Sent back to sea: Drama about Rohingya refugees in Indonesia 18-year-old right-wing extremist arrested in Germany for attack plans

A drama has been unfolding in Indonesia for days surrounding desperate Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Last week alone, five boats with nearly 900 people on board landed in Aceh province in the north of Sumatra island, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said.

About 250 of them had been on a sea odyssey since Thursday, after locals prevented them from landing in two places and sent the exhausted people back to the ocean. Only after an appeal from the United Nations and various human rights organizations were they finally able to land on Sunday.

According to Mitra Salima Suryono, spokeswoman for UNHCR in Indonesia, the refugees spent between one and two months on the open sea after leaving Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. The refugee camp there, consisting of many individual camps housing 600,000 to a million refugees from former Burma, is considered the largest in the world. Most people have been living there for years in makeshift shelters.

Distributed since 2017

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority who were brutally expelled from their predominantly Buddhist homeland of Myanmar in 2017. At the time, hundreds of thousands of people fled the military offensive in Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh to the west. The United Nations describes the persecution of the Rohingya as genocide. The minority members had lost their citizenship under a law passed by Myanmar’s military junta in 1983.

“In the search for solutions, Rohingya refugees are once again taking life-threatening risks,” said Ann Maymann, head of UNHCR in Indonesia. “These are journeys of people who have no opportunities and have lost hope.” Many fishermen and residents of Aceh initially welcomed the first boats last week and provided the refugees with food and shelter. But one of the boats was rejected at two coastal locations.

The Indonesian government, which has not signed the Geneva Refugee Convention, is often accused of inaction in dealing with refugees. Activists called for the provision of humanitarian assistance, security and protection to the Rohingya and for the principle of non-refoulement to be respected. “Indonesia is obliged to help them,” Usman Hamid, director of Amnesty International in Indonesia, told the German news agency. (sda/dpa)