At least three boats carrying Rohingya refugees have been adrift for more than two months. As of this week, rights groups that had been tracking the boats lost sight of them.
The belongings of Rohingya refugees lying on the shore last month as their boat remained anchored nearby in Teknaf, Bangladesh.Credit...Suzauddin Rubel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BANGKOK — Somewhere in turquoise waters, perhaps where the Bay of Bengal meets the Andaman Sea, wooden boats filled with Rohingya refugees are listing, adrift now for more than 10 weeks.
They were prevented from docking in Malaysia, their preferred destination, and Bangladesh, their port of origin. As of this week, rights groups that had been trying to track the boats by satellite lost sight of them. Each boat — there were at least three — carried hundreds of Rohingya Muslims desperate for sanctuary and at the mercy of human traffickers.
“I feel like crying, realizing the situation of my brothers and sisters who are still floating in the deep sea,” said Mohammad Yusuf, a chief imam in one of the refugee camps in Bangladesh, where about one million Rohingya have taken refuge after fleeing waves of persecution and violence in neighboring Myanmar.
The boats had been caught in what the United Nations has called a dangerous “game of human Ping-Pong.” The Bangladeshi government balked at accepting them, arguing that it has already taken in many Rohingya and borne a far greater share of the burden in the refugee crisis than any other nation.
But with Malaysia refusing to allow the boats to dock amid a national coronavirus lockdown, and a xenophobic mood sweeping the region, the boats had nowhere else to go.
“Bangladesh has shouldered very heavy responsibilities for the Rohingya refugees and must not be left alone to deal with these challenges,” said Steven Corliss, the United Nations refugee agency’s representative in Bangladesh. “But turning desperate people away cannot be the answer.”
The deadly results of such a rejection became clear on April 15 when another Rohingya boat that had been prevented from docking in Malaysia was rescued by the Bangladeshi Coast Guard. Nearly 400 malnourished and dehydrated figures, many of them children, emerged from the hold, where they had been kept by human traffickers.
The United Nations refugee agency, which assessed the refugees’ condition, did not quantify how many Rohingya perished on the journey, saying simply that “many died and were tossed overboard.” A significant number had suffered physical abuse at the hands of the traffickers, the agency said.
Rohingya refugees gather after being rescued last month in Teknaf near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.Credit...Suzauddin Rubel/Associated Press
