Members of the persecuted minority risk their lives each year on long and dangerous sea journeys, often crowding into rickety boats in the hopes of reaching Malaysia or Indonesia.
The refugees were abandoned before dawn on Thursday around 100 metres off a beach in Aceh Province, Saiful Anwar, a village official in East Aceh, said. The group included 46 women, 37 men and seven children, he said, while locals found two bodies on the shore and four floating in the sea.
Miftach Tjut Adek, chief of the community, said that the 96 arrivals, including seven children, were still at the local beach in the eastern part of Aceh on Sumatra island. “There is no solution yet, they are still at the beach,” said Miftach.
Refugees abandoned by human traffickers around 100 metres off a beach in Aceh province
“According to information from residents, these people were stranded at around 4am. It seems like there was a boat that brought them,” Saiful said. Eight sick refugees were taken for medical treatment, he said.
East Aceh acting district head Amrullah M. Ridha told reporters the refugees would be kept in tents on the beach until authorities sheltered them. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said it knew about the arrivals but could offer no further information. Acting Aceh Governor Safrizal, told reporters “human trafficking mafia activity” was to blame for the latest arrivals.
It is the third group of arrivals in western Indonesia this month, with more than 150 refugees landing in Aceh and another 140 arriving in North Sumatra province.
Every year, thousands of Rohingya attempt the perilous 4,000-kilometre journey from Bangladesh to Malaysia, fuelling a multi-million dollar human-smuggling operation that often involves stopovers in Indonesia.
Indonesia is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention and says it cannot be compelled to take in the refugees, calling instead on neighbouring countries to share the burden.
Many Acehnese, who themselves have memories of decades of bloody conflict, are sympathetic to the plight of their fellow Muslims, but others say their patience has been tested by the annual arrivals.
About 300 Rohingya came ashore last week in Indonesia’s Aceh and North Sumatra provinces. The United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR has called on Indonesia’s government to ensure their safety. UNHCR was providing aid to the Rohingya together with local authorities, a spokesperson in Indonesia said.
Between October and April, when the seas are calmer, many Rohingya Muslims leave Myanmar on rickety boats for Thailand, Muslim-majority Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh.
The Rohingya leave Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where they are regarded as foreign interlopers from South Asia and are denied citizenship and subjected to abuse. Over 2,000 Rohingya arrived in Indonesia last year, UNHCR data showed, more than the combined total of arrivals in the previous four years. Some of them faced rejection in Indonesia as locals grew frustrated by the deluge of arrivals.
In August,24-A drone attack on Rohingya fleeing Myanmar killed many dozens of people, including families with children, several witnesses said, describing survivors wandering between piles of bodies to identify dead and injured relatives.
Four witnesses, activists and a diplomat described drone attacks on Monday that struck down families waiting to cross the border into neighbouring Bangladesh.
A heavily pregnant woman and her 2-year-old daughter were among the victims in the attack, the single deadliest known assault on civilians in Rakhine state during recent weeks of fighting between junta troops and rebels.
Three of the witnesses told Reuters on Friday that the Arakan Army was responsible, allegations the group denied. The militia and Myanmar’s military blamed each another. Reuters could not verify how many people had died in the attack or independently determine responsibility.
Videos posted to social media showed piles of bodies strewn across muddy ground, their suitcases and backpacks scattered around them. Three survivors said more than 200 had died while a witness to the aftermath said he had seen at least 70 bodies.
Reuters verified the location of the videos as just outside the coastal Myanmar town of Maungdaw. Reuters was not able to independently confirm the date the videos were filmed.
One witness, 35-year-old Mohammed Eleyas, said his pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter were wounded in the attack and later died. He was standing with them on the shoreline when drones began attacking the crowds, Eleyas told Reuters from a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
“I heard the deafening sound of shelling multiple times, he said. Eleyas said he lay on the ground to protect himself and when he got up, he saw his wife and daughter critically injured and many of his other relatives dead.
A second witness, Shamsuddin, 28, said he survived with his wife and newborn son. Also speaking from a refugee camp in Bangladesh, he said that after the attack many lay dead and some people were shouting out from the pain of their injuries.
Boats carrying fleeing Rohingya, members of a mostly Muslim minority who face extreme persecution in Myanmar, also sank in the Naf River that separates the two countries on Monday, killing dozens more, according to two witnesses and Bangladesh media.
Medecins Sans Frontieres said in a statement the aid organisation had treated 39 people who had crossed from Myanmar into Bangladesh since Saturday for violence-related injuries, including mortar shell injuries and gunshot wounds. Patients described seeing people bombed while trying to find boats to cross the river, the statement said.
A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees said the agency was aware of the deaths of refugees from the capsize of two boats in the Bay of Bengal and it had heard reports of civilian deaths in Maungdaw but that it could not confirm the numbers or circumstances.
The Rohingya have been long persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. More than 730,000 of them fled the country in 2017 after a military-led crackdown that the UN said was carried out with genocidal intent.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military seized power from a democratically elected government in 2021, and mass protests evolved into widespread armed struggle.
Rohingya have been leaving Rakhine for weeks as the Arakan Army, one of many armed groups fighting, has made sweeping gains in the north, home to a large population of Muslims.
Reuters has previously reported that the militia burned down the largest Rohingya town in May, leaving Maungdaw, which is under siege by the rebels, as the last major Rohingya settlement aside from grim displacement camps further south. The group denied the allegations.
Activist groups condemned this week’s attacks. A senior Western diplomat said he had confirmed the reports.
“These reports of hundreds of Rohingya killed at the Bangladesh/Myanmar border are, I’m sorry to say, accurate,” Bob Rae, Canadas ambassador to the United Nations and a previous special envoy to Myanmar, posted on X on Wednesday.
Myanmar’s junta blamed the Arakan Army in a post on its Telegram channel.
