{"id":28524,"date":"2022-12-26T11:21:49","date_gmt":"2022-12-26T11:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myanmarnewswire.com\/?p=28524"},"modified":"2022-12-27T11:23:37","modified_gmt":"2022-12-27T11:23:37","slug":"second-boatload-of-rohingya-arrives-in-indonesia-in-as-many-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myanmarnewswire.com\/second-boatload-of-rohingya-arrives-in-indonesia-in-as-many-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Second boatload of Rohingya arrives in Indonesia in as many days"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

About 185 gaunt and bone-tired Rohingya refugees landed on the coast of Pidie regency in Indonesia\u2019s Aceh province Monday, police said, as reports emerged that another boatload of Rohingya may have sunk at sea.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two NGOs confirmed to BenarNews that the new arrivals were from a boat that was at sea for about a month and stranded as food and water supplies dwindled. As many as 20 of the passengers perished, NGO sources said, while the refugees journeyed south across the Andaman Sea as they fled refugee camps in Bangladesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Citing information from refugees, a fisherman in Pidie said they told him that more than two dozen people had died and others threw their bodies overboard.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe group consists of 83 adult males, 70 adult women and 32 children,\u201d Aceh provincial police spokesman Winardy said, adding that sick refugees were receiving medical treatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He declined to give more details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The boat was the second one carrying Rohingya to land in Aceh \u2013 Indonesia\u2019s westernmost province \u2013 in as many days. On Christmas Day, 57 Rohingya males<\/a> arrived in Aceh Besar regency aboard a wooden boat. Thirteen of them were minors, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A video shared by a local resident showed Monday\u2019s 185 Rohingya newcomers, including women and children, crumpled on the beach, visibly weak, exhausted and emaciated. In the distressing footage, some in the crowd could be heard wailing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe refugees were stranded because of very high waves due to the East Wind season,\u201d said Marfian, a leader of the local fishing community. \u201cAccording to their information, 30 people died and their bodies were thrown into the sea. We don’t know how long they were at sea, and we received information that they were on the open sea a month ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Like skeletons walking\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest arrivals were from the boat with scores of people aboard that had been drifting for days in waters north of Aceh, said Chris Lewa,  director of the Arakan Project, a human rights group that advocates for the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority group from Myanmar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI just received confirmation that the latest group which landed this evening is indeed the boat in distress,\u201d Lewa, who is based in Thailand, told BenarNews on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes, this is the same boat we have been urging people to rescue weeks ago,\u201d said Lilianne Fan, co-founder and international director of the Geutanyoe Foundation, a humanitarian group in Malaysia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two NGOs were tracking the boat\u2019s movements at sea, with Lewa keeping in touch regularly with relatives of passengers and plotting the boat\u2019s GPS coordinates via Google Maps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are extremely alarmed by the condition of the refugees who have been brought ashore,\u201d Fan told BenarNews on Monday night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[W]e saw the videos of the first arrival of these refugees on shore. It looked like skeletons walking onto the shore and collapsing on the beach.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent days and weeks, Lewa and Fan\u2019s groups, as well as other NGOs and the United Nations, were pressing governments in the region to move swiftly to search for and rescue refugees trying to make such perilous and illicit journeys about people-smuggling boats, but to no avail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, I think that as a region we really need to be taking this crisis extremely seriously and we need to learn from this tragedy and prevent sub-humanitarian disasters from happening in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Senior officials in the coast guard and new government of Fan\u2019s country, Malaysia, had not been responding to multiple phone calls and text messages from BenarNews to inquire what authorities were doing to help people on stranded Rohingya boats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every year, hundreds of Rohingya undertake perilous sea crossings as they try to escape from sprawling refugee camps along Bangladesh\u2019s border with Myanmar or their home state of Rakhine in Myanmar, where members of the minority group are persecuted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The head of the Acehnese branch of the Indonesian human rights group KontraS, Azharul Husna, said children and women were among the group that landed in Pidie on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhether they are the group that were reported to be drifting on the sea, we need to check,\u201d she told BenarNews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aceh police spokesman Winardy said police were still collecting information from the refugees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere needs to be more coordination with different institutions to address this Rohingya issue, considering their arrivals have become more frequent,\u201d he said in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A medical team from the IOM was on its way to Pidie, said an IOM spokesperson, Ariani Hasanah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was also not immediately clear whether a group of 47 to 50 Bangladeshi migrants were with the Rohingya on the boat that arrived in Pidie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In interviews with BenarNews last week in Cox\u2019s Bazar, Bangladesh, mothers of some of these migrants had expressed anguish and uncertainty about the fate of their loved ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said over the weekend that it had received unconfirmed reports \u201cof a separate boat \u2013 with 180 Rohingya, missing in the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRelatives have lost contact. Those last in touch presume all are dead. We hope against hope this is not the case,\u201d the agency\u2019s Asia-Pacific office said in a message posted via Twitter on Saturday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When reached on Monday, UNHCR regional spokesman Babar Baloch said \u201cthe shocking tragedy was reported to us by sources directly in touch with relatives and those recently rescued. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe still hope against hope this is not the case,\u201d he told BenarNews, noting that UNHCR could not independently verify those reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also confirmed that the boat, which may have sunk with 180 people on board, was not the same as the boat that had been drifting off Aceh in recent days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Chris Lewa, of the Arakan Project, the people traveling aboard these two boats were among four groups of Rohingya refugees that had sailed from Cox\u2019s Bazar district in late November. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These people likely left aboard smaller boats \u2013 to avoid detection by the Bangladeshi coast guard \u2013 before they were transferred onto four larger boats for their respective journeys on the open sea, Lewa said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the boats, with more than 150 people onboard, was rescued by a Vietnamese oil ship off the coast of Myanmar on Dec. 8 and then towed to shore, Lewa said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Dec. 18, one of the other boats, which was transporting 104 people, was rescued by the Sri Lankan Navy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, the captain of the boat who was now in Sri Lanka sent a message to a relative of his who lives at one of the refugee camps in Cox\u2019s Bazar, to alert him that one of the other boats may have sunk in early December, Lewa said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the captain in Sri Lanka, their two boats were sailing close together when the other captain sent him a distress call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The captain had received an \u201cSOS call from the captain of this other boat, which was about to sink, and asking him to transfer the passengers on his boat (from the sinking to the boat later rescued in Sri Lanka) but he refused because he already had engine problem,\u201d Lewa told BenarNews on Monday in an email. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHis boat was already overcrowded and he feared that an attempt to transfer them would result in everyone sinking.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Radio Free Asia –Copyright \u00a9 1998-2016, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About 185 gaunt and bone-tired Rohingya refugees landed on the coast of Pidie regency in Indonesia\u2019s Aceh province Monday, police said, as reports emerged that another boatload of Rohingya may have sunk at sea.   Two NGOs confirmed to BenarNews that the new arrivals were from a boat that was at sea for about a month … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nSecond boatload of Rohingya arrives in Indonesia in as many days - Myanmar Newswire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/myanmarnewswire.com\/second-boatload-of-rohingya-arrives-in-indonesia-in-as-many-days\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Second boatload of Rohingya arrives in Indonesia in as many days - Myanmar Newswire\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"About 185 gaunt and bone-tired Rohingya refugees landed on the coast of Pidie regency in Indonesia\u2019s Aceh province Monday, police said, as reports emerged that another boatload of Rohingya may have sunk at sea.   Two NGOs confirmed to BenarNews that the new arrivals were from a boat that was at sea for about a month ... 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