After 36 hours adrift at sea, clinging to an imaginatively improvised float, two Bangladeshi friends reached the shore of Indonesia’s far northwest coast alive to tell their remarkable tale.
The pair had been aboard a cramped boat carrying hundreds of desperate migrants to Malaysia when one of them, Habibur Rahman, unable to withstand hunger pangs, tried to take some food, and was caught and thrown overboard by furious fellow passengers.
His companion, Saiful Islam, watched helplessly as Habibur – his close friend since childhood – disappeared over the side, before he flung himself into the water after him.
The pair from Pabna are just two of an estimated 2,000 boat people from Myanmar and Bangladesh who have swum ashore, been rescued or intercepted off Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days.
Saiful and Habibur were fortunate to make land at a beach in East Aceh. After they went overboard, their cries were ignored and the boat sailed on leaving the men, both aged 30, bobbing in the open ocean with nothing but their traditional clothing to help keep them afloat.
“We made the sarong I was wearing into a balloon,” Habibur, a father of two, told the AFP. “We hung onto it and swam away, without any clear direction.”
They drank seawater as their situation became more desperate, scanning the featureless horizons for fishing boats.
But as the light faded on the second evening of their time adrift at sea, their spirits rose.
“At night, we saw a light,” Saiful said, describing what turned out to be a tower in the far distance.
They managed to make shore but the fate of their fellow passengers is far from certain. The Indonesian navy towed the boat back out to sea on Tuesday, and it has not been seen since.
Fears for migrants as SE Asia refuses safe haven
Malaysia joined Indonesia yesterday in vowing to turn back vessels bearing a wave of migrants, drawing warnings that the hardline policy could be a death sentence for boatloads of people at risk of starvation and disease.
As the UN’s refugee agency accused regional authorities of playing with lives, more grim accounts emerged from among refugees and migrants who have endured weeks of torment at sea.
Mizanur Rahman, a 14-year-old Bangladeshi boy, said he and a friend spent two agonising months crammed aboard a boat with an estimated 600 other people.
They subsisted on a single plate of rice per day, but were given nothing to eat towards the end of the voyage, Mizanur told the AFP.
Others aboard that vessel said they saw at least six people die of sickness or hunger, only to have their bodies tossed overboard.
Meanwhile, Thailand has called for a May 29 regional summit to address what it called an “unprecedented increase” in migrant arrivals.
But Malaysia said it would turn away boats entering its waters unless they were about to sink. The Indonesian navy already has turned away at least one vessel packed with hundreds of abandoned migrants.
