Dozens of Rohingya rescued off coast of Indonesia
Refugees fleeing crowded camps in Bangladesh
Dozens of Rohingya were rescued Thursday after spending the night on the overturned hull of a capsized boat off the Indonesian coast, according to media reports, as an international charity expressed alarm about the numbers of unaccompanied Rohingya minors making the perilous voyage.
The refugees, members of Myanmar’s persecuted Muslim minority, were part of the increasing numbers fleeing from overcrowded camps in Bangladesh, to seek a new life elsewhere in the region.
A search-and-rescue ship set off from Banda Aceh on Wednesday evening, hours after the wooden boat capsized, and rescued 59 men, women, and children around midday Thursday, according to the Associated Press. Ten others were rescued by fishing crews.
It is unclear how many people were originally on board the vessel, though six of the survivors rescued by the fishermen estimated the number to be between 60 and 100.
Almost 4,500 Rohingya embarked on dangerous journeys by sea last year in hopes of reaching other countries in Southeast Asia, according to the UN refugee agency’s figures from January. Of those, 569 were reported dead or missing, the highest numbers since 2014.
In 2017, Myanmar’s military launched a deadly crackdown on the long-persecuted and stateless Rohingya Muslim minority, killing about 10,000 and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee into neighboring Bangladesh. It was an operation that the UN human rights chief at the time described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
For many Rohingya, the crisis is far from over. According to the UN figures, almost 1 million Rohingya refugees remain in Bangladesh. Around 600,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where they continue to suffer severe rights restrictions and the threat of further violence, Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said last year.
In February, Human Rights Watch warned that renewed fighting in Rakhine had caused innumerable civilian casualties and forced 100,000 people — many of them already displaced — to flee their homes.
On Thursday, Save the Children reported a “worrying rise” in the number of unaccompanied Rohingya children arriving in Indonesia. The organizationsaid around 250 unaccompanied children arrived in Indonesia in the last three months of 2023, an increase of 78 percent compared with the rest of the year.