At least 250 people are feared dead or missing after a boat capsized in the Andaman Sea on the way to Malaysia, the International Organization of Migration said this week, marking the latest incident involving Rohingya refugees undertaking risky journeys by sea in hopes of finding a better life.
Most of them depart from Bangladesh’s coastal Cox’s Bazar district, where nearly 1.3 million Rohingya are trapped inside squalid camps with limited access to job opportunities and education.
As international aid for the refugee community has been dropping since 2021, aid agencies and the Bangladeshi government have been facing difficulties in covering the costs of education, healthcare and food, thus furthering the Rohingya’s struggle to survive.
“The lives of the Rohingya are very miserable here at the Rohingya camps. They are very hopeless with the current situation,” Mizanur Rahman, refugee relief and repatriation commissioner in Cox’s Bazar, told Arab News on Thursday evening.
“The reality is that they see a bleak future in front of them. If they consider that a better life is there on the other side of the sea, they must want to go there. I fear that this trend will further increase in the coming days.”
In 2025, IOM reported at least 890 Rohingya refugees — out of more than 6,500 people — had died or gone missing trying to relocate to another country through deadly sea crossings, the highest figure since 2014.
For years, many Rohingya have risked their lives by crossing on fragile wooden boats to reach countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, fleeing persecution in Myanmar and harsh conditions in Bangladesh’s overcrowded refugee camps.
“This sort of boat journey is very risky and inhumane. The passengers are forced to lie down beneath the deck of the wooden boat, packed tightly against one another. There is no scope to make even a little movement,” Sayed Ullah, a Rohingya community leader and acting president of the United Council of Rohingya, told Arab News, citing past testimonies from survivors.
“When people become hopeless, future-less and dream-less in their lives, they become desperate to change their luck. It’s a human instinct.”
According to the IOM, the trawler that carried at least 250 people departed from Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar had reportedly sunk on April 9 due to overcrowding, strong winds and rough seas.
Passengers of such boats usually face “indescribable sufferings,” Ullah said, which require them to get medical treatment after the weeks-long journey.
A predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, the Rohingya have lived for centuries in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State but were stripped of their citizenship in the 1980s.
Since then, many have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, with about 700,000 arriving in 2017 alone following a brutal military crackdown in their native state.A UN-backed repatriation and resettlement process of the Rohingya has yet to take off for the past few years, despite multiple attempts from Bangladeshi authorities.
Their struggles have amplified in recent years, as funding shortages forced the UN’s food agency, the World Food Programme, to slash food rations for the Rohingya.
The latest cut, which went into force on April 1, reduced food assistance to $7 a month for some 200,000 people. Around a third of the refugees received $12 while the remainder of the group were given $10, depending on the severity of their family’s needs.
“We have been experiencing this hardship for the last nine years. In such conditions, people can’t live here. That’s why the youth are considering that if they can go to Malaysia or somewhere else even with risking their lives, they would be able to provide some support to the family members,” Ullah said.
“It will at least ensure food for the children, as education has become a luxury here. Driven by this thought, people are risking their lives.”