More than 500 Rohingya vanish at sea – what happened?

Two boats carrying an estimated 530 Rohingya refugees left Myanmar’s Rakhine state on June 29 and have not been heard from since. The equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people has disappeared.

It is very likely that both will capsize. The monsoon has begun, the seas are rough and the boats (usually old fishing trawlers converted to carry as many people as possible) can barely keep up going out to sea with their unreliable engines.

It is also likely that there will be few or no survivors. Half of them may be women and children.

But we’ll never know for sure.

Rakhine has been in a state of war for many years as the rebel Arakan Army has decimated Myanmar’s military and laid siege to its last stronghold in the state capital, Sittwe, which is now only accessible by air and sea. Almost all telecommunications were cut off.

Chris Lewa, who runs the Arakan Project, which campaigns to improve the situation of the Rohingya, is trying to piece together what might have happened to the two boats.

This is extremely difficult. He no longer has contacts in Sittwe or the Arakan Army-controlled village of Sin Tet Maw where the boats depart.

But thanks to a series of other contacts combined with other brief information, he is certain that both boats set out on June 29, one in the morning and the other later in the day.

He said they would head to Myanmar’s southern coast, where they would unload their human cargo into smaller boats and put them back on land.

From there they will be transported by land, through difficult transit camps in the jungle, through Thailand to the Malaysian border.

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

Bangladesh authorities found the body of a woman washed ashore. Nine days later, fishermen working in the sea between the Irrawaddy delta and the coast of Mon State found many more bodies.

Chris Lewa believes that all this indicates that one of the boats capsized a few hours after leaving Sin Tet Maw, and the other after sailing southeast for several days.

More than a million Rohingya live in overcrowded camps in southern Bangladesh; Here, benefits are running out, there are almost no jobs, and organized crime gangs operate freely. They are not allowed to leave.