The United Kingdom has announced an additional £4.5 million in funding to address the ongoing Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh.
The UK is lifting its funding from the start of the crisis in August 2017 to a total of £345 million, read a press release issued by the British High Commission Dhaka on Sunday.
In this connection, the British High Commissioner in Dhaka Robert Chatterton Dickson said, “The UK remains committed to supporting Rohingya refugees and their host communities in Bangladesh.”
Re-assuring the UK’s continuous support to the Rohingya in Bangladesh, Dickson said, “The UK continues to push for a long-term solution that will enable the Rohingya to return to Myanmar on a safe, voluntary and dignified basis, when the conditions there allow.”
This additional £4.5 million support to WFP (£3 million) and UNICEF (£1.5 million) will provide food, water, sanitation, and child protection to Rohingya refugees and host communities in Cox's Bazar and Bhasan Char, the release added.
Since August 25 in 2017, Bangladesh has been hosting over 1.2 million forcefully displaced Rohingyas in the Cox's Bazar district and most of them arrived there after a military crackdown by Myanmar.
The UN called the crackdown a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and other rights groups dubbed as "genocide".
Myanmar, however, is yet to take back a single Rohingya in the last five years while repatriation attempts failed twice due to a trust deficit among the forcibly displaced people about their safety and security in Rakhine state.
