Two days after their makeshift boat sank, seventy-five Rohingya refugees were saved. Indonesian emergency services declared on Friday March 22 that they had ended the search to find possible new survivors.
“The search ended on Thursday. All the Rohingya refugees who were on the boat yesterday were rescued,” said Muhammad Fathur Rachman, an official with the local search and rescue agency in Aceh, on the western tip of the big island of Sumatra.
Survivors had estimated that around 150 Rohingya were on board the boat before the sinking, but this figure could not be verified. “We have not received any additional information about missing people, and there is no list of passengers from the boat,” said Mr. Rachman, adding: “According to our analyses, the boat [could] not hold 150 people. »
Exhausted and traumatized
On Thursday, a rescue ship took on board sixty-nine refugees who had survived for hours, under a scorching sun, clinging to the upturned hull of a fishing boat 30 kilometers from the coast. Among them, nine children, eighteen women and forty-two men.
“They seemed exhausted and traumatized. The women’s faces were red, burned by the sun,” explained an Agence France-Presse journalist on board the rescue ship. Panicked, some men tried to jump into the boat that came to pick them up, before the rescuers and some of their companions calmed them down.
These refugees, members of a Muslim minority persecuted in Burma, had just been shipwrecked twice: the wooden boat on which they had left Bangladesh capsized on Wednesday, then the fishing boat that came to their rescue turned over. tower under overload.
Eight hospitalized
The first six refugees were rescued on Wednesday by fishermen. At least eight of the survivors, dehydrated and sick, were hospitalized. The others were taken to a temporary accommodation center – a former Red Cross building – in a village near Maulaboh, the main town in West Aceh district. Their arrival has sparked protests from some residents, who take a dim view of the constant arrival of these refugees accused of consuming their already meager resources.
Since November, hundreds of Rohingya have fled the camps housing them in Bangladesh to reach the province of Aceh by sea, on makeshift boats. According to survivors of the shipwreck, they intended to reach the Thai coast but ultimately headed for Banda Aceh after being pushed back by Thailand.
Thousands of Rohingya risk their lives every year on perilous and costly sea journeys to try to reach Indonesia or Malaysia. Since mid-November, more than 1,700 have arrived in Indonesia. Hundreds of them are currently housed in temporary reception centers in the region.
