Bhasan Char gets its youngest inhabitant

Saidul Bashar, a seven-pound baby boy became the first child to be born in Bhasan Char.

Faced with a brutal military crackdown in Myanmar, the new-born baby's parents fled to Bangladesh seeking shelter in 2017.

On December 4 this year, they were among the first groups of Rohingya refugees to have reached the newly settled island on the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of southern Noakhali.

Both mother and child are doing well after the baby was born yesterday.

The new-born baby is the third son of Md Kasem and Rabeya Khatun.

The elder son, Noor Bashar, was born in Myanmar and the second son, Abul Bashar, in the Kutupalong camp.

"My mother named the boy. I am happy as both the son and the mother are doing well," Kasem told this correspondent over phone.

Commodore AA Mamun Chowdhury, project director of the Ashrayan-3 Project (the official name of the Bhasan Char project), said, "It was really an amazing feeling, in this month of victory, that we could relocate the first batch of forcibly displaced Myanmar Nationals [FDMNs] from Cox's Bazar."

He also said, "News of the first baby being born in Bhasan Char is really amazing."

A total of 1,642 Rohingyas were taken to Bhasan Char on December 4 amid concerns expressed by the United Nations and other development partners who demanded an independent assessment of the housing project before any relocation.

Bhasan Char, an island which appeared only in 2006, now looks like a planned modern township with rows of white multi-storey buildings.

The total area of the Bhasan char is around 13,000 acres and of this, around 6,427 acres are usable. The total project area is 1,702 acres, but cluster houses were constructed on around 432 acres.

The project, funded with public money, was undertaken after some 750,000 Rohingyas fled a brutal military campaign in Myanmar's Rakhine state and took shelter in Cox's Bazar in the months following August 2017. They joined some 300,000 other Rohingyas, who had fled previous waves of violence in Rakhine.

From Sandwip island, Bhasan Char is 4.5 nautical miles away and is only an hour's trip by boat. It is 13.2 nautical miles away from Hatiya, 21 nautical miles from Noakhali and 28 nautical miles from Patenga of Chattogram.