Fishermen rescue 797 from sinking boat off Aceh

Around 900 more illegal migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority were rescued off the coast of the northwest province of Aceh in Indonesia and in Thailand on Friday.Fishermen rescued the migrants in Indonesia and the Thai navy discovered the migrants on an island in Thailand.Of the rescued boat people, 432 are Bangladeshi men, and the rest are the Rohingya men, women and children, according to Indonesian police.Nearly 600 migrants were already sheltering in Aceh after managing to get ashore in recent days.Activists estimate up to 8,000 illegal migrants are in peril at sea in Southeast Asia.Meanwhile, Thailand has announced a regional meeting for May 29 for a coordinated response to Southeast Asia’s human-trafficking crisis but Myanmar, which refuses citizenship to its Rohingya minority, indicated it would stay away, Agence France-Presse reported.Bangladesh authorities claimed it had clamped down on human traffickers to check illegal migration after at least five human traffickers were killed in ‘gunfight’ with law enforcers on Bangladesh coast in Cox’s Bazar since May 8 when they were attempting to dispatch people into the sea on fishing boats.At least 13 suspected human traffickers were also arrested in Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong and Dhaka during the period.Agence France-Presse, referring to Indonesian police, reported that at least 797 people were rescued Friday by fishermen in Aceh province on the east coast of huge Sumatra Island in Indonesia.

One overloaded boat was sinking off the coast when local fishermen came to the rescue, picking up migrants as they jumped from the stricken vessel, police said.‘According to initial information we got from them they were pushed away by the Malaysian navy to the border of Indonesian waters,’ said Sunarya, police chief in the city of Langsa in Aceh province, where the migrants arrived.The boat the passengers of which included 61 children, was sinking but Indonesian fishermen ferried them to shore, he said.In Thailand, the navy discovered 106 Rohingyas on an island off the coast of Phang Na province but it was unclear whether their boat had a problem or they had been abandoned, Agence France-Presse reported, referring to the provincial governor.Earlier on Friday, a boat carrying about 300 Rohingyas, including women and children, left Thailand’s waters after authorities repaired its engine and provided some food, a Thailand official said.The boat’s passengers begged for food and water after arriving near the southernThai island of Koh Lipe on Thursday.Human Rights Watch has called the situation a deadly game of ‘human ping pong’.UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon called on Southeast Asia to ‘keep their borders and ports open in order to help the vulnerable people who are in need’.He also reminded authorities they were obliged to rescue stricken boats and to respect an international ban on expelling prospective refugees.The US state department demanded that Southeast Asian countries ‘save lives at sea’.Spokesman Jeff Rathke said US ambassadors in the region were coordinating with UN agencies and governments on ways to help.Many of the migrants are now feared to be stranded at sea after a Thai police crackdown threw busy people-smuggling routes into chaos.Southeast Asia is being hit by a wave of migrants arriving in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, part of a regional human trafficking crisis driven by conflict, persecution and poverty.An estimated 25,000 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis boarded people smugglers’ boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many in the same period of 2014, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.Most travel in rickety traffickers’ boats to Thailand, where they are held in squalid jungle camps until a ransom is paid.

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