Guest contributor
Shafiur Rahman
The buildings were torn down, the fences hauled away, the jungle allowed to swallow whatever remained. A place that had held years of anguish was permitted to vanish almost as soon as the detainees were removed.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2021, Jaivet Ealom, the only Rohingya to have reportedly escaped the prison island of Manus, described it as a landscape engineered for erasure. It was a place where isolation was designed not merely to contain people, but to make their suffering forgettable and unrecorded.
As Bangladesh halts further relocations to Bhasan Char, I find myself returning to that idea. What becomes of an island built to manage and confine once its political purpose expires?
Does it, too, risk being erased by those who once insisted it was a solution? Already the stories of Bhasan Char feel precarious: the drownings of those who tried to escape, the bodies washed ashore; the beatings, suicides and attempted suicides, the drowning of children, the hunger, the slow dimming of hope among people told they were being offered safety.
Even those who escaped the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) threats on the mainland and found brief shelter there were not ultimately served well. They were moved from one danger into another and their testimony risks being blurred and dissolved.
Manus teaches us something bleak but essential. When suffering is exiled to an island, when people are rendered surplus to political needs, the world feels permitted to look away. And once the world looks away, the suffering is not only endured, it is forgotten.
Bhasan Char now stands on that threshold. Whether it becomes another island of erasure, or a place where truth is finally held and reckoned with, will depend on what we choose to remember.
The record is already fragmenting. Official narratives emphasised “modern facilities” and “safety,” while quietly minimising the incidents that told a different story.
Over the years since it was established, I’ve spoken with scores of Rohingya who passed through the island’s gates. Their stories carried a heavy sameness. These accounts were often whispered not because the details were unclear, but because people feared the authorities and their unchecked power.
They had seen how easily their suffering could be rewritten into a narrative they did not recognise. On Bhasan Char, hope survived, but it was thin, and always at risk.
Even the World Bank, speaking in the clinical idiom of measurement, would later confirm what refugees had already lived – that Bhasan Char was a high-cost, low-welfare island where isolation hollowed out well-being and deepened despair.
Humanitarian agencies produced a soft chorus of approval that drowned out the harder truths emerging from the island. Even the press, the supposed custodians of scrutiny, reproduced the vocabulary of the project’s architects, speaking of “beacon of hope” and “opportunity,” while rarely confronting the basic fact that relocation itself was a form of coercion shaped by fear, not choice.
What remains now is the task of pulling these fragments back into coherence. To understand what Bhasan Char truly became, we must resist the temptation to treat it simply as a failed project of the Sheikh Hasina Awami League government that can be quietly archived. The people who lived there have already paid the cost of that convenience.
As relocations began, an information vacuum settled over the island, and into that vacuum rushed a dense fog of disinformation. I watched as an entire cottage industry of manufactured expertise sprang up – anonymous authors, policy briefs from think tanks with no track record, and academics speaking far beyond their disciplines.
Their portrayals of the island as a place of opportunity and innovation circulated widely, even as accounts of disease outbreaks leaked from the island’s edges. The darker the evidence grew, the brighter the official narrative became.
Bhasan Char was transformed into a stage where truth was managed and suppressed – much like the people sent there. The island was defended with a zeal that refused to acknowledge what was unfolding in plain sight.
But this choreography of optimism did not arise by accident. Behind it lay a harder political and economic calculus. Bhasan Char was never simply a humanitarian experiment; it became entangled in a system where political legitimacy was faltering and elections looming.
Yet deeper still was the logic that has shaped so many state decisions in Bangladesh – rent-seeking. Economists use the term to describe the capture of public resources for private gain; in plain language, it is the machinery through which corruption, patronage, lobbying, black money, muscle and kickbacks find official expression.
Bhasan Char fits this system perfectly. It was not an “offshore detention” model imported from Australia but a part of Bangladesh’s own Ashrayan project, launched in 1997 to relocate the landless to remote and marginal land.
That same logic was applied to a stateless population. It turned a domestic resettlement scheme into a mechanism of containment. The Bangladesh Anti-Corruption Commission’s inquiries into the Ashrayan schemes underline how such large-scale projects accumulate opportunities for rent-seeking and opaque financial flows. It revealed Bhasan Char not as an aberration but as the continuation of a familiar state practice.
The island’s monumental price tag, $300–350 million USD, was not incidental but instrumental. State expenditure of that scale creates rents; rents create beneficiaries; beneficiaries create the political will to sustain the project, no matter how socially destructive or strategically pointless it might be.
This is why new think tanks appeared overnight. And why media outlets echoed government talking points with eerie uniformity. Indeed, this is why even academic voices were enlisted to offer reassurances that dissolved under scrutiny.
The narrative was engineered not merely to defend the policy but to protect the rents attached to it. A parallel world emerged, scrubbed clean of inconvenience, where every refugee concern became an exaggeration and every injury a misunderstanding.
And as always, the cost of maintaining this illusion was borne not by those who profited from it, but by the people compelled to live within its boundaries. But corruption is not the central story here. It may have helped shape the project’s incentives and momentum, yet the deepest damage was not financial – it was human.
I thought about this while standing on another island shaped by tragedy – Lampedusa, Italy. I had travelled there to launch an exhibition of photographs taken by Rohingya refugees, images that refused despair, that insisted on dignity.
Lampedusa is not a place of long-term confinement; it is a threshold, a fragile point of arrival. Yet the sea around it is a graveyard. The island remembers its dead. Every October, the October 3rd Committee gathers survivors, families, activists, and citizens to honour the hundreds who drowned in 2013 and those who have drowned since.
I spoke at one such ceremony. The island’s rituals resist forgetting; they assert that every life lost in the water has value, and every body deserves recognition. It is a form of citizenship offered to the dead when the living have been denied it.
But these rituals exist alongside a very different reality. Lampedusa has also been turned into a “hotspot,” a border outpost burdened with emergency politics, securitisation, and media spectacle.
Solidarity sits next to exhaustion; commemoration coexists uneasily with far-right narratives that frame arrivals as invasion; acts of welcome persist despite years of neglect from Rome and Brussels. The island’s meaning is not fixed, and is debated and reinterpreted. Lampedusa does not speak with one voice. It contains tension.
For the Rohingya who died fleeing Bhasan Char, no such space exists. No committees gather, no names are read aloud, no plaques stand against the wind. Their deaths, too, belonged to the sea, yet there is no place where grief can take shape.
Their passing is absorbed into paperwork – incidents, rumours, entries in a logbook, delisting from ration supply. Bangladeshi civil society, so often vocal on rights and humanitarian principles, has barely made a sound.
No inquiries, no demands for accountability – not from civil society, and not from the supine humanitarian agencies that accepted the island as fait accompli.
If Lampedusa’s meaning remains open to debate, Bhasan Char’s moral scandal is met with near total quiet. What does it reveal when a society chooses not to remember the refugees under its care at all?
Islands expose the moral architecture of the societies that build upon them. They show us what is considered disposable and what truths are too heavy to carry into the public record.
And when an island is used to hold people in fear, the temptation for governments and for the humanitarian sector aligned with them, is to let the island forget what was done in their name.
Now that Bangladesh has halted further relocations, the question is no longer whether Bhasan Char was a viable solution, but whether its history will be honestly told. Five years have passed since the first official relocations began, yet only now is the country beginning to confront what the island became.
Yes, the Anti-Corruption Commission is now examining aspects of the project, but inquiries of that kind, by design, follow the money rather than the human consequences. They can expose irregularities yet still leave untouched the structural violence of isolating tens of thousands on a flood-prone island.
And this is where the deeper temptation lies. Such inquiries risk narrowing wrongdoing into technical investigations, letting the island be quietly archived.
The Rohingya who live there, and those who died attempting to escape it, deserve more than that. Their experiences must be placed at the centre of any reckoning with what Bhasan Char became.
If there is to be justice, even the smallest measure of it, then Bangladesh and the international community must preserve the testimony and resist the urge to sanitise the past.
Memory is not an indulgence; it is the first condition for accountability. Without it, Bhasan Char will follow the path of Manus – a lesson unlearned waiting to be repeated elsewhere.
Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary maker. He writes the Rohingya Refugee News newsletter.
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