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LHOKSEUMAWE, Indonesia: Nearly 300 Rohingya refugees believed to have been at sea for six months landed in Indonesia’s Aceh province on Monday (September 7), Indonesian authorities confirmed.
Aceh police said a wooden boat carrying the Rohingya was spotted by local fishermen several kilometers off the coast of Lhokseumawe, before landing on Ujung Blang beach shortly after midnight.
“There are 297 Rohingya according to the latest data, including 181 women and 14 children,” Iptu Irwansya, a local police chief, told Reuters.
Junaidi Yahya, head of the Red Cross in Lhokseumawe, said the group was currently being held at a temporary location.
“We hope they can be transferred to the evacuation center today, but their health, especially that related to COVID-19, is our main concern,” Yahya said.
Among the group was a sick 13-year-old boy who, according to police, was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
Images of the Rohingya arrivals show lines of masked women carrying their belongings in plastic bags and men huddled on the floor of a thatched shelter.
Monday’s arrival follows the arrival of another boat in late June, when Acehnese fishermen rescued more than 100 Rohingya refugees, including 79 women and children, after Indonesian authorities had initially threatened to turn them away.
READ: Rohingya refugees tell Malaysia how dozens perished during a four-month trip
Fleeing persecution in Myanmar and refugee camps in Bangladesh, the Rohingya have for years boarded ships in an attempt to seek refuge in other Southeast Asian nations.
Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, a nonprofit group that focuses on the Rohingya crisis, said the passengers who arrived in Aceh on Monday had set sail from southern Bangladesh in late March or early April, bound for Malaysia.
But both the Malaysian and Thai authorities rejected them, he said, as borders tightened due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The smugglers divided the passengers into several ships, some of which managed to land in Malaysia and Indonesia in June, but several hundred remained at sea until Sunday night.
The traffickers called their families to demand payments in the weeks before they were brought to shore, he said.
“The smugglers seemed not to want to try to disembark them because not all of them had paid … They were basically holding them hostage on the ship,” he said.
