300 migrants land in Indonesia after spending 200 days at sea

JAKARTA: Nearly 300 members of Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya minority landed in Aceh province on Indonesia’s Sumatra island on Monday after spending more than seven months at sea, a Red Cross official said. Locals immediately brought the migrants to beach huts in the town of Lhokseumawe as soon as they reached the shore around midnight, said Muhammad Waly, the head of the local Indonesian Red Cross. The group consisted of 181 women, 102 men and 14 children, who started their voyage from Bangladesh with Malaysia as their destination, Waly said. “According to information from some of them, they spent six months at sea,” Waly said. “They are weak and some of them are ill,” he added. The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR said about 30 in the group died at sea after they embarked on their journey in February from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees live. “Their hazardous ordeal has been prolonged by the collective unwillingness of states to act for more than six months,” said the UNHCR director for Asia and the Pacific, Indrika Ratwatte. “The group had repeatedly tried to disembark over the course of more than 200 days at sea, to no avail,” he said in a statement. UNHCR staff in Aceh were helping local authorities to assess the needs of the refugees, he added. In June, Acehnese fishermen rescued nearly 100 Rohingya migrants who had been drifting several kilometres of the coast of North Aceh. Thousands of Rohingya have become stranded in Aceh over the past five years after their boats drifted while en route to Malaysia and other countries. UN investigators have accused Myanmar’s military of carrying out mass killings and other atrocities against the minority with “genocidal intent” during a 2017 campaign that forced more than 730,000 across the border into Bangladesh. — dpa