Ten years ago this month, thousands of Rohingya refugees stranded on wooden fishing boats in the Andaman Sea brought global attention to a crisis spanning five countries. That attention was fleeting. A decade on, the perilous journeys continue out of the public eye.
From 2012 to 2015, about 170,000 Rohingya Muslims fled persecution in Myanmar and the refugee camps of Bangladesh on overcrowded smugglers’ boats. In May 2015, pushbacks by Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia left an estimated 8,000 Rohingya adrift in the open sea, at risk of dehydration, illness, and drowning. Harrowing details of violent traffickers, mass graves, and hundreds of deaths at sea triggered regional and international pledges to better protect migrants and trafficking victims in Southeast Asia.
Today, Rohingya seeking asylum are still being beaten, extorted, and left to die, while the violence and repression pushing them from their homes has surged. Trafficking routes have grown increasingly complex and risky.
Earlier this May, an estimated 427 Rohingya died at sea when two boats sank during the recently arrived monsoon season. “Nearly 1 out of 5 people attempting perilous sea movements in this region have been reported as dead or missing so far in 2025, making the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal waters amongst the deadliest in the world,” the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, reported. Over the past year, more than 1,000 Rohingya are known to have died or gone missing at sea.
Thousands of Rohingya embark on these high-risk journeys each year to escape the unending oppression and armed conflict in Rakhine State and growing hopelessness and desperation in Bangladesh’s refugee camps. Most are looking to reach Malaysia or Indonesia, for the promise of work and relative freedoms, despite the threats of boat pushbacks and immigration detention that await them.
“The smugglers would beat us with whatever they could find, wooden or plastic rods, and wouldn’t let us leave the warehouse,” a 24-year-old Rohingya man told us. He had fled Myanmar’s western Rakhine State in June 2024 with his pregnant wife after their village was bombed and burned. Fighting between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army armed group has intensified since November 2023, bringing a wave of killings, arson, forced recruitment, and mass displacement.
The couple spent a week crowded on a boat with about 160 other Rohingya before traveling overland toward the Thailand border. The wife went into labor and was separated from the group. They were reunited after she gave birth at a warehouse along the border, where smugglers held all three for about three months because they lacked the funds to pay for the rest of the journey to Malaysia.
“Two-thirds of the people in the warehouse were abused because they couldn’t pay the fees,” the 24-year-old said. “They put our legs in wooden devices.” He said the family all got scabies, including their newborn daughter. They were able to cross the border into Thailand only after paying about $5,000.
In early May, Indian authorities rounded up dozens of Rohingya refugees in Delhi, sending about 40 of them away on a navy ship in the Andaman Sea. They were forced into the water, the U.N. reported, abandoned to swim ashore to a Myanmar island.
UNHCR estimates that 33,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar and Bangladesh from 2022 to 2024. The journeys are increasingly undertaken by Rohingya women and children, who now account for about 70 percent of those fleeing by sea.
A 13-year-old Rohingya boy fled his village in late 2024 out of fear of being forcibly recruited into the Myanmar military. He traveled first by boat with about 200 others, then overland to Myawaddy, near the Thai border. He too was kept at a warehouse when he could not pay the smugglers or contact his family.
“After two months, when it was clear I couldn’t pay, I was beaten,” he told us. “I was put in a wooden lock and my hands were tied and beaten every day, almost for one month…. They said if I couldn’t pay, they would sell us.” He and eight others who could not pay, including other boys, were sold to another trafficker, who moved them to a cell where they were regularly beaten. They managed to escape after 10 days and he fled across the border into Thailand.
Another Rohingya refugee, who spent 10 weeks in a smugglers’ warehouse, said there were about 300 Rohingya when he arrived, and another 400 who passed through while he was trying to get money to leave.
Responsibility for the security and well-being of the Rohingya rests first with Myanmar, but also extends to the countries where they seek refuge and the broader international community – especially when conditions in Rakhine State don’t currently allow for their safe return.
Regional and global actors should capitalize on several events in upcoming months to better coordinate protection for Rohingya refugees across Asia, including the 46th ASEAN Summit this week, and the high-level meeting on the Rohingya at the U.N. General Assembly in September.
Southeast Asian governments should end pushbacks at land and at sea, screen and identify victims of trafficking, provide Rohingya with access to protection, and ensure they are not forcibly returned to Myanmar, where they face persecution. Other governments should step up to share the burden, including by increasing resettlement opportunities for Rohingya refugees.
Above all, governments need to hold the Myanmar military accountable for its unremitting abuses against the Rohingya, so that the past decade of treacherous asylum seeking will one day come to an end.
