Rohingya violence: Bangladesh to move 15,000 Rohingya from tribal district to ensure peace

Bangladesh is to move to a camp at least 15,000 Rohingya refugees who have settled in a restive hill district near the border with Myanmar, a local official said on Sunday.

Rohingyas, the world's most persecuted minority fleeing from the violence-affected Myanmar are crammed into the camps that have sprung up on government land.

Mainly Rohingya Muslim refugees have settled in the nearby district of Bandarban which is the part of the Chittagong Hill tracts where indigenous tribes waged a separatist insurgency in the 1980s and 1990s.

And there could be a chance that presence of the Rohingya Muslims in Bandarban revived the communal tensions between the local Muslim population and the tribal minority who are mainly Buddhist. 

"The government has now decided to shift all 15,000 newly arrived Rohingya to the main camp," Bandarban government administrator Dilip Kumar Banik told AFP. Banik said the government would begin moving them tomorrow to "ensure peace in the hill district".

In an order to ensure peace in the hill district, the government will begin moving them. Myanmar has denied the citizenship to the Rohingyas after that, Bangladesh has opened its border.

However, Bangladesh has not granted them official refugee status and has made clear that it does not want them to remain indefinitely.

Authorities have barred the refugees' movement, not allowing them to leave the overcrowded camp areas where hundreds of thousands are living in desperate conditions with inadequate shelter.

There are around 12,000 Rohingyas who are homeless in the nearby no-man's land between Bangladesh and Myanmar and the Bangladesh government is also trying to move them.

Tribal groups ended their separatist insurgency in 1997 and signed a peace treaty with the government. But tensions persist between the local Muslim population and the tribal groups, who have close ties with the ethnic Rakhine Buddhists accused of carrying out attacks on Rohingya in Myanmar.

In June this year, local Muslims torched hundreds of houses in a tribal community following the alleged murder of a local politician. And in May last year, a 75-year-old Buddhist monk was found hacked to death in Bandarban, an attack later claimed by the Islamic State group