BIREUN, Indonesia: A boat carrying more than one hundred Rohingya refugees, including dozens of children, landed on the coast of Indonesia's westernmost province Aceh early yesterday, police said. The vessel, which sailed from a Rohingya camp in Bangladesh, arrived shortly after 3:00 am on a beach in Bireun district. It was carrying 114 people, including 58 men, 21 women and 35 children aged under 15 years old, police said. "We will conduct a general health check up and COVID-19 rapid antigen tests for these foreigners," local police chief Mike Hardy Wirapraja told AFP.

He said they would later be transferred to neighbouring Lhokseumawe district which has a shelter for refugees. Police found out about the arrival after some local fishermen reported that a boat filled with Rohingya people had landed on the beach. The boat appeared to be in good condition and the refugees had sufficient food and supplies during the journey. "We are originally from Myanmar but we fled to Bangladesh and we started our journey from Bangladesh," one of the refugees, Omar Faruk, told an AFP journalist, adding that the group had been at sea for 25 days. "We left Bangladesh because the Rohingya situation at the camp is not good, it's getting very bad at the moment," the 11-year-old said in English.

Faruk said he left his mother in Bangladesh and followed his uncle to start a new life, preferably in a Muslim majority country like Indonesia or Malaysia. "We left Bangladesh to this country to make a beautiful future... I have no father, only one uncle and my mom is still in Bangladesh. I came here because I want to improve my education," he added. It is the second arrival by the persecuted minority in Muslim-majority Indonesia in the recent months. More than 100 Rohingya also arrived in Bireun in late December after drifting for days before the Indonesian government eventually allowed them to land and dragged their stricken boat to shore. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar since 2017 after a military crackdown that refugees said included mass killings and rape.

Most live in cramped camps in Bangladesh, where human traffickers run lucrative operations promising to find them sanctuary abroad. Each year hundreds of Rohingya make perilous, months-long journeys from refugee camps in Bangladesh to Southeast Asia. Relatively affluent Malaysia is usually the favoured destination, but they also end up in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh police arrested a powerful Muslim cleric who allegedly issued an execution edict against a prominent Rohingya activist shot dead last year in the vast refugee camps near the Myanmar border, officials said yesterday. The murder last September of Mohib Ullah, the head of an important civil society group, sent shockwaves through the massive settlements that house hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled a violent crackdown by Myanmar's army in 2017.

His family blamed the murder on the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which is the main Rohingya insurgent group in western Myanmar and believed to be involved in drug smuggling and violent crime in the camps. On Saturday, an elite Bangladeshi police unit arrested Moulvi Zakoria, the alleged chief of the Ulema Council, a council of powerful clerics tied to ARSA. "Moulvi Zokaria issued a fatwa (a religious edict) to assassinate Mohib Ullah. Then Mohib Ullah was killed. Zakoria went into hiding," said police official Naimul Haque. Haque said Zakoria had "disagreements with Mohib Ullah".

"Mohib Ullah was working for the repatriation of Rohingya people to Myanmar. But the work of the so-called ARSA was to destroy the discipline in the camps," he said. The overwhelming majority of the Rohingya people are conservative Muslims. Sources said ARSA has a firm grip on the religious affairs of the Rohingya people through the Ulema Council. In October last year, ARSA was also accused of killing six people in an Islamic seminary in a refugee camp in Bangladesh's southeast, which was allegedly controlled by its rival, Islami Mahad. Working among the chaos and unease in the camps, Ullah and his colleagues quietly documented the crimes that his people suffered at the hands of the Myanmar military while pressing for better conditions.

The former schoolteacher shot to prominence in 2019 when he organised a protest of about 100,000 people in the camps to mark two years since their exodus. He also met US president Donald Trump in the White House that year and addressed a UN meeting in Geneva. But his fame appears to have gone down badly with ARSA. They saw Ullah as threatening their place as the sole voice representing the Rohingya-one who was opposed to their violence, his colleagues and rights activists say. - AFP