A BOAT carrying more than 100 Rohingya refugees, including dozens of children, landed on the coast of Aceh, Indonesia, early today, said police.

The vessel, which sailed from a Rohingya camp in Bangladesh, arrived shortly after 3am on a beach in Bireun.

It was carrying 114 people, including 58 men, 21 women and 35 children aged under 15 years old, said police.

“We will conduct general health check-ups and Covid-19 tests for these foreigners,” said local police chief Mike Hardy Wirapraja.

He said the group will then be transferred to neighbouring Lhokseumawe, which has a shelter for refugees.

Police found out about the arrival after local fishermen reported that a boat filled with Rohingya people landed on the beach.

The boat appears to be in good condition and the refugees have had sufficient food and supplies during the journey.

“We are originally from Myanmar, but we fled to Bangladesh and we started our journey from Bangladesh,” one of the refugees, Omar Faruk, told an AFP journalist, adding that the group had been at sea for 25 days.

“We left because the Rohingya situation at the camp is not good. It is getting very bad at the moment,” said the 11-year-old in English.

Faruk said he left his mother in Bangladesh and followed his uncle to start a new life, preferably in a Muslim-majority country like Indonesia or Malaysia.

“We left Bangladesh to this country to make a beautiful future… I have no father, only one uncle and my mother is still in Bangladesh.

“I came here because I want to improve my education.”

It is the second arrival by the persecuted minority in Indonesia in recent months.

More than 100 Rohingya also arrived in Bireun in late December, after drifting for days before the Indonesian government allowed them to land and dragged their stricken boat to shore.

Hundreds of thousands of the ethnic group members have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar since 2017 following a military crackdown that they said included mass killings and rape.

Most live in cramped camps in Bangladesh, where human traffickers run lucrative operations promising to find them sanctuary abroad.

Hundreds of Rohingya make perilous, months-long journeys from refugee camps in Bangladesh to Southeast Asia each year. Relatively affluent Malaysia is usually the favoured destination, but they also end up in Indonesia. – AFP, March 6, 2022.