A large number of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are set to get Bangladeshi nationality by listing their names in fresh voters’ lists, according to a government agency report.
The government agency has informed the Election Commission that millions of Rohingyas living in greater Chittagong districts applied to local and central election offices for listing their names in fresh voters’ lists. The agency report has marked 13 bordering upazilas as “sensitive” and planned detailed scrutiny for updating the voters’ lists to prevent the Rohingya refugees from getting registered as voters.
On September 17, the EC received a letter from the government agency that said, “About three to five lakh Rohingya people are now living in three greater Chittagong districts including Cox’s Bazar, Bandarban and Chittagong, and they have listed their names in the voters’ lists.”
“A section of EC officials, local politicians and influential people are engaged in helping the Rohingyas to get Bangladeshi citizenship for money,” the report added.
Copies of the letter have also been sent to the PMO, home ministry and foreign ministry. The letter asked the EC to take measures to stop further anomalies with the Rohingya issue.
“We collected our data from the grassroots level with utmost caution and if given specific information, we can take action in this regard,” said EC secretary Dr Mohammad Sadik.
He also said the commission had started investigation against 135 people based on the agency report.
Recently, the EC has dropped the names of about 17,000 Rohingya people from the updated draft voters’ lists in 13 upazilas of Cox’s Bazar, Bandarban and Rangamati districts, close to the border on Myanmar.
According to EC sources, in 2010, the EC had prevented at least 50,000 Rohingyas from getting enrolled in the voters’ lists in the three districts where these refugees from Myanmar mostly live.
According to the foreign ministry, more than half a million Rohingyas had entered Bangladesh as refugees in two phases in 1978–79 and 1992–92 after Myanmar’s military junta started persecution following a 1982 law that denied them citizenship.
Many Rohingyas are again trying to enter Bangladesh after ethnic riots rocked Myanmar’s Rakhine (former Arakan) province in 2012.
In anticipation of the next Parliamentary election, the EC began collecting information to update the voters’ lists in the three Chittagong hill tract districts, like other places in the country, on Mar 10, 2012. The process was completed on Dec 15.
Before the voter list updates, the EC directed the enumerators to take final decision after intensive scrutiny of all the eligible voters of seven upazilas of Cox’s Bazar district (Sadar, Chakaria, Teknaf, Ramu, Pekua, Ukhiya and Moheshkhali), four upazilas of Bandarban district (Sadar, Alikadam, Lama and Nikhongchhari) and two upazilas of Rangamati (Bilaichhari and Kaptai).
According to the EC statistics, over 70 lakh new voters have been enrolled since March last year, increasing the number of voters in the country to 91,943,538. Of these, 46,108,814 are male voters and 45,834,769 are female.
-With The Independent input
