Hundreds of Rohingya refugees have been at sea for weeks. When they finally arrive in Indonesia, some are immediately sent back to sea. Now the drama is over – for now.
A drama involving desperate Rohingya refugees from Myanmar has been playing out in Indonesia for days. Last week alone, five boats with almost 900 people on board landed in Aceh province in the north of the island of Sumatra, said the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
Around 250 of them had been on an odyssey in the sea since Thursday after the local population prevented them from landing in two places and sent the exhausted people back to the ocean. Only after an appeal from the United Nations and several human rights groups were they finally able to go ashore on Sunday.
According to Mitra Salima Suryono, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Indonesia, the refugees spent between one and two months on the open sea after setting sail from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. The refugee camp there, made up of many individual camps with 600,000 to a million refugees from the former Burma, is considered the largest in the world. Most people have been living there in makeshift shelters for years.
Brutally expelled from Myanmar in 2017
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority who were brutally expelled from their predominantly Buddhist homeland of Myanmar in 2017. At that time, hundreds of thousands of people fled the military offensive in Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh to the west. The United Nations describes the persecution of the Rohingya as genocide. The members of the minority had lost their citizenship under a law passed by Myanmar’s military junta in 1983.
“In the search for solutions, the Rohingya refugees are once again taking life-threatening risks,” said Ann Maymann, head of the UNHCR in Indonesia. “These are journeys of people who have no opportunities and have lost hope.” Many fishermen and residents in Aceh initially welcomed the first boats last week and provided the refugees with food and accommodation. But one of the boats was rejected at two coastal locations.
The Indonesian government, which has not signed the Geneva Refugee Convention, is often accused of inaction in dealing with refugees. Activists called for humanitarian assistance, safety and protection to be provided to the Rohingya and for the principle of non-refoulement to be respected. “Indonesia is obliged to help them,” said Usman Hamid, managing director of Amnesty International in Indonesia, to the German Press Agency.
Source: Stern
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