Bangladesh’s Yunus promises support to Rohingya in first policy speech

Bangladesh’s interim prime minister has also pledged to maintain the country’s important garment industry.

Muhammad Yunus, the interim leader of Bangladesh, has delivered his first major government policy address in which he promised to support the Rohingya community seeking refuge in the country and maintain Bangladesh’s garment trade.

Setting out his priorities in front of diplomats and UN representatives on Sunday, Yunus pledged that his government “will continue to support the million-plus Rohingya people sheltered in Bangladesh”.

“We need the sustained efforts of the international community for Rohingya humanitarian operations and their eventual repatriation to their homeland, Myanmar, with safety, dignity and full rights,” he said.

Bangladesh is home to about one million Rohingya. Most of them fled neighbouring Myanmar in 2017 after a military crackdown now the subject of a genocide investigation by a United Nations court.

Earlier this month, medical charity Doctors without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, said that more Rohingya are arriving in Bangladesh from Myanmar with war-related injuries amid escalating conflict between the military and the rebel Arakan Army (AA) in western Rakhine State.

More than 40 percent of the injured were women and children, it added in a statement.

Yunus, an 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist, returned from Europe this month after he was picked by President Mohammed Shahabuddin to lead an interim government, fulfilling a key demand of the student protest leaders.

His predecessor Sheikh Hasina, 76, fled the country on August 5 by helicopter after 15 years in power, brought down by antigovernment protests.

The weeks of unrest and mass protests that toppled