Majuma Begum stayed awake until 3am waiting for her son to return from the market before accepting he was not coming home. The next day he phoned to say he was on the Bangladeshi coast, waiting to begin a boat journey to Malaysia that she had desperately tried to stop him taking.
It was the start of weeks of worry for the 58-year-old, whose fears deepened when a boat carrying Rohingya refugees capsized near Malaysia in early November, killing dozens. She felt as though she could finally breathe again when he finally reached his destination.
Begum’s 16-year-old son, Abu Musa, is among thousands from the persecuted Myanmar ethnic minority to have boarded boats in the past two months, according to the Arakan Project, a human rights organisation based in the region that tracks Rohingya boat journeys.
They are trying to escape the refugee camps in Bangladesh, where despair has set in after aid cuts led to food rations being reduced and health facilities closing, or from Myanmar, where the Muslim minority have faced decades of violence and persecution.
The Guardian has spoken to refugees who have arrived in Malaysia and to the families of those who left. Among them are young men who fled the deteriorating conditions in the refugee camps and women sent to marry Rohingya men or to reunite with husbands already in Malaysia.
More than 1.1 million Rohingya refugees live in Bangladesh’s camps near the Myanmar border; three-quarters of them arriving in 2017 after “genocidal” massacres of Rohingya people by the Myanmar military.
Conditions in Bangladesh are difficult, as the government has imposed strict limits on the refugees’ ability to work or move freely. There is also little access to education in the overcrowded camps, which have seen another 200,000 refugees arrive from Myanmar’s Rakhine state since 2024.
The newer arrivals have fled conflict between the country’s military and the rebel Arakan Army, who are accused of forcibly conscripting Rohingya and targeting civilians, in Rakhine state, the northern region of Myanmar that was home to most of the Rohingya.
The Arakan Project, which has monitored the persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar since 1999, says it has documented 22 boats leaving the Bay of Bengal to south-east Asia since September, carrying a total of about 4,000 people.
The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, says 600 Rohingya have died or gone missing at sea this year, either travelling between Myanmar and Bangladesh or on longer journeys across south-east Asia.
Many Rohingya are enticed by people traffickers with the promise of better lives away from Bangladesh. But the migrants can be kidnapped and held for ransom at various points along the route.
Chris Lewa, coordinator of the Arakan Project, says it is hard to know the exact numbers of people who have left. Refugees are held in secret locations – in warehouses, forests or along the coast – then ferried out on small boats to a larger ship at sea where hundreds are held.
The traffickers then demand money from the migrants’ families. “If they delay, then they are beaten. Often they beat them on camera, so the family in Bangladesh can see it,” she says. “I have testimony from families saying their daughters or wives are being beaten, sometimes their legs being put in wooden stocks – horrible things.”
Abu Musa left Bangladesh because he felt that Bangladesh’s restrictions on refugees working or going to school left him without a future.
“My mother didn’t want me to leave the camp and she was watching me all the time. Then one day I left our shelter, telling her that I’m going to market but I went straight to Teknaf [on the coast] with my friends,” he says.
It took 26 days for Musa and his friends to reach Malaysia, on a route that involved two weeks at sea and being held in trafficking camps in Myanmar and Thailand along the way. Towards the end, they went at least six days without food.
“When I ask about his journey, he just cries and he doesn’t say anything,” says his mother.
Lewa believes levels of migration between the Bay of Bengal and south-east Asia could be comparable with its peak in 2015, when about 170,000 people were trafficked over three years, according to Human Rights Watch.
The discovery of mass graves in Thailand in May 2015 led to a crackdown on trafficking networks. But now it appears they are growing again. Lewa believes aid cuts in Bangladesh and violence in Myanmar are fuelling the desperation that propels high numbers of Rohingya to the traffickers.
A Rohingya broker, who has recruited for the traffickers since 2018, says so many people want to go that she no longer has to seek them out as they now come to her.
Myanmar criminals pay her 20,000 Bangladeshi taka (£122) for each person she recruits. Those people themselves have to pay about 500,000 taka – with the traffickers then able to extort further amounts from them through ransom demands.
“There is no limit to how many people can go,” she says. “The traffickers can take people from many places; some boats can take 400 people.”
Like Musa, 13-year-old Furkahan went missing from his family’s shelter in late October.
“We looked everywhere – in the shelters of our relatives, of our friends, his school, in every place he used to go – but we could not find him anywhere,” says the boy’s father, Abdul Hoque, 35.
The family were distraught. Since leaving Myanmar in 2017, Hoque had spent all of the money he had on private tuition for his son offered by other refugees in lieu of formal schooling.
After two days of searching, they received a call from a trafficker in Teknaf saying the boy was “on the way” to Malaysia and demanding 350,000 taka for his “safe arrival”.
The boat departed on 29 October and there has still been no news. They fear he could have been on a boat that sunk near the border between Malaysia and Thailand on 9 November, carrying about 70 Rohingya.
His mother, Rashida, 30, says: “We cannot sleep or eat. We only pray to hear something, anything, about our son.”
According to Lewa, 36 bodies have been recovered by Thai and Malaysian authorities, with 26 people rescued; eight remain missing. The boat’s passengers had been on a larger boat holding about 300 people but had disembarked on to smaller boats to land on the Malaysian coast.
Malaysia’s human rights commission said last month that it was “perplexed and appalled” by the country’s decision to charge 11 of the shipwreck’s survivors for entering without valid documentation.
The family of 24-year-old Robina Bibi were distraught to learn that she and her five-year-old son had died in the tragedy. Bibi was scared but persuaded to travel by her husband, who had already reached Malaysia.
The family say they last spoke to her when she left on 26 October but had repeatedly called traffickers, who insisted she would reach Malaysia safely until finally admitting she had drowned when the boat capsized. The trafficker no longer accepts their calls.
Robina Bibi’s father, Abul Baser, says his wife was already unwell and but has gone into a coma-like state from the shock of the news.
“I have lost my daughter and that means I lost my world. The world has become a dark place for me,” he says. “She feared the water a lot and she didn’t need to go there but she was bullied to go there.”
He blames Rohingya deaths at sea on a lack of international action to allow the refugees to return home safely to Myanmar.
“If the world doesn’t take any step nowadays, the whole Rohingya generation will be lost in the sea and in the jungle,” he says.
