Nearly 800 “boat people” were brought ashore in Indonesia yesterday, but other vessels crammed with migrants were sent back to sea despite a UN call to rescue thousands adrift in Southeast Asian waters with dwindling supplies of food and water.
Underlining the hardening of Southeast Asia government’s stance on the boatloads of Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar, Thailand’s Prime Minister warned yesterday that if more migrants arrived they might steal jobs from Thais and Indonesia’s military chief warned they would cause “social issues”.
About 2,500 migrants have landed on Indonesia’s western tip and the northwest coast of Malaysia over the past week.
But two boats that crossed the Malacca Strait from the Thailand-Malaysia side have been turned away by the Indonesian navy, and yesterday another was towed out to sea by the Thai navy.
Malaysia, too, has said it would push migrant boats back to sea.
“They have no food, no water and are drinking their own urine,” said Joe Lowry, a spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration in Bangkok.
The crisis has arisen because smugglers have abandoned boats full of migrants, many of them hungry and sick, in the Andaman Sea following a Thai crackdown on human trafficking.
Thailand is the first stop on the common trafficking route used by criminals preying on Rohingya as well as Bangladeshis seeking to escape poverty. As some countries faced pressure for closing their doors to desperate “boat people”, a UN human rights spokesman said the deadly pattern of migration by sea across the Bay of Bengal would continue unless Myanmar itself ends discrimination.
Around dawn yesterday a boat with almost 800 people was brought ashore by fishermen along the coast of Aceh, on Indonesia’s western tip, Khairul Nova, a search and rescue official in Langsa, said.
“What I have been told by some of the people who were on the boat is that the boat was sinking and fighting broke out on board,” Nova said. “We have seen many with injuries to the face and head. I don’t know why the fighting happened.”
However, in the same waters, the Indonesian navy pushed another boat back and Thailand’s navy towed a wooden vessel with hundreds, including children, on board back out to sea.
“Those on the boat did not want to come to Thailand so we gave them food, medicine, fuel and water,” Thai Lieutenant Commander Veerapong Nakprasit told Reuters. “This is not a push-back because these people wanted to go.”
Veerapong said the boat was without a captain but that some of those on board had been trained by local Thai fishermen for a few hours to navigate.