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A United Nations agency is seeking information about the voyage of over 100 Rohingya Muslim refugees who landed on an Indonesian beach this week, and warned Tuesday that there will likely be more. A distressing video circulated widely in social media showed the dehydrated and exhausted Rohingya, crumpled weakly and emaciated, many crying for help. At least 185 men, women and children disembarked from a rickety wooden boat Monday at dusk on Ujong Pie beach at Muara Tiga, a coastal village in Aceh's Pidie district, said local police chief Fauzi, who goes by a single name. They are very weak because of dehydration and exhaustion after weeks at sea, Fauzi said. Muhammad Rafki Syukri, the Protection Associate at United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said the agency would provide Rohingya language translators and counselling to determine if they were from the group of 190 Rohingya who were reported by United Nations to be drifting in a small boat in the Andaman Sea for a ...
The United States has earmarked an additional USD 180 million to aid more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield announced nearly USD 180 million in additional humanitarian assistance for those affected by the Rakhine State/Rohingya refugee crisis in Burma, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in the region."With this new funding, our total humanitarian assistance for this response reaches more than USD 1.5 billion since August 2017, when more than 740,000 Rohingya were forced to flee ethnic cleansing and other horrific atrocities and abuses in Burma's [Myanmar's] Rakhine State to safety in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh," Price said in a press release on Wednesday.The state department lauded humanitarian actors for a strong and well-coordinated humanitarian response, which includes preventing and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.Myanmar has been in turmoil since the coup on February
The Indian coast guard has found a boat adrift in the Andaman Sea carrying Rohingya refugees, including eight people who had died, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Thursday.Speaking at a videoconference briefing, spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said that on February 11, a boat sailed from Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh carrying 64 women including 8 girls and 26 men including 5 boys."The engine of the boat failed on February 15 and since then it has been drifting. Due to the severe conditions, we understand that eight occupants have died and one of the occupants had been missing since February 15," Srivastava said."When we learnt of the boat in distress, we immediately dispatched two coast guard ships to provide food, water and medical assistance to the occupants. Seven of them were administered IV fluids," he added.The spokesperson stated that around 47 of the boat's occupants possessed identity cards issued to them by the UNHCR office in Bangladesh, which stated that they were ...