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Acehnese hospitality towards Rohingya refugees

Indonesia Project

Event details

Indonesia Study Group

Date & time

Wednesday 10 May 2017
12.30pm–2.00pm

Venue

Lennox Room, Level 1, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU

Speaker

Antje Missbach, Monash University.

Contacts

Indonesia Project

Acehnese hospitality towards Rohingya refugees: welcoming victims, strangers, brothers, or aid recipients?

In May 2015, the discovery of mass graves on both sides of the Thailand–Malaysia border caused international outcry. The discoveries were made in camps known to be reception points for Rohingya smuggled from Myanmar. As police and international media focused on the graves, smugglers abandoned their Rohingya ‘cargo’ at sea. Between 5000 and 8000 Rohingya became stranded on boats in the Andaman Sea. When some of the abandoned passengers managed to steer their vessels towards the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, authorities initially refused them permission to land. But Malaysia and Indonesia eventually agreed to allow the Rohingya to disembark and offered them sanctuary for up to one year. In Aceh, where the Rohingya were brought on to Indonesian shores, the refugees were met with an unusual degree of hospitality.

This paper examines different explanations for why a group of more than 1000 Rohingya refugees stranded in Aceh were treated differently from asylum seekers and refugees residing in other parts of Indonesia. Given the overall lack of a legal framework for refugee protection in Indonesia, the actions of non-state actors in Aceh were widely praised. This paper, however, argues that Acehnese motivations were not necessarily as altruistic as they are widely claimed to be. Instead, actors engaged in a subtle instrumentalisation of hospitality for non-refugee related purposes. The paper challenges assumptions that the Aceh model serves as an alternative humanitarian response to refugee crises.

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