Dozens of Rohingya refugees have arrived in Indonesia after a week-long odyssey at sea. According to the state news agency Antara, 57 people reached the shore in the province of Aceh on the northwestern tip of the island of Sumatra.
They had previously been adrift on boats in the Indian Ocean for weeks. It was said that some of the refugees were ill. According to initial information, there were no women or children among them. It was initially unclear where they were to be taken, the news portal Detik.com reported.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR called again on Friday for the rescue of Rohingya refugees in the Indian Ocean. The organization was particularly concerned about reports of a boat carrying up to 190 people, mostly women, in distress in the Bay of Bengal near India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands. According to unconfirmed reports, at least 20 people have died on the boat, which has been floating in the sea since the end of November.
The military took power in Myanmar in early February 2021. Since then, critics of the regime have been brutally persecuted. Hundreds of thousands of members of the Rohingya Muslim minority had already fled repression and persecution in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, mainly to Bangladesh but also to other countries.
