A boat carrying about 140 Rohingya refugees has been stranded miles off the coast of Indonesia for over a week, banned from arriving on land as Indonesian communities increasingly shun Rohingya refugees arriving by sea.
Near the boat, residents of a town in Aceh Province had been working with the United Nations’ refugee agency to provide food and water to the stranded group, said Muhammad Jabal, the chairman of the fisheries association in the South Aceh region. The residents were unwilling to host the group on land because of unrest that Mr. Jabal said was happening in nearby towns that had welcomed other refugees.
“They’ve caused disturbances: for example, littering, theft and various security and safety issues,” Mr. Jabal said in a phone interview. “As a community, we request that, if possible, the boat not stay in our area.” He added that he did not know what should be done about the refugees.
The impasse follows a recent surge in the number of Rohingya refugees arriving by boat in Indonesia, which has hosted thousands of them before. Last year, a wave of rejections began, prompted in part by misinformation about the Rohingya on social media, said Murizal Hamzah, an Aceh resident and writer of two books about Rohingya.
Tiy Chung, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, said in an emailed statement that the agency was discussing the situation with the authorities on the ground. “We hope to get people disembarked to safety,” he said.
The Rohingya people, who are mostly Muslim, are one of the most persecuted ethnic groups in the world. About a million of them have been displaced from Myanmar, many of them after the Rohingya genocide of 2017, forced to flee for safety and livelihoods, along with access to education.
Thousands of them have made perilous journeys by sea in recent years to other Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia — both Muslim-majority countries — in order to flee massacre in Myanmar and crowded camps in Bangladesh. In Indonesia, about 7,300 Rohingya refugees have arrived by boat since 2006, according to the U.N. refugee agency.
About a third of the boat arrivals in Indonesia happened last year alone, the agency said, an increase driven by instability in Myanmar, declining humanitarian assistance in the Bangladeshi camps and a rise in smuggling activity.
The stranded boat off Aceh departed Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, weeks ago, carrying about 210 people, according to a statement released last week by the police in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh. The refugees paid a sum of money to be taken to Malaysia, the police said.
While Malaysia was their final destination, at some point during the voyage about 50 passengers disembarked and headed to the Indonesian city of Pekanbaru, the police said.
The boat then arrived at shore near the town of Labuhan Haji last week, the police said. Soon after its arrival, at least three people were found dead and 11 others were hospitalized with illnesses, the police said. But the roughly 140 people who remained onboard were barred from coming onshore, forcing them to anchor their boat four miles from land.
The police suggested that the boat was linked to human trafficking, stating that they had detained three Aceh residents on suspicion of smuggling in connection with the boat, and that eight other suspected smugglers remained at large.
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