Boat with ‘dehydrated and exhausted’ Rohingya refugees lands in Indonesia
Dozens of “dehydrated and exhausted” Rohingya refugees – all males – landed on the coast of Aceh Besar regency in Indonesia on Christmas Sunday after being at sea for about a month, local officials said.
These 57 men were not part of a group of close to 200 Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi migrants who were stranded on another boat believed to be drifting in waters north of Aceh province, according to an Indonesian NGO. As many as 20 people aboard the other boat have reportedly died at sea.
The FB Tarikul Islam 2, the boat carrying the 57 men, sprung a leak and was taking on sea water, and its engine had broken down, Aceh provincial police spokesman Winardy said. The wooden boat came ashore at Indra Patra beach in Ladong, a village in Aceh Besar.
“They were forced to land and rest in Ladong because the boat’s hull was leaking and they ran out of food,” Winardy told BenarNews, an online news service affiliated with Radio Free Asia.
“Generally, they were dehydrated and exhausted,” he said.
Every year, hundreds of Rohingya undertake perilous crossings as they journey southward across the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea in fleeing sprawling refugee camps along Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar or their home state of Rakhine in Myanmar, where members of the stateless minority are persecuted.
The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR earlier this month said it had recorded a six-fold increase in Rohingya undertaking such dangerous and illicit sea journeys this year, compared with 2021.
“They look very weak from hunger and dehydration. Some of them are sick after a long and severe voyage at sea,” the Associated Press quoted Rolly Yuiza away, the local police chief, as saying in referring to the people who arrived in Aceh Besar on Sunday morning.
Winardy, the spokesman for provincial police, said four of the men on the boat were sick from dehydration.
The secretary for the regency’s administration, Sulaimi, said there were no women or children aboard the boat that drifted ashore in this corner of Aceh, a province at the northwestern tip of Sumatra island.
“Based on the information received, the Rohingya immigrants have been drifting at sea for about a month,” Sulaimi said.
Telmaizul Syatri, who heads the immigration office in Aceh, said the refugees would be temporarily housed at a local government facility, Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying.