At least three new boats carrying hundreds of Rohingya refugees, a persecuted minority in Burma, set sail this week and left Bangladesh, refugees and an NGO told AFP, after more than a thousand refugees arrived in Indonesia at the end of a perilous journey of 1800 km.
Bangladesh is home to around a million Rohingya, including around 750,000 who fled the Myanmar army’s repression campaign in 2017 and are being investigated by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for “acts of genocide”.
Their living conditions there are very difficult as they are crammed into overcrowded camps where insecurity is rampant.
Mohammad Ullah, 26, a Rohingya refugee living in Nayapara camp in Cox’s Bazar, told AFP on Friday that his ex-mother-in-law, who had been caring for his four-year-old daughter since his wife’s death, took the victim’s child with her on a boat without telling her.
“When I asked her where she was, I learned that she had put her on a boat to Indonesia on November 21.”
Two other Rohingya refugees and the Rohingya defense NGO Arakan Project confirmed the boats’ departure. “Two boats left, one on the night of the 20th to the 21st and the other on the night of the 21st to the 22nd,” Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, told AFP.
The first boat carried about 200 people and the second about 150, both probably destined to reach Indonesia, she said.
A third boat with around 200 people on board also left on Thursday, Rohingya refugees told AFP on Friday.
According to Chris Lewa, the boats could reach the Indonesian coast by the end of next week after a journey of around 1,800 kilometers.
“They left Bangladesh. They are still arriving in Indonesia because Malaysia doesn’t let them in,” Ms Lewa, who lives in Thailand but has a team in Bangladesh, told AFP.
The Rohingya, mostly Muslims, face persecution in Burma and thousands of them risk their lives every year on dangerous and costly sea journeys, mostly aboard makeshift boats.
They generally try to reach Malaysia, where a large Rohingya community lives, but are often forced to land in neighboring Indonesia first.
More than a thousand of them have arrived in Indonesia’s far western Aceh province since November 14. This is the highest number of arrivals since 2017.
According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), more than 2,000 Rohingya are expected to have made the risky journey to other Southeast Asian countries in 2022. Nearly 200 of them died at sea during the voyage, according to the same source.