SHAPIRO: For any country to take 700,000 people in the span of just a few months would be a burden. But at the same time, it doesn't want to have this huge humanitarian crisis right next to one of its leading beach resorts. They also are not allowed to buy SIM cards for the local cell phone network, so they're more cut off inside there. But they're not allowed to actually study Bengali. You'll hear them counting in English, or you'll hear them speaking in their local Rohingya language. So you'd be walking around, and you'll hear English. Inside these camps, the Bangladesh authorities have made it clear that the kids are not allowed to learn Bengali.
And Bangladesh has been accepting of them, but it's also making it very clear that they don't want them. So is this where they're going to stay?īEAUBIEN: That is the big question. SHAPIRO: As you've described this week, the Rohingya appear to be settling in in Bangladesh. All week we've been hearing NPR's Jason Beaubien's reports from the crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh where nearly a million Rohingya refugees are crammed in together. The Myanmar military calls it a cleanup operation against terrorists. The mass migration of Rohingya Muslims out of Myanmar has been called ethnic cleansing by some, genocide by others.
