Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh

Nine years after the largest single influx, Bangladesh hosts one of the world's largest and most protracted refugee populations. As of 30 September 2026, the joint Government of Bangladesh–UNHCR registration counted 1,206,528 Rohingya in the country: 1,173,291 in the camps of Cox's Bazar district and 33,237 on the island of Bhasan Char. UN agencies describe the Cox's Bazar camp complex, centred on the Kutupalong–Balukhali expansion site, as the world's largest refugee settlement. Almost nothing about the situation is temporary any more. A second generation is growing up in the camps, the aid budget shrinks year by year, fighting in Myanmar's Rakhine State has pushed more than 140,000 additional people across the border since 2024, and not one organised voluntary repatriation has taken place since the exodus of 2017. This article traces how the crisis began, how the response is organised, and where things stand in late 2026 — including a judgment of the International Court of Justice due on 19 November 2026.

Background: The Rohingya of Rakhine State

The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic group whose home is northern Rakhine State, in western Myanmar along the border with Bangladesh. Before 2017, an estimated one million or more Rohingya lived in Myanmar. Their status there was contested for decades. Myanmar's governments and much of its Buddhist majority have treated the Rohingya as irregular migrants from Bengal — officials in Naypyidaw still officially call them "Bengalis" — while Rohingya point to a presence in Rakhine going back centuries. What is not in dispute is the legal outcome: most Rohingya hold no citizenship anywhere, making them, in UNHCR's description, one of the world's largest stateless populations.

Statelessness and the Earlier Influxes

Displacement across the Naf River is not new. In 1978, Burma's military government launched Operation Nagamin (Dragon King), an exercise to identify supposed foreigners; more than 200,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, according to Médecins Sans Frontières' historical timeline. Most returned under a bilateral agreement, but many came back to find their identity documents confiscated. In 1982 Burma passed a new citizenship law recognising 135 "national races" and tying full citizenship to proof of ancestry in the country before 1823. The Rohingya were not on the list, and the law left most of them formally stateless.

A decade later, the military campaign known as Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation drove about 250,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh in 1991–92. Again most were repatriated by the mid-1990s under a UNHCR-supervised process, but a residual community remained. The joint registration data of July 2026 still records 39,856 people in Bangladesh in the "1990s influx" category — a reminder that some families have now spent more than three decades in the camps. Smaller waves followed communal violence in Rakhine in 2012 and military operations in late 2016, so that an estimated 300,000 or more Rohingya were already in Bangladesh when the events of 2017 began.

August 2017: The Exodus

On 25 August 2017, fighters of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked some 30 police posts and an army base in northern Rakhine. Myanmar's military responded with what it called clearance operations. Villages were burned, and civilians fled in every direction. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described the operation as a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing"; the UN fact-finding mission later concluded that the operations were carried out with genocidal intent, a finding Myanmar's authorities have always rejected.

The scale of the flight overwhelmed the border. The Inter Sector Coordination Group (ISCG) counted 655,000 new arrivals in Bangladesh by 21 December 2017, less than four months after the exodus began. UNHCR's settled estimate is that about 740,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh from August 2017 — one of the fastest mass displacements of the century. (The often-repeated claim that "a million Rohingya fled in 2017" is not accurate: the million-plus figure is the total population in Bangladesh, which includes earlier arrivals and children born in the camps since.) Bangladesh opened its border and allocated land in Ukhiya and Teknaf, where the Kutupalong–Balukhali site expanded within months into a continuous settlement of bamboo and tarpaulin shelters.

The Camps of Cox's Bazar Today

The registered population is spread across 33 camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf upazilas, plus Bhasan Char. UNHCR's protection reporting put the population at 1,189,213 in March 2026, with women and children making up 78 per cent; by 30 September 2026 the joint registration had risen to 1,206,528. Bangladeshi official statements sometimes cite higher totals of around 1.4 million, including unregistered people. Bangladesh is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not formally recognise the Rohingya as refugees; the official term is "Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals" (FDMNs).

The population keeps growing from two directions. Children are born in the camps every day, and war in Rakhine has produced a second influx: as fighting between Myanmar's military and the Arakan Army intensified from late 2023, UNHCR recorded 146,989 newly arrived Rohingya biometrically identified between January 2025 and March 2026, and Dhaka Tribune reported 154,690 new arrivals registered between December 2024 and July 2026. The camps themselves remain densely packed and physically fragile. In July 2026, monsoon landslides and flooding killed at least 17 refugees and displaced more than 3,000, according to situation reporting — a pattern repeated almost every rainy season.

The Aid System and the Funding Squeeze

Bangladesh leads the response through the Office of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner (RRRC). UN agencies and Bangladeshi and international NGOs deliver services, coordinated through the Inter Sector Coordination Group, and the operation is financed through an annual Joint Response Plan (JRP) presented by the government and the UN. The first two-year plan, for 2025–26, sought US$934.5 million; the 2025 appeal closed the year only about 46 per cent funded, according to the UN's Financial Tracking Service.

For 2026 the partners issued a "hyper-prioritised" update asking for US$710.5 million — 26 per cent less than the 2025 request — to reach 1.56 million people, refugees and host-community members combined. By 4 September 2026 the Financial Tracking Service had recorded US$352.7 million, or 49.6 per cent, against that appeal. The squeeze is visible in the most basic service of all: food. Until March 2026 the World Food Programme provided every refugee a flat food voucher worth US$12 per person per month. From 1 April 2026, under a Targeting and Prioritisation Exercise, households receive US$12, US$10 or US$7 per person per month (US$13, US$11 or US$8 on Bhasan Char) depending on assessed food insecurity. WFP presents the change as needs-based targeting; Associated Press reported that the agency had lost about a third of its funding following aid cuts by the United States and other donors.

Pressures: Hosts, Forests and Security

Cox's Bazar was one of Bangladesh's poorer districts before 2017, and the refugees now outnumber the local population in Ukhiya and Teknaf. The JRP directs a share of its funding to host communities, but competition for wages, land, water and services remains a persistent source of tension, and Bangladeshi officials regularly cite the economic and environmental cost of hosting as a reason the situation cannot continue indefinitely.

The environmental damage was severe in the first years, though estimates differ by method. Bangladesh's Environment Ministry put degraded forest at 3,238 hectares for 2017–19, while academic studies estimate roughly 5,400–5,500 hectares of forest were lost between 2017 and 2021, cleared for shelters and firewood. The response then changed course: LPG cooking gas has been distributed since 2018 — nearly 1.8 million refills in 2024 alone, according to programme reporting — and UNHCR-linked assessments credit it with cutting camp firewood consumption by about 80 per cent. Replanting inside and around the camps rose from about 40 hectares in 2018 to roughly 4,100 hectares by 2024 in JRP reporting, though other programme accounts put the restored area lower, at above 2,300 hectares.

Security inside the camps is a third pressure. Bangladeshi government records cited by Prothom Alo in August 2026 count 292 people killed in the camps over nine years, amid turf wars involving Myanmar-based armed groups and criminal networks engaged in drug trafficking and abduction. Refugee leaders and aid workers have been among the victims, and Bangladeshi officials say armed-group activity has increased alongside the new influx.

Bhasan Char

To ease congestion, the government developed Bhasan Char, a silt island in the Meghna estuary under Hatiya upazila of Noakhali district. The Bangladesh Navy's Ashrayan-3 project, costing about Tk 3,100 crore (roughly US$350 million), built housing for 100,000 people, with 120 cluster villages and 120 cyclone shelters. Relocations from Cox's Bazar began in December 2020, at first without UN involvement; aid and rights groups questioned the island's exposure to cyclones and the restrictions on residents' movement. On 9 October 2021 the government and the UN signed a memorandum of understanding, with UNHCR acting for UN agencies, establishing a common framework for protection and services on the island, including education, health and livelihoods support.

Nine years on, the island holds 33,237 registered residents (30 September 2026) — about a third of its built capacity. Relocation convoys have slowed to a trickle, and in recent registration data some of the island's residents are people who arrived in the post-2023 influx rather than transferees from Cox's Bazar. Bhasan Char remains part of the official response, but it has not become the large-scale decongestion measure it was designed to be.

Education and the Myanmar Curriculum

For the first years, camp learning centres taught an informal curriculum of basic literacy and numeracy. The turning point came with government approval to teach Myanmar's own national curriculum — intended to prepare children for an eventual return. UNICEF and partners launched the Myanmar Curriculum Pilot in November 2021 with 10,000 children in grades 6–9, then scaled it across the camps; in 2023–24 about 300,000 children were enrolled, the first year in which all age groups studied under the standardised curriculum.

Funding cuts hit education hard. In mid-2025, reductions in US and other donor funding forced the suspension of many donor-funded learning programmes, and large numbers of children stopped attending. The RRRC's figures for August 2026 record 6,137 learning facilities — 3,723 learning centres and 2,368 community-based facilities — with 8,017 teachers and 302,802 students, while an estimated 150,000 children remain outside any learning facility. Community-run schools have filled part of the gap: in the 2025–26 academic year a community-established Examination Board of Rohingya Refugees conducted unified examinations based on the Myanmar curriculum. Education thus mirrors the wider crisis: a system built for a short emergency now carries the schooling of a generation, on a shrinking budget.

Repatriation: A Stalled Process

Every Bangladeshi government since 2017 has held the same stated position: the only sustainable solution is the repatriation of the Rohingya to Myanmar, with citizenship and safety guaranteed. Dhaka and Naypyidaw signed a repatriation arrangement on 23 November 2017, and two start dates were set — in November 2018 and August 2019. Both collapsed when no refugees volunteered to board the buses, citing the absence of guarantees on citizenship, security and return to their own villages. China has mediated trilateral talks since 2019, without producing returns; on 5 November 2026 Bangladesh again publicly sought China's diplomatic support for early, safe and sustainable repatriation. As of late 2026, not one organised voluntary repatriation has taken place.

The paperwork illustrates the deadlock. Bangladesh submitted a list of 828,824 names for verification. Myanmar's Foreign Ministry stated in August 2026 that of 426,545 names processed, 308,797 had been verified as former Rakhine residents, 4,241 flagged for alleged terrorist links and 113,507 could not be verified; Bangladeshi reporting of the same process has carried different figures. Myanmar's authorities continue to call the Rohingya "Bengalis", terminology Dhaka formally rejects, and verification has produced no timetable for returns.

Meanwhile the ground has changed entirely. The Arakan Army now controls most of northern Rakhine, including the border townships of Maungdaw and Buthidaung along the frontier with Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts districts — meaning the authority that would have to receive returnees in much of the area is no longer Myanmar's military government at all. UNHCR maintains that conditions in Rakhine are not currently conducive to safe, voluntary, dignified and sustainable return. Bangladesh presented a five-point plan at the United Nations in September 2026 — a credible repatriation roadmap, an end to violence in Rakhine, agreed humanitarian funding, greater accountability and regional cooperation against trafficking — and in July 2026 formed an 11-member National Strategy Formulation Committee on Rohingya Affairs to draft a longer-term policy. Third-country resettlement has offered a way out to only a few: 3,195 departures in 2024 and 2,160 in 2025, according to response reporting, while UN data cited by Save the Children pointed to a rise of about 90 per cent in attempted sea journeys by Rohingya in 2026.

The Genocide Case at the International Court of Justice

The legal track reaches a milestone days after this article is published. On 11 November 2019 The Gambia, backed by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, brought Myanmar before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, alleging breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention in the treatment of the Rohingya. The Court ordered provisional measures for the protection of the Rohingya in January 2020 and rejected Myanmar's preliminary objections in July 2022; eleven states have intervened in the case. Public hearings on the merits were held from 12 to 29 January 2026, and on 3 November 2026 the Court announced that it will deliver its judgment — final, and not subject to appeal — on 19 November 2026. Whatever the Court decides, it will be the first final ruling by the world court on whether the 2017 campaign against the Rohingya constituted genocide.

The Position in Late 2026

Nine years on, the crisis is defined by a set of facts that pull against each other. The registered population, 1,206,528 in September 2026, is the highest it has ever been, swelled by births and by a war-driven influx that continues along a border now controlled on the Myanmar side by the Arakan Army. The money is going the other way: the 2026 appeal is the smallest in years and was barely half funded by September. Repatriation, Bangladesh's stated goal, has not moved a single person and now depends on conditions in a Rakhine State whose control has fragmented. The open questions for 2027 are consequently stark. Whether the ICJ's November 2026 judgment changes any government's calculations; whether funding stabilises or falls further, and with it food, schooling and health care in the camps; whether any authority in Rakhine can offer the citizenship and security that return would require; and whether Bangladesh's new national strategy can find a path between permanent encampment and a return that refugees themselves judge safe. Until those questions are answered, the camps of Cox's Bazar — the world's largest refugee settlement — remain what they have become: not an emergency camp, but an unintended city in waiting.