Burmese Refugees Rescued at Sea

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Dozens of refugees from Myanmar, rescued by the Indonesian Navy after drifting aboard a wooden boat at sea for almost three weeks, are receiving treatment at a hospital in Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, Indonesian officials said Tuesday.

About 200 refugees, all of them men, were found by a local fisherman Monday afternoon. It was the second boatload of refugees from Myanmar to land in Aceh in the last month.

Interviews by Indonesian Navy pers

onnel indicated the men are all part of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar who had fled to Thailand in December.

Survivors from the first boat, which was found in early January and was also carrying about 200 men, told Indonesian authorities that they had been rounded up by the Thai military after escaping Myanmar, and then were beaten, towed out to sea and abandoned.

The survivors rescued Monday told Navy personnel a similar story, adding that originally there was a flotilla of nine motorless boats that had been led out to sea by the Thais, containing about 1,200 people.

“Based on interviews with some of the survivors there were originally 220 people on the most recent boat, but 22 people died at sea,” Tedi Sutardi, a naval commander in East Aceh, said in an a telephone interview. “We know that nine ships originally left Thailand, so we will monitor the waters around Aceh for the possibility of finding any remaining boats.”

About 850 Rohingya have been rescued in the last month. Three boats were discovered by Indian authorities and another was found near Thailand. . The other three boats are missing.

The United Nations calculates that there are about 723,000 Rohingya living in Myanmar. Rohingya, who are Muslim, are officially considered foreigners in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar and are not entitled to passports.

Illegal migrants from other parts of Myanmar typically travel across Thailand’s porous borders and either stay in Thailand or transit to Malaysia, where they work in restaurants, on construction sites or in factories.

But the Rohingya have followed different paths: over the past decade many traveled through Bangladesh to Middle Eastern countries where they found work. This changed in 2006 when the Bangladeshi government made it more difficult for the Rohingya to get travel documents, according to Chris Lewa, an expert on the Rohingya who heads a human rights group called the Arakan Project.

In what is already a generally impoverished country, the Rohingya are perhaps the most vulnerable minority in Myanmar. They are not allowed to own land and are technically restricted from travel outside of northern Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh. A United Nations survey, carried out in June 2008, found that more than half of Rohingya were illiterate and that the average number of meals among households had decreased from an average of three to two a day because of food shortages.

Last week, a spokesperson at the Indonesian Foreign Ministry indicated the first boatload of migrants would be repatriated to Myanmar, saying they were economic migrants, not political refugees. The decision angered human rights organizations as well as Indonesian Muslim groups.

Almost 90 percent of Indonesians are Muslim and many believe the government should be reaching out to the Rohingya.

The Indonesian government has so far denied human rights groups, the foreign media and the United Nations access to any of the refugees.

Peter Gelling reported from Jakarta, Indonesia, and Thomas Fuller reported from Bangkok.