Hundreds of Rohingya go missing from Indonesian refugee camp, feared trafficked to Malaysia

Just 112 refugees remain at the makeshift camp in Lhokseumawe, well down from the almost 400 that arrived there last summer

Neither local authorities nor the UN could account for the whereabouts of the refugees from the stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar

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The deserted refugee camp is seen in Lhokseumawe, Indonesia’s Aceh province, after several hundred Rohingya refugees left. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:23pm, 28 Jan 2021Updated: 3:27pm, 28 Jan 2021

Hundreds of Rohingya are missing from a refugee camp in Indonesia and are believed to have been trafficked to neighbouring Malaysia, officials and sources said Thursday.

Just 112 refugees remain at the makeshift camp in Lhokseumawe on Indonesia’s northern coast this week, well down from the almost 400 that arrived between June and September last year.

Neither local authorities nor the UN could account for the whereabouts of the refugees from the stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar, who are feared to have enlisted traffickers to help them cross the Malacca Strait into Malaysia.

“We don’t know yet where they went,” said Ridwan Jamil, head of the Rohingya task force in Lhokseumawe. “But they’ll escape if they can find any hole to leave because that is their goal.”

A Myanmar military crackdown in 2017, which UN investigators said amounted to genocide, forced 750,000 Rohingya to flee across the border into Bangladesh’s southeast coastal district of Cox’s Bazar, where many ended up in sprawling refugee camps.

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