When Myusup Mansur, a fisherman from the small island village of Pusung, first caught a glimpse of the boat in the distance in waters off North Sumatra, it was dark and impossible for him to make out the hundreds of migrants huddled on the deck.
It was only when two other fishermen pulled up and told him what they had seen that he realised what was happening: scores of people were jumping from the boat into the sea.
‘They needed help’ They headed in the direction of the boat while radioing in for rescue reinforcement on the way. “We helped them because they needed help,” said Mansur (38). “What is more human than that?” Some 677 migrants were brought ashore late last Thursday by Mansur and his fellow fishermen.
While governments around the region have refused to receive what is thought to be thousands of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh stranded and starving in the Andaman Sea, the fishermen of Indonesia have stepped up to fill the humanitarian void.
More than 1,350 migrants, a mixture of ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar and migrants from Bangladesh, have landed on the shores of Aceh, Indonesia, this week and in each case it has been the fishermen who had come to their rescue.
Mansur and the other two fishermen’s small boats could take only about 30 people each but there were many more migrants waiting to be rescued. “I was lost for words,” he said. “I was panicked, because I have never seen so many people in the water like that. I kept pulling them from the water one by one, I couldn’t count how many, but my boat was full. After that I couldn’t take any more and there were still people crying for help.
“I didn’t understand their language. I couldn’t ask them anything, and I couldn’t understand what they were asking,” he added. “They just kept calling to me for help.”
‘Will do the same again’ Nearly two hours passed before six large fishing boats that had also been out at sea arrived to help. The fishermen laboured together, pulling the migrants from the sea and transferring them from boat to boat.
Mansur said he would do the same again if faced with another similar situation.
Suryadi, from the fishermen association in Langsa, Aceh, said: “We helped out of solidarity. If we find someone in the ocean we have to help them no matter who they are. The police did not like us helping but we could not avoid it. Our sense of humanity was higher. So we just helped with the limited resources that we had at the time.”
Over recent weeks boats full of migrants have been pushed back and forth between the navies of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, with no country willing to take them in. The United Nations estimates that up to 8,000 more are languishing at sea. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
