Hundreds of students drive Rohingya out of temporary shelter in Aceh
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said that it was “deeply disturbed to see a mob attack on a site sheltering vulnerable refugee families, the majority being children and women.” It urges the Indonesian government to provide the refugees with greater protection.
Banda Aceh (AsiaNews) – Hundreds of students in the province of Aceh, western Indonesia, invaded a shelter yesterday that temporarily housed more than a hundred Rohingya refugees, driving them out in what is but the latest incident due to local hostility towards the refugees, who belong to a persecuted stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar.
Since mid-November, more than 1,500 Rohingya fled refugee camps in Bangladesh to reach Aceh province by sea in makeshift crafts. According to the United Nations, this is the largest migration of Rohingya to Indonesia since 2015.
Under the slogan "Aceh's Students Denied Access to the Rohingyas", hundreds of people demanded that these asylum seekers leave from their temporary shelter in the Balee Meuseuraya building and be relocated elsewhere.
Even though most of vulnerable refugees are families, especially women and children, the students dragged them into vans and pickups and drove them to another place not far away, about a kilometre from the previous location.
About 135 Rohingya, who landed on an Aceh beach on 10 December, were subjected of this action, after.
“We were able to move these Rohingya as most of our compatriots in Aceh have already expressed concern and were against their presence here," said one of the coordinators of Wednesday's action.
The protesters also said that in previous years Aceh had warmly welcomed Rohingya refugees. But local feelings soured after President Joko Widodo spoke – without evidence or without referring to any time frame – of "illegal trafficking of human beings" among refugees at a conference on 12 December.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Jakarta harshly criticised the action by university students in Aceh against the Rohingyas who are now traumatised after yesterday’s incident.
The UNHCR “is deeply disturbed to see a mob attack on a site sheltering vulnerable refugee families, the majority being children and women,” its office said in a statement released yesterday.
In its official communiqué, the UN agency called on Indonesian authorities to address the issue as soon as possible.
The “UNHCR remains deeply worried about the safety of refugees and calls on local law enforcement authorities for urgent action to ensure protection of all desperate individuals and humanitarian staff,” the statement read.
“The attack on refugees is not an isolated act but the result of a coordinated online campaign of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech against refugees,” it went on to say.
.png)
13/02/2016 13:51
