Rohingya who moved to island in Bangladesh are learning job skills, says Japanese charity chief

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Japan’s Nippon Foundation will spend $2 million to help move tens of thousands more Rohingya refugees to a remote island in Bangladesh and provide them with skills training, the charity’s chairman said.

Speaking to The Associated Press on Sunday after a visit to Bhashan Char, Yohei Sasakawa praised the support the government has provided to refugees on the island and said it’s a step toward returning them to Myanmar.

Some 700,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar for Bangladesh after August 2017, when the military in Buddhist-majority Myanmar began a harsh crackdown following an attack by insurgents. The crackdown included rapes, killings and the torching of thousands of homes, and was termed ethnic cleansing by global rights groups and the U.N., while the United States called it genocide.

Efforts to repatriate refugees to Myanmar under a 2017 agreement meditated by China have failed at least twice, and seem only more distant as the security situation worsens. Fighting has spread across much of Myanmar as the ruling junta loses ground to rebel and separatist groups in the country’s long-running civil war.

Sasakawa, who also serves as Japan’s Special Envoy for National Reconciliation in Myanmar, said that they’ll need jobs training to return: “After their return to Myanmar, if they have no skill whatsoever, then they would end up living poorly in the country. So having the skill training in Bhasan Char is going to help them greatly.”

The Nippon Foundation will fund moving some 40,000 Rohingya to the island, Sasakawa said.

While Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina says the refugees will not be forced to return to Myanmar, she’s urged the international community to put pressure on the Buddhist-majority