The boat gets into distress in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) called for the rescue of 185 people on board a drifting boat near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean in a statement on Saturday, December 23. A call for “urgent action” addressed “to regional coastal authorities”.
About 70 of those on board were children, while 88 were women, the UN refugee agency said. “At least a dozen of them would be in critical condition and one person would have died,” “many others could die (…) without being rescued in time,” she warns.
A UNHCR spokesman, Babar Baloch, told Agence France-Presse that the agency was contacting all authorities in the region's coastal countries and asking them to rescue the migrants, believed to be Rohingya refugees, and spoke of one “desperate situation”.
“This situation underlines once again how important it is for all States in the region to use all their search and rescue capacities to prevent human disasters of this magnitude,” UNHCR further warned in its press release.
Every year, thousands of Rohingya refugees, mostly Muslims persecuted in Burma, undertake risky sea journeys from Burma and refugee camps in Bangladesh to reach Malaysia or Indonesia.
According to the UNHCR, more than 2,000 Rohingya are estimated to have made this risky journey to countries in Southeast Asia in 2022. And since last year, more than 570 people, including Rohingya refugees, have been killed or missing at sea in the region, according to the statement.
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