Opinion Two years after Myanmar coup: Let’s not forget Rohingya refugees adrift at sea

Initially, life in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh provided a semblance of security and stability to the Rohingya. Along with a roof over their heads, these camps provided them with an opportunity to share, with the world, stories of the horrors they’ve faced. Conditions in the camps, which currently host about a million refugees, have deteriorated. From rising poverty due to a lack of employment opportunities, to the constant threat of violence by criminal gangs and armed groups, the Rohingya continue to face multi-faceted threats in these camps. Rising complaints by the host population of supposed resource degradation and social instability have driven the Sheikh Hasina government to ship off some 30,000 of the refugees to Bhashan Char, a remote, offshore island formed by silt deposition.

That the camps in Bangladesh are turning into hostile territory for the Rohingya, much like their enclosed villages and IDP camps in Myanmar, is shown by a steady uptick in refugee crossings through the Andaman Sea. In 2022, hundreds of them took to the sea from Bangladesh and Myanmar on boats arranged by smugglers in search of a better life in Southeast Asia. However, many of them found themselves in the maws of death in the middle of the high seas when their rickety vessels gave up halfway through. In December 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that one of the boats with around 180 refugees had fallen off the radar and everyone on board was presumed dead. Days later, more than 200 Rohingya washed up ashore on a beach in northwestern Indonesia’s Aceh Province in two separate boats. On January 8, another boat with 184 refugees washed up in Aceh.

This isn’t the first time the Rohingya are taking to the sea en masse to reach Southeast Asia. In the first half of 2015, some 30,000 attempted to make this dangerous voyage from Bangladesh and Myanmar. The numbers dipped sharply in the following years until they began climbing again in 2021. According to the UN refugee agency, 2022 saw a more than six-fold increase in a year in Rohingya refugee crossings across the Andaman Sea. In terms of the dead and the missing, too, 2022 was one of the worst years in recent memory.

What’s particularly striking, and rather disturbing, is the absolute lack of response from any of the countries in the region to this recurrent humanitarian tragedy. Despite the UNHCR, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), and several Rohingya activists publicly releasing detailed information about the distressed, non-seaworthy vessels and issuing categorical calls for their rescue, no country or national maritime force in the Bay of Bengal littoral region has made any attempt to proactively look for or rescue the refugees. The only exception was the Sri Lankan Navy, which rescued some 105 Rohingya from the country’s northern shores on December 18, 2022.

After the 2015 crossings when hundreds perished at sea, countries part of the “Bali Process”, a 49-member grouping formed in 2002, met in the Indonesian province and signed the 2016 Bali Declaration to collectively address the crisis and take the classic “never again” pledge. Two years later, they signed another declaration and took another pledge. But, merely six years on, we are witnessing a dramatic return of these catastrophic sea crossings. Clearly, something is failing.

Is this a crisis of institutions? It is easy to blame institutions, but they do not fail by themselves. They are made to fail by the same people who create them. The Bay of Bengal region today is plagued, first and foremost, by a crisis of empathy. No government in the region wants to go out of its way to protect the Rohingya, let alone allow them to disembark in their territory. At the outset, this is because most of these countries are not state parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention. But, this isn’t just about one UN treaty. Rising xenophobia, nationalism, and sectarianism, manifested in hate speech, militarised border regimes, and coordinated disinformation campaigns on social media, continue to fuel institutional apathy in several parts of the region.

This is a crisis that institutions, by themselves, cannot fix. It demands a wholesale change of popular attitudes and political narratives, backed by a conscientious recognition by all governments in the region that refugees need affirmative protection. This is not easy. Most nations don’t want to talk about the stateless community in bilateral or multilateral discussions, lest other “more important” political, economic or security agendas fall apart. For this reason, a frank discussion about protecting Rohingya refugees at sea within the Bali Process, BIMSTEC, ASEAN or SAARC remains a pipe dream.

So, if states are failing to protect them what can be done? One potential alternative is private sector or NGO participation in search and rescue operations in the Andaman Sea. In the Mediterranean Sea, the key conduits for migrant crossings from Africa to Europe are several humanitarian NGOs, such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and SOS Méditerranée. They work in tandem with governments and their maritime forces. Could this model be replicated in the Bay of Bengal region?

In theory, yes. The Information Fusion Centre, Indian Ocean region (IFC-IOR), an integrated nodal point for maritime data collection, set up by the Indian government in 2018, could provide technical support to private rescue ships, given that it is already tracking irregular migrant crossings across the Indian Ocean. However, there remains the serious challenge of safe disembarkation. No country in the Bay of Bengal would likely be keen on receiving large groups of Rohingya refugees without a guarantee of swift repatriation. While this takes us back to square one, it is worth a try. Some countries in the region might, in fact, be happy to outsource refugee SAR operations to NGOs. Since this is a humanitarian crisis, all alternatives must be given a shot.

The writer is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Previously, he was Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Southeast Asia Research Programme at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi