After floating aimlessly for weeks, two boats carrying more than 300 Rohingya Muslims—including impoverished women and children—arrived at Aceh, the northernmost region of Indonesia, Sunday morning.

After spending almost 1.5 months at sea, one boat with 135 passengers arrived at a beach in Lamreh hamlet, Aceh Besar Regency. There were 20 girls, 15 boys, 65 women, and 35 men on the boat.

“The boat was submerging. We were out of food and water,” said 34-year-old Shahidul Islam. He said they were out of their Bangladeshi refugee camp.

However, people in Lamreh hamlet who lived near the beach were hesitant to welcome the refugees. On Sunday night, the locals drove the 135 evacuees in four trucks to the governor’s office in the city of Banda Aceh.

The 180 passengers on board the other boat—74 women, 53 men, 27 girls, and 26 boys—arrived to a beach near the Pidie Regency settlement of Blang Raya. It had spent roughly twenty-seven days at sea in the Andaman Sea without sufficient provisions.

Mahmud Husein, a 25-year-old survivor, claimed he helped the boat owner depart Bangladesh by giving him 40,000 taka ($363).

Husein remarked, “We want to go to other countries if they want to help us. We came to Indonesia.”
Husein stated that another boat, carrying more refugees, sailed from Bangladesh at the same time, but it was still missing. If more is not done to save the individuals on board, the U.N. refugee agency issued a warning that they may not survive.

Rohingya not allowed to land in Indonesia

Following a bloody guerrilla campaign, some 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar and are now living in camps in Bangladesh as of August 2017. International courts are debating whether the actions of the Myanmar security forces, who have been accused of mass rapes, massacres, and the burning of thousands of Rohingya houses, constitute genocide.

In Indonesia’s Aceh province, around 1,500 Rohingya refugees have come by boat since November. Human rights organizations expressed alarm after some residents of Aceh Utara district and Sabang Island denied them permission to land.

The chief of Acehnese village Blang Raya, Rijalul Fitri, declared on Sunday that the refugees were not welcome in his community. He claimed, “We stayed up all night to prevent them from docking, but they arrived at 2:30 a.m.”
Fitri insisted that the refugees go because “they can’t stay here.”

In a statement released on Friday, President Joko Widodo stated that the government of Indonesia was concerned about an increase in human trafficking as a result of the growing influx of Rohingya Muslims into the nation in recent weeks, particularly in Aceh.

Rohingya Woes are not ending

As the weather cleared up last month, more than sixty boats—some of which the locals tried to return to the sea—carried hundreds of Rohingya refugees into Aceh province from Bangladesh.

According to East Aceh police, 36 Rohingya arrived last month, who declared that they now maintain 24-hour patrols and are in charge of a regency with over 350,000 residents.

“Its subordinate police precincts with coastal areas have been instructed to intensify surveillance, both along the coastline and in the waters of the Malacca Strait, to prevent the entry of Rohingya immigrants,” the force said in an official statement.

“To prevent Rohingya immigrants from entering East Aceh, police are on patrol around-the-clock, according to Police Chief Andy Rahmansyah.”

Numerous Rohingya refugees reside in the cramped, dangerous, and ill-equipped relief camps in Bangladesh. Refugees claim that circumstances are growing worse because there are too few jobs, violent gang fighting, and the suspension of food handouts.

As the waters of the Bay of Bengal calm following suitable weather, human traffickers are offering to transport hundreds of Rohingya individuals on boats bound for Malaysia and Indonesia.

In August 2017, thousands of Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State were forced to escape their homes due to armed attacks, widespread violence, and grave human rights violations. To get to safety in Bangladesh, many braved perilous sea voyages across the Bay of Bengal and days-long walks across forests.

Currently, over 960,000 people have sought protection in Bangladesh, with the majority residing in the district of Cox Bazar, which is home to the largest refugee camp in the world. The Rohingya are “the most persecuted minority in the world,” according to the UN.

For decades, the Rohingya, an ethnic minority of Muslims, have resided in largely Buddhist Myanmar, which was once known as Burma. The Rohingya are the biggest stateless population in the world, having lived in Myanmar for many generations but not being accepted as an official ethnic group and denied citizenship since 1982.

Rohingya families are denied fundamental rights and protection due to their statelessness, making them particularly susceptible to abuse, exploitation, and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

In Myanmar, the Rohingya suffered decades of persecution, brutality, and discrimination. When a severe wave of violence erupted in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, pushing over 742,000 people—half of them were children—to seek safety in Bangladesh, their greatest migration started in August 2017.

Numerous human rights crimes were documented, thousands of families were slaughtered or split up, and entire towns were set on fire.

Since 2021, the government of Bangladesh has moved up to 30,000 refugees to Bhasan Char island in an effort to relieve congestion in the 33 camps in Cox’s Bazar. There are still large gaps in service delivery and the sustainability of vital support, even though protective services and humanitarian aid have increased on the island.

In addition, around 92,000 Rohingya refugees have sought asylum in Thailand and 21,000 in India; fewer migrants have settled in Indonesia, Nepal, and other nearby countries.

With 1.5 million of them having been domestically displaced since February 2021, armed conflicts throughout Myanmar have continued to cause displacement, increasing the country’s overall number of internally displaced people (IDP) to over 1.8 million.