After being lost on a boat for nearly a month, a Rohingya mother was rescued with her 5-year-old daughter.
Sky News spoke to Mohammed Rezuwan Khan on Monday, a Rohingya refugee who was living in a camp at Bangladesh. He said that his sister Hatemonnesa, and his niece Umme Salama, were rescued by the Indonesian authorities.
These were just 160 Rohingyas who left Bangladesh to travel to Malaysia aboard a large boat that sank after the engine malfunctioned.
After it washed up at Ujong Pie beach, Aceh province, on the northwest tip Indonesia’s island Sumatra, the wooden vessel, which had been a wooden boat, became a rickety and unsafe.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, (UNHCR), more than 200 people were saved by Indonesian fishermen and local authorities between Sunday and Monday. The majority of these were women and children.
Many people died of starvation while stranded in the middle of the ocean and without food supplies. However, Hatemonnesa and her child survived the treacherous journey.
Rezuwan Khan stated that he was in tears when he finally spoke with his family via video conference after not being able to reach them for over a month.
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He said that “we felt like we got an entirely new world today” and added that both the mother-daughter looked exhausted.
He said that his sister had decided to travel the dangerous route because of the conditions in Bangladesh’s refugee camp. She hoped to find better opportunities in Malaysia for her daughter.
Dehydrated and exhausted
In A call was made on 18 December by a person aboard the vessel. He said “we’re dying here” as well as “we’re starving” adding that some people had already died.
The survivors of the rescue mission were tired and dehydrated and reported to UNHRC that 26 people had died from the terrible conditions aboard.
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The UN reports that there has been an increase in people trying to cross the Andaman sea from Bangladesh and Myanmar, with over 1,900 people being killed since January.
Rohingya refugees are the most dangerous of all those who risk their lives to flee Myanmar’s military persecution. They fled in their hundreds of thousands in 2017.
Myanmar’s security forces have been accused of mass murders, rapes, and killings of Rohingyas and burning thousands of their homes.
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