(Cox’s Bazar) At least three new boats carrying hundreds of Rohingya refugees, a persecuted minority in Burma, set sail and left Bangladesh this week, refugees and an NGO told AFP, after the arrival of more of a thousand refugees in Indonesia, at the end of a perilous journey of 1,800 km.
Bangladesh hosts around a million Rohingya, including some 750,000 who fled in 2017 a campaign of repression by the Burmese army who are the subject of an investigation for “acts of genocide” before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) .
Their living conditions are very difficult there, because they are crowded into overcrowded camps where insecurity is omnipresent.
Mohammad Ullah, 26, a Rohingya refugee living in the Nayapara camp in Cox’s Bazar, told AFP on Friday that his ex-mother-in-law, who had been caring for his four-year-old daughter since his wife’s death, took the child with her on a boat without telling her.
“When I asked her where she was, I learned that she had put her on a boat to Indonesia on November 21.”
Two other Rohingya refugees and the Rohingya defense NGO “Arakan Project” confirmed the departure of the boats. “Two boats left, one on the night of the 20th to the 21st and the other on the night of the 21st to the 22nd,” Chris Lewa, director of Arakan Project, told AFP.
The first boat carried about 200 people and the second about 150, both likely aiming to reach Indonesia, she said.
A third boat with some 200 people on board also left on Thursday, Rohingya refugees told AFP on Friday.
The boats could approach the Indonesian coast, after a journey of some 1,800 kilometers, at the end of next week, according to Chris Lewa.
“They left from Bangladesh. They are still arriving in Indonesia because Malaysia will not let them in,” M told AFPme Lewa, which is based in Thailand, but has a team in Bangladesh.
The Rohingya, mainly Muslims, are persecuted in Burma and thousands of them risk their lives every year on perilous and costly sea journeys, most often aboard makeshift boats.
They generally try to reach Malaysia, where a large Rohingya community lives, but are often forced to land in neighboring Indonesia first.
More than a thousand of them have arrived in Indonesia’s far-western province of Aceh since November 14. This is the highest number of arrivals since 2017.
According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), more than 2,000 Rohingya are believed to have attempted the risky journey to other Southeast Asian countries in 2022. Nearly 200 of them perished at sea during the trip, according to the same source.