The UN refugee agency on Monday revealed that about 400 Rohingya Muslims are onboard two boats adrift in the Andaman Sea and reportedly out of supplies.
Babar Baloch, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHCR) Bangkok-based regional spokesperson, expressed worry that all aboard could die without international efforts to rescue them.
“There are about 400 children, women and men looking death in the eye if there are no moves to save these desperate souls,” he told The Associated Press (AP). If the two boats are not provided assistance, the world “may witness another tragedy such as in December 2022, when a boat with 180 aboard went missing in one of the darkest such incidents in the region,” Baloch stressed.
He added that the boats are believed to have left from Bangladesh and have been at sea for about two weeks.
This news that 250 Rohingyas who reached Indonesia in wooden boats were pushed back into the sea to die by Indonesian Muslims was posted ten days ago. Today BBC released a complete video on this. Listen to how the BBC got this whole thing together that 250 Rohingya (men, women… pic.twitter.com/fnCEwIiEZx
— Sandy 🇮🇳(Sundeep) (@ssingapuri) December 5, 2023
The captain of one of the boats, who was contacted by the AP on Saturday, said that he had 180 to 190 people on the boat, that they were out of food and water, and the engine was damaged. The captain, who identified himself as Maan Nokim, said he feared that all on board will die if they do not receive help.
On Sunday, Nokim said the boat was 320 kilometres from Thailand’s west coast. Meanwhile, a Thai navy spokesperson, contacted Monday, said he had no information about the boats.
The boat’s location is about the same distance from Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh, where another boat carrying 139 people reached Sabang Island off the tip of Sumatra on Saturday, Baloch said. The passengers included 58 children, 45 women, and 36 men — a typical balance of those making the sea journey, he said.
The number of Rohingya fleeing refugee camps in Bangladesh has surged since last year due to food ration cuts and a spike in gang violence.
Since August 2017, around 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh after a brutal military counterinsurgency campaign wreaked havoc on their communities. Myanmar security forces have been accused of mass rapes and killings.