Dozens of Rohingya refugees rescued after spending the night on capsized boat’s hull

An Indonesian search and rescue ship spotted an overturned wooden boat carrying dozens of Rohingya Muslim refugees on Thursday and began pulling survivors standing on the hull to safety.

An Associated Press photographer on the rescue ship said that 10 people had been rescued on local fishing boats and 59 others had been rescued by Indonesian vessels.

Men, women and children soaked by the night rain were crying as the rescue operation began and people were loaded onto rubber dinghies to be transported to rescue ships.

It was unclear how many refugees were on board the small boat when it capsized off Indonesia’s northernmost coast on Wednesday, with local fishermen initially rescuing six survivors and an estimated 60 to 100 people.

It was unclear whether everyone managed to hold on to the capsized boat overnight or if some drowned.

Indonesian search and rescue teams left the city of Banda Aceh on Wednesday night, hours after the capsizing, and initially struggled to find the ship in choppy waters off the coast.

It finally found the boat and survivors around noon Thursday.

Amiruddin, the leader of a tribal fishing community in Aceh’s Barat region, said rescuers said the boat was sailing east when it started leaking, before strong currents pushed it west of Aceh. Six other people said they were still trying to survive on the capsized spacecraft.

Some 740,000 Rohingya have been resettled in Bangladesh to escape brutal counter-insurgency operations by security forces in their native Myanmar.

Thousands of people are trying to escape overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh and flee to neighboring countries, with Indonesia seeing a surge in refugee numbers since November, prompting calls for international help. Rohingya arriving in Aceh face hostility from some fellow Muslims.

Like Thailand and Malaysia, Indonesia is not a signatory to the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, which outlines its legal protections, and is therefore under no obligation to accept them. However, so far they have provided temporary shelter to stranded refugees.

The U.N. refugee agency reports that nearly 4,500 Rohingya, two-thirds of them women and children, fled by boat from refugee camps in their native Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh last year. Of these, 569 people died or went missing while crossing the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, the highest death toll since 2014.

Safe return to Myanmar is nearly impossible since the army that attacked them overthrew Myanmar’s democratically elected government in 2021. No country offers them any opportunity for large-scale resettlement.