checking the police.”
“Many of them want to move freely because the camps have become suffocating,” Abu Kalam, Bangladesh’s relief and reconstruction commissioner for Irrawaddy, told Reuters.
“The Rohingya has not received psycho-social counseling since they arrived here after the trauma they suffered,” said Abu al-Qasim, executive director of Help Cox’s Bazar, a local charity. That was another reason why refugees had left the camps, although he added that Bangladesh was doing its best with limited resources.
