Indonesia says it is protecting the country’s sovereignty in turning away boat people in its waters, though it will help such migrants with emergency aid.
By Sara Schonhardt
Indonesia says it is protecting the country’s sovereignty in turning away boat people in its waters, though it will help such migrants with emergency aid.
“If there are boats, such as boats carrying (migrants), that have a problem, of course we would help them,” said Indonesia armed forces spokesman Fuad Basya.
Indonesia has provided some assistance to the migrants, such as sending fuel, food and medicine to boats adrift, as it would in any humanitarian crisis, he added.
More In boat people
But Indonesia is asking that boats conform to procedure. The Indonesian military has a responsibility to see that anyone who enters Indonesia abides by regulations, meaning they receive the proper documents from the government before trying to enter. That would not be possible for those stranded at sea now, who had paid smugglers to get away from Bangladesh and Myanmar.
If they do not, it’s the military’s duty to prevent them from entering, Mr. Basya said. Four warships are currently patrolling the waters around North Sumatra to do just that.
But despite official procedure, Indonesia has so far taken almost half of the more than 3,000 ethnic Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants who have made landfall after human traffickers jumped ship to avoid a smuggling crackdown by Thai authorities.
More boats are at sea, and aid agencies fear a massive loss of life as supplies of food and water are depleted.
Lilianne Fan, a Bangkok-based research fellow for the humanitarian policy group at the Overseas Development Institute think tank, wants Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia to take in the boat people.
By not doing so, “these countries are effectively saying that lives that don’t have legal recognition aren’t really worth saving, and that’s an unacceptable position to take in my mind.”
The Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, in particular, have been the subject of migrant tugs of war several times since 2009, when they started fleeing their country in droves to avoid persecution and sectarian violence.
The countries passing the boats back and forth, in what Human Rights Watch has dubbed a “three-way game of human ping pong,” have all taken in some of the migrants – many brought ashore by fishermen who came upon boats that were foundering.
But aid teams criticize the navies of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia for focusing their resources on keeping potential asylum seekers out of their territorial waters instead of launching wide-ranging search and rescue operations.
Anger toward Myanmar for not doing more to weigh in and solve the problem, may be one reason, said Ms. Fan. Countries within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations regional grouping feel “that they just can’t accept any more of this flow without having some reassurance from Myanmar that they’re going to be taking responsibility in any way,” she said.