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Boat carrying Rohingya stops on Thai island: official
 by Staff Writers
 Bangkok (AFP) April 1, 2018

Bangladesh begins relocating Rohingya before monsoon
Dhaka (AFP) April 1, 2018 - Bangladesh has begun relocating 100,000 Rohingya refugees to safer ground before the monsoon season for fear of deadly landslides and floods in the congested camps, an official said Sunday.

The UN says about 150,000 refugees in Bangladesh's southeast -- where nearly one million Rohingya in total live in shanties on hillsides -- are extremely vulnerable to disease and disaster this rainy season.

Humanitarian groups have been racing to reinforce the basic shelters erected hastily by the Rohingya as they fled across the border after a fierce army crackdown on the community in western Myanmar.

Nearly 700,000 refugees have crossed the border since August into the Cox's Bazar region, clearing trees and packing whole hillsides with unstable shanties.

Bangladesh's refugee commissioner Mohammad Abul Kalam said 100,000 refugees living in "priority" areas most at risk from floods and landslides would be relocated before June.

"We have already shifted some 10,000 refugees from different locations to safer settlements," he told AFP.

Bangladesh had allocated roughly 3,500 acres (14 square kilometres) of forested land in Cox's Bazar to the newly-arrived Rohingya to build simple shelters.

But the forest is being felled at a rate of four football fields a day, Kalam said.

The refugees, who use the firewood for cooking, have already cleared 5,000 acres of forest, Cox's Bazar deputy district administrator Mahidur Rahman told AFP.

The once lush hillsides have turned barren, exposing the topsoil and leaving them highly vulnerable to landslides during heavy rain, he said.

"Some 200,000 people are vulnerable to landslides," he said.

Monsoon rains wreak havoc every year in Cox's Bazar and the adjacent Chittagong Hill Tracts, a tropical forest zone home to wild elephants.

Last season heavy rain triggered landslides in the tract region, killing 170 people. Experts blamed deforestation for worsening the impact of the mud avalanches.

More than 100 people were killed in landslides in the region in 2012, and two years earlier heavy rain killed around 50.

In the past week UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has expressed fears the Rohingya were "extremely vulnerable" to the annual storms.

He told reporters he had stressed to Bangladesh that "higher ground is the best place for this kind of relocation".

Dhaka had earlier said about 100,000 refugees from the persecuted Muslim minority would be shifted to an island in the Bay of Bengal where the Bangladesh navy is building accommodation for the refugees.

But Abdul Mannan, the Chittagong regional commissioner, told AFP the Rohingya would not be relocated to the island before the end of the year.

A boat carrying dozens of Rohingya refugees trying to reach Malaysia briefly stopped on a Thai island, an official said Sunday, as fears grow about overcrowded camps for the stateless minority fleeing violence in Myanmar.

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have sought shelter in southern Bangladesh since Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown on insurgents in August that the US and UN have called ethnic cleansing.

But the refugees have arrived to find cramped settlements and often squalid conditions in Cox's Bazar, where hundreds of thousands who fled previous waves of persecution are already living.

An agreement to repatriate Rohingya from Bangladesh to Myanmar's Rakhine state has yet to see a single refugee returned.

Rohingya migrants attempting the boat routes south have been a rare sighting since Thai authorities clamped down on regional trafficking networks in 2015, leaving thousands of migrants abandoned in open waters or jungle camps.

The boat arrived off Thailand's western coast in Krabi province early Sunday due to bad weather.

Images showed the passengers, who said they were Rohingya, being interviewed on shore and then getting back into the boat before departing.

Krabi governor Kitibodee Pravitra confirmed that the people travelling on the boat were Rohingya but said he did not know where they had come from.

"The initial report said they were docking near Koh Lanta this morning to avoid the storm," he said, referring to an island popular with tourists. "They want to go to Malaysia."

He said there were about 56 women, men and children on board and that the Rohingya would continue toward their destination.

A Thai official who was involved in the response but declined to be named told AFP naval authorities escorted the boat towards Malaysia and that it would likely arrive at the border area tomorrow morning.

He said local villagers donated food to the Rohingya and that they were "happy" with the help.

Many of the Rohingya ensnared in the 2015 boat crisis wound up in Muslim-majority Malaysia and Indonesia as Thailand stuck to a policy of not accepting the vessels.

The Thai official said in this case it was "their wish to continue the journey to the neighbouring country".

Bangladeshi economic migrants have also taken the boat routes south.

There are nearly 70,000 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers living in Malaysia, according to the most recent statistics from the UN refugee agency.


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