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Jakarta/Colombo: Southeast Asian lawmakers on Tuesday urged countries in the region to urgently rescue Rohingya refugees, including women and children, who have been adrift for weeks on a boat off the coasts of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and India.
The boat reportedly departed from Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh on November 25 with at least 160 refugees on board. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and activists have warned that some people on board have died from lack of food and drinking water.
“We urgently call on ASEAN member states and other countries in the region to fulfill their humanitarian obligations and to conduct search and rescue operations on ships should they enter their waters, and to allow refugees to disembark properly,” Eva Sundari, an ASEAN member of the Human Rights Council, said in a statement. said the statement.
“It is an insult to humanity to ignore the people on board.”
Cox’s Bazar Rohingya activist Mohammed Rezuwan Khan, whose sister and niece were on board, told Arab News that at least two children and a woman were killed .
“No one can save them,” he said. “There were 160 people on board … they could have died of dehydration and starvation.”
The number of Rohingya refugees trying to cross the Andaman Sea from overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh to another host country has been rising since last year, according to the UN refugee agency. Earlier this month, 154 refugees on a boat were rescued by a Vietnamese offshore company and handed over to the Myanmar Navy.
On Sunday, 104 people from another boat were rescued by the Sri Lankan navy off the coast of Kankesanthurai. Kankesanthurai police officer M. Ratnayake told Arab News that they were being held at the Mirihana Immigration Detention Center about 10 kilometers from the capital Colombo.
They appeared in court on Monday as Sri Lankan officials tried to determine next steps, although their cases now have until Jan. 2.
Sri Lanka is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol and has no laws or mechanisms for the permanent resettlement of refugees.
Shiraz Noordeen, a Colombo lawyer representing Rohingya refugees, told Arab News: “The government should work with UNHCR to find temporary accommodation for the refugees until they are secured in permanent shelter in Lanka or abroad.”
“Sri Lanka urgently needs to sign a refugee treaty with UNHCR to facilitate the flow of such cases.”
The plight of the Rohingya refugees stems from decades of persecution in their native Myanmar. More than 730,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh in 2017 after Myanmar’s military cracked down on what the United Nations said constituted genocide.
Nearly 2,000 people, most of them Rohingya, traveled by boat from Myanmar and Bangladesh to Myanmar between January and November this year — a sixfold increase since 2021, according to the United Nations refugee agency. At least 119 of them were killed or reported missing.
“Authorities of ASEAN member states must launch search and rescue operations immediately. For the sake of humanity. ASEAN countries…countries intersecting Indian Ocean territories should make short- and long-term plans at this time to save them,” Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia, told Arab News news.
“But the first priority now is to figure out their whereabouts and fate, and to rescue them.”
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