Over 500 Rohingya asylum seekers feared dead after reports of boats capsizing off Myanmar

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - BANGKOK — Two boats carrying carrying an estimated 530 Rohingya asylum seekers are feared to have capsized off the coast of Myanmar, United Nations agencies have said.

The boats left Myanmar in late June and have not been heard from since.

According to preliminary information reported on Thursday by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), the two vessels departed from Myanmar’s Rakhine State on June 29 carrying mostly Rohingya passengers.

One boat, believed to have been carrying about 250 people, lost contact shortly after departure. A second boat, reportedly carrying some 280 people, is believed to have sunk off Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady coast on July 8, they said.

“While the incidents and casualty figures have yet to be officially confirmed, UNHCR and IOM are gravely concerned by the potentially devastating loss of life,” read the statement.

Chris Lewa, who runs the Arakan Project that campaigns to improve the situation of Rohingyas, has been trying to piece together what may have happened to the two boats.

She no longer has contacts she can reach in Sittwe, or in Sin Tet Maw, the Arakan Army-controlled village from where the boats departed.

But through a series of other contacts, combined with other snippets of information, she is confident that both boats did leave on 29 June, one in the morning, the other later in the day.

She says they would have been heading for the southern coast of Myanmar, where they would unload their human cargo.

From there they would be transported by road, via rough transit camps in the forest, through Thailand to the Malaysian border.

Normally their families would expect to hear from them within a week or 10 days. Nearly three weeks later, they have heard nothing.

The Bangladesh authorities have recovered the body of one woman, washed up from the sea. Fishermen working the sea between the Irrawaddy delta and the coast of Mon state found several other bodies nine days later.

Chris Lewa believes all this suggests that the boats capsized, one several hours after leaving Sin Tet Maw, the other after several days of sailing south east.

Before the latest incidents, more than 300 people had been killed or reported missing in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal, it said. These included Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi nationals, it added.

″While the incidents and casualty figures have yet to be officially confirmed, UNHCR and IOM are gravely concerned by the potentially devastating loss of life,” the agencies said.

The Rohingya, who have in recent years fled both Myanmar and Bangladesh’s refugee camps by the thousands, typically avoid such boat journeys at this time of year, when monsoons are frequent, and conditions at sea are particularly dangerous.

There are more than a million Rohingyas living in over-crowded camps in southern Bangladesh, where aid is drying up, there are almost no jobs, and organized crime gangs operate freely.

The UNHCR and IOM noted this in their statement, saying that recent torrential rain and flooding across the region would have made such journeys especially risky.