INDONESIA SAVES ROHINGYA BOAT PEOPLE

Some 399 Rohingya boat people, including women and children, were stranded in Aceh, Indonesia's westernmost province, in 2020, after being denied entry into Malaysia, the preferred destination, over concerns of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The refugees, adrift in the middle of the sea for weeks aboard damaged boats, were rescued by Aceh fishermen, according to Antara news agency.

Currently, 364 of them remain in Aceh, as 31 had escaped in order to reach Malaysia, which shares its marine border with Aceh, while four had died in the Aceh refugee camp. Indonesia currently hosts over 900 human trafficking victims, who have become refugees on the high seas.

The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar that have faced persecution at the hands of the Buddhist majority for decades. In fact, the UN reports show that Rohingya are the most persecuted minority in the world.

In May 2015, the Rohingya refugee crisis had grabbed international headlines when tens of thousands of Rohingya fled from genocide in Myanmar in overcrowded boats heading toward Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Facing a genocide in their hometown of Rakhine State, Myanmar, nearly one million of them fled to the neighboring country, Bangladesh, in 2017, and were accommodated in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp, the biggest refugee camp in the world today.

Their tragedy continues unabated, as the Rohingya refugee crisis has become a ripe ground for human trafficking since they were moved to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, which could be inundated by a single strike from a cyclone.

Since January 2020, at least 2,400 refugees took to boats in the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

Some 36 percent of the refugees are children. The vast majority are Rohingya people leaving from camps in Bangladesh – many of them victims of human trafficking – who had earlier fled violence and persecution in Myanmar.

Conditions on the boats are appalling, with a dearth of food and water and zilch healthcare, while survivors spoke of beatings and other abuse by traffickers on board.

Even in Aceh, they remain prone to the human trafficking network. Last November, the North Aceh District Military Command had thwarted an attempt of 14 Rohingya refugees to flee a temporary refugee camp at the vocational training center in Meunasah Mee Kandang Village, Lhokseumawe.

The military personnel also arrested eight suspected members of a human trafficking ring allegedly smuggling Rohingya immigrants into Aceh, according to spokesman for Aceh’s Rohingya Handling Task Force Lieutenant Colonel Am Oke Krisyanto.

The Rohingya misery has lingered on, as the Myanmar Government has allowed the atrocities to continue, while other ASEAN member countries could not stop it due to the regional grouping’s principle of non-interference in the affairs of the 10 member states.

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