More than 200 new Rohingya refugees who arrived overnight in Indonesia’s Aceh province were on their way to a temporary accommodation center on Wednesday evening as hostile locals threatened to send them back to sea.
More than 200 new Rohingya refugees who arrived overnight in Indonesia’s Aceh province were on their way to a temporary accommodation center on Wednesday evening as hostile locals threatened to send them back to sea.
During the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, 219 refugees, including 91 women and 56 children, landed on a beach on the island of Sabang, at the tip of the big island of Sumatra, according to local authorities and the rescue agency. United Nations for Refugees (UNHCR).
Strongest wave of arrivals
This brings to more than a thousand the number of Rohingya arriving by sea in one week in Aceh province.
This is the largest wave of Rohingya arrivals in Indonesia since 2015, Ann Maymann, representing UNHCR in Indonesia, told AFP.
Faced with hostility from the local population, local authorities decided to transfer the refugees by ferry to a temporary accommodation center in the Aceh region.
In the middle of the afternoon, the refugees, including one person on a stretcher, boarded a ferry, noted an AFP journalist while the crew distributed food to the children.
“What is planned is that the refugees will be transferred to a reception center in Lhokseumawe,” Naufal, director of the Sabang social agency, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name, told AFP.
Local authorities “decided to take them to a place designated by the national government”, Faisal Rahman, who works with the UNHCR, told AFP on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, another group of 256 refugees who arrived a few days ago further east, and first pushed back by residents in the district of Bireuen, were taken to the same temporary accommodation center in the town of Lhokseumawe .
Thirty-six other refugees who arrived on Sunday were sent to the same reception area. But according to a local immigration official, this center “is no longer usable” and will not be able to hold more than 500 people.
A Muslim minority, the Rohingya are persecuted in Burma and thousands of them risk their lives every year during long and costly sea journeys, often aboard makeshift boats, to try to reach Malaysia or Indonesia. .
Like last week, when Aceh residents turned away several boats, members of the local community threatened Wednesday morning to send these refugees back to sea.
“Rejection virus”
“The situation on the ground is not good at the moment. The virus of rejection has spread to everyone,” said Mr. Rahman.
Many Aceh residents, who themselves have endured decades of bloody conflict due to the existence of a separatist movement, have long been sensitive to the plight of this Muslim minority.
But some now complain that the arrival of Rohingya is consuming their already limited resources and sometimes coming into conflict with the local population.
On Wednesday, the refugees, exhausted after a sleepless night and 15 days at sea, according to one of them, waited, destitute and grouped in an area on the beach from which they could not leave. Amid the tears and screams of children, some fainted from exhaustion.
Every end of the year, when navigation conditions at sea are favorable, the Rohingya try to reach Indonesia or Malaysia from Bangladesh, which shelters around a million members of this stateless Muslim minority, of whom some 750,000 have fled the Burma in 2017.
According to the UNHCR, more than 2,000 Rohingya attempted the difficult crossing to Indonesia or Malaysia in 2022 and 200 died or were missing.
Indonesia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention and says it is not obliged to take in these refugees, stigmatizing neighboring countries that have closed their doors to them.
But human rights groups say Jakarta should do more to help them, within the framework of other international conventions.
“These conventions also oblige Indonesia to rescue those in danger at sea,” Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia, told AFP.
“The latest wave of refugees shows that there is an emergency and that the Rohingya are experiencing a humanitarian crisis,” he added.