Two boats carrying an estimated 530 Rohingya asylum seekers left Myanmar’s Rakhine state on 29 June, and have not been heard from since. The equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people has vanished.
It is very likely that they both capsized. The monsoon has started, the seas are rough, and the boats – usually old fishing trawlers converted to carry as many people as possible – are barely sea-worthy with unreliable engines.
It is also very likely that there were few, or no survivors. Half of them may have been women and children.
But we will never know for certain.
Rakhine has been in a state of war for many years, with the insurgent Arakan Army driving the Myanmar military out of most of it and besieging its last stronghold in the state capital Sittwe, which is now accessible only by air and sea. Almost all telecommunications have been cut by the military.
Chris Lewa, who runs the Arakan Project that campaigns to improve the situation of Rohingyas, has been trying to piece together what may have happened to the two boats.
This is extremely challenging. She no longer has contacts she can reach in Sittwe, or in Sin Tet Maw, the Arakan Army-controlled village from where the boats departed.
But through a series of other contacts, combined with other snippets of information, she is confident that both boats did leave on 29 June, one in the morning, the other later in the day.
She says they would have been heading for the southern coast of Myanmar, where they would unload their human cargo.
From there they would be transported by road, via rough transit camps in the forest, through Thailand to the Malaysian border.
Normally their families would expect to hear from them within a week or 10 days. Nearly three weeks later, they have heard nothing.
The Bangladesh authorities have recovered the body of one woman, washed up from the sea. Fishermen working the sea between the Irrawaddy delta and the coast of Mon state found several other bodies nine days later.
Chris Lewa believes all this suggests that the boats capsized, one several hours after leaving Sin Tet Maw, the other after several days of sailing south east.
There are more than a million Rohingyas living in over-crowded camps in southern Bangladesh, where aid is drying up, there are almost no jobs, and organised crime gangs operate freely. They are not allowed to leave.
