Three boats carrying more than 500 Rohingya refugees arrived on Indonesian shores on Sunday, a UN agency said. The number of refugees in the northern province of Aceh rose to over 800 in less than a week.
A first boat with 256 people on board, including 110 women and 60 children, which was turned away by residents of the area on Thursday, arrived in Bireuen district of Aceh province.
“They were in different locations,” Faisal Rahmah, who works with the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), told AFP, confirming that it was the same boat that was pushed back into the sea on Thursday. “This was confirmed because many people had been identified by security officials,” he added.
The makeshift boat had been turned away by angry locals, who sent the passengers back on their sea journey. Their dilapidated and overloaded boat arrived off the coast of Aceh province on Thursday, but villagers refused to let it dock.
Two more boats carrying 239 and 36 refugees respectively docked in the Pidie region and eastern Aceh on Sunday, the agency said.
Thousands of Rohingya risk their lives every year on long and costly sea journeys, often aboard dilapidated boats, to reach Malaysia or Indonesia.
In total, more than 800 refugees arrived in this region of Aceh in less than a week, initially reaching 196 people on Tuesday and another 147 the next day, according to local officials.
An AFP journalist noted the presence of a boat carrying Rohingya refugees on a beach in Bireuen, although the people on board had already disembarked.
The refugees, most of whom were in good health, were taken to a temporary detention center where they awaited a decision from authorities on their fate.
That decision must be made by “other institutions,” Ibrahim Ahmad, a local official, said on Sunday.
According to the UNHCR, in 2022 more than 2,000 Rohingya, many of whom are refugees in Bangladesh, attempted the difficult crossing to Indonesia or Malaysia and 200 died or went missing.
Around a million members of this stateless Muslim minority live in Bangladesh, around 750,000 of whom fled neighboring Burma in 2017.
A 2020 AFP investigation found that the smuggling of millions of dollars’ worth of migrants from a massive refugee camp in Bangladesh to Indonesia and Malaysia is constantly evolving, with members of the Rohingya community playing a key role.