About 250 desperate Rohingya refugees are afloat in the Andaman Sea after their attempt to land in Indonesia was rejected.
Their dilapidated and overcrowded wooden vessel reached western Indonesia on Thursday. However, after two other vessels carrying some 350 refugees docked in the northern region of Aceh earlier in the week, they were prevented from disembarking.
A third boat met resistance from locals in Bireuen, who prevented it from disembarking and pushed the vessel back out to sea.
When the boat tried to disembark a second time – a little further south, at Muara Batu – and the refugees staggered ashore, they were lined up and escorted back out, witnesses said.
Myanmar is persecuted mainly by Rohingya Muslims, and thousands risk their lives each year on long and costly sea journeys, often in flimsy boats, to reach Malaysia or Indonesia.
Fishermen on Muara Batu beach handed some refugees bags of food and bottles of water, but the situation escalated by late afternoon. Saiful Afwadi, a traditional community leader in North Aceh, told AFP on Friday:
We’re fed up with their presence because when they arrived on land, sometimes many of them ran away. There are some kinds of agents that picked them up. It’s human trafficking.
The Rohingya have long been persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. For years, many have fled to neighbouring states such as Thailand and Bangladesh, as well as Muslim-majority Malaysia and Indonesia, between November and April, when the sea is calmer.
About 1 million people live in cramped conditions in Bangladesh, including many of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 2017 from a deadly crackdown by Myanmar’s military, which denies committing crimes against humanity.
