More than 500 Rohingya missing at sea – what happened?

Two boats carrying an estimated 530 Rohingya asylum seekers left Myanmar’s Rakhine State on June 29, and have not been heard from since. Gone is the equation of a jumbo jet full of people.

Both are likely to be copied. Monsoon has set in, the sea is rough, and the boats – usually old fishing boats converted to carry as many people as possible – are seaworthy with unreliable engines.

And few are likely to be missing or surviving. Half of them may be women and children.

But we can’t know for sure.

Rakhine has been at war for years, with the insurgent Arakan Army driving Myanmar’s army out of much of its territory and laying siege to its last stronghold in the state capital, Sittwe, which is now accessible only by air and sea. Almost all telecommunications were cut off.

Chris Lewa, who runs the Arakan Project, which campaigns for the betterment of the Rohingya, is trying to piece together what happened to the two boats.

This is extremely challenging. She no longer has contacts in Sittwe or Arakan Army-controlled Sin Tet Maw, where the boats depart from.

But through a series of other contacts, combined with other pieces of information, she is certain that both boats left on June 29, one in the morning, the other later in the day.

They were heading to the southern coast of Myanmar, she said, where they would unload their cargo onto small boats and put them on dry land.

From there, they are transported by road, through rough transit camps in the jungle, through Thailand to the Malaysian border.

Families typically expect to hear from them within a week or 10 days. Three weeks later, they heard nothing.

Bangladeshi authorities have recovered the body of a woman washed up in the sea. Nine days later, fishermen working in the sea between the Irrawaddy Delta and the Mon State coast found several more bodies.

Chris Lewa suggests that all of this suggests that the boats sailed several hours after leaving Sin Tet Maw, and the second that they sailed to the southeast several days later.

More than a million Rohingya live in overcrowded camps in southern Bangladesh, where aid is drying up, jobs are virtually non-existent, and organized crime groups operate freely. They are not allowed to leave.