Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Mizanur Rahman has now admitted it - the Bhasan Char relocation project has failed. Built to warehouse 100,000 Rohingya, it moved only 37,000 people in four years; Thousands have escaped back to the mainland. Costs ballooned, aid agencies started recalculating costs, and now the interim government of Bangladesh calls it unworkable. None of this is surprising. It was baked into the project’s logic from the start.
This is what Mizanur Rahman said:
“The government has not given fresh approval for further relocation. This is because the government considers the Bhasan Char project a failed project. The United Nations and other international aid agencies are also no longer showing interest. Given the financial crisis in the Rohingya response project, they too cannot bear the costs. If it costs 100 taka per person in Cox’s Bazar, on Bhasan Char that cost rises to more than 130 taka.”
In my essay for Failed Architecture, I described Bhasan Char as an “island warehouse.” Its stucture contains regimented barracks, a surveillance-heavy grid and a grotesque, unused eight-crore-taka VIP guesthouse. The architecture itself was built for control, though packaged as care. In CounterpointBD, I discussed what followed: drownings (in the island’s unfenced ponds and at sea as people fled), suicides, threadbare healthcare, no recognised schooling, and an economy of enforced idleness that corrodes dignity. These are the predictable outcomes of a policy that treats refugees as a surplus population.
The rent-seeking engine behind a “humanitarian” facade
As I argued in the Southeast Asia Globe, the island’s USD 300–350 million price tag fuelled a classic rent-seeking machine: contracts to favoured firms, a Navy-managed build, and a halo of “national project” rhetoric to deter scrutiny. Keeping the UN and independent assessors at bay wasn’t a bureaucratic quirk - it was essential to preserving the rents. If refugees or monitors exposed the truth, the flows would dry up.
Hence the choreography: staged “go-and-see” visits, bucolic TV packages with sheep, geese and drone shots, and an architect proclaiming a “paradise” for the “lucky” Rohingya while women on the island were filmed wailing and being manhandled by police for wanting to leave. And worse. The production values were high. The ethics were not.
How the 4th estate was bent to the task
The project’s lifeblood was narrative management. As I reported for DVB English, an AFP investigation exposed a pipeline of fake op-eds by fabricated “experts,” seeded across pliant media outlets to launder the Hasina regime’s talking points. Simultaneously, think-tanks with military pedigree - the Central Foundation for International and Strategic Studies and later the Centre for Bangladesh and Global Affairs - positioned themselves as neutral outfits. They published titles like “Bhasan Char: A Beacon of Hope” and commissioned “studies” declaring the island “perfectly liveable.” The academic branding gave the appearance of rigour. Their outputs served the policy.
Television joined in. One Jamuna TV package racked up hundreds of thousands of views by painting a rustic idyll: panoramic skies, vegetable plots, soft-focus livestock. Promises of 24/7 electricity, emergency sea ambulances and biogas cooking made for compelling b-roll. It all amounted to journalism failing to ask hard questions. It was journalism recruited to supply easy answers.
Years later, many of those promises remained unmet. Meanwhile, The Lancet noted the information vacuum: refugees too frightened to speak, and services shielded from independent verification.
Foreign contractors also played their part. The British firm HR Wallingford and Mukta Dinwiddie MacLaren (MDM) Architects were central to the project’s design and promotion. MDM’s principal architect, Ahmed Mukta, went so far as to call Bhasan Char a “paradise” for the “lucky” Rohingya - but when I pressed him about basic safety failures, such as why children kept drowning in unfenced ponds, he refused to answer without the Bangladesh Navy’s permission. The Navy, unsurprisingly, never replied. This evasiveness captured the project’s entire ethos: glossy claims up front, silence when confronted with the lived reality of refugees.
When journalists, academics, companies and think tanks lend their platforms to propaganda, they become part of the apparatus that dehumanises refugees. The walled garden of “positive coverage” makes it easier to pressure families to move, block exits, and rebrand escapes as anti-trafficking “rescues”. The deaths that followed were not aberrations; they were the real-world externalities of a narrative that prized optics over lives.
Bhasan Char as the hard edge of a wider system
As I argue in Himal, Bhasan Char is the sharpest expression of a long Bangladeshi pattern: temporary shelter coupled with coercive repatriation, followed by non-recognition and tightly controlled registration - all mechanisms to exclude, discipline, and monetise a population deemed expendable. This fits a global playbook described by Zygmunt Bauman: modernity manufactures “surplus populations” - kept alive, denied participation, and instrumentalised for others’ gain.
In Cox’s Bazar, the Rohingya are penned behind barbed wire, denied formal work, and periodically cast as a “ticking time bomb.” Their labour is quietly absorbed by informal markets at low wages; their presence becomes a bargaining chip to secure donor funds; their camps turn into lucrative humanitarian projects for local elites and agencies while refugees themselves are locked out of opportunity. Bhasan Char simply exported that same logic offshore - farther from scrutiny, closer to the security state, and perfectly aligned with a politics that seeks performative repatriation at any rhetorical cost while outsourcing responsibility to the international system.
Naming the complicit
Let’s be plain and not beat about the bush. UN agencies that normalised relocation with partnership deals; architects and engineers who marketed a carceral grid as a community; think-tanks that churned out apologetics; newsrooms that aired infomercials - all helped launder coercion as care. The Bangladesh Navy, which should never have been tasked with managing refugees, enforced this regime with threats and beatings. And then there are the Camp-in-Charges and their lackeys…a story for another day.
The empty VIP villa, Meghna, and vacant barracks now stand as monuments to hubris, rents and disregard.
The Rohingya were never the beneficiaries of Bhasan Char. They were the pretext. If there is a lesson worth taking to New York conference rooms and donor capitals, it’s this: containment dressed up as compassion will always collapse - first morally, then practically. The task now is to unwind the damage with honesty and restore a rights-based footing that treats refugees as people with futures, not problems to be managed out of sight.