Bangladesh, explained.
People rescued by a Malaysian vessel near the Malaysia-Thailand border, at a jetty in Langkawi on 11 November 2025 (Hakim Mustapha/AFP via Getty Images)
Regional states may prefer not to see what is happening, but wilful blindness does not make the boats disappear.
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Rohingya boats: Out of mind but still comingRohingya boats: Out of mind but still coming
In November, the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) launched a week-long rescue operation near the maritime border with Thailand after news emerged of a boat capsize. Fourteen Rohingya survivors were rescued and 36 bodies recovered at sea from an estimated 90 passengers aboard.
Despite the many victims, this operation has been praised as a positive, life-saving intervention and it stands in stark contrast to Malaysia’s usual approach. In recent years, Malaysia has implemented pushback policies and delayed calls to conduct search-and-rescue operations. The November rescue was an exception: a rare moment when Rohingya became visible to regional authorities willing to rescue refugees in distress at sea.
But here is the worrying question: what about all the other Rohingya boats?
The business of transporting Rohingya across the Andaman Sea has not diminished. It has adapted, becoming more clandestine, more dangerous.
Rohingya have been travelling across the Andaman Sea towards Malaysia regularly since 2006. These journeys are extraordinarily dangerous: one in five does not make it. While Aceh in Indonesia has received the largest number of arrivals (45 boats between 2009 and 2025), this current sailing season from November to March has seen hardly any boats reported. To some observers, this looks like success: the refugee flow stemmed, the smuggling networks disrupted.
But we contend this is a dangerous and misguided view. Fewer sightings and encounters do not mean fewer departures. Rohingya continue to leave from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Rakhine state in Myanmar in significant numbers.
Most Rohingya are still trying to reach Malaysia, where the diaspora has grown from around 5,000 in the 1990s to more than 200,000 today. But direct maritime passage is no longer viable. Pushbacks and non-disembarkation policies by regional states are the most decisive factors shaping these journeys and have forced smugglers to adapt.
Rohingya are now transported by boat to the Myanmar-Thai border, from where they must walk across the border on foot. In some cases they are forced to walk for days through Thailand. Sometimes they are transported to the Thai-Malaysia border by car. This came to light when a cement truck was involved in a road accident on the Asia Highway in Phattalung on 13 January 2026. Upon arriving at the scene, police discovered that the truck was carrying 30 Rohingya concealed under a tarpaulin at the back, and that seven women had been injured.
To extract payment that often far exceeds what was originally agreed, smugglers hold them in makeshift jungle camps. When families cannot pay immediately, smugglers record beatings and send the footage to relatives as coercion.
A boat carrying Rohingya in Jangka, Bireuen, Aceh in 2023 (Supplied)
These dynamics are sadly familiar. More than a decade ago, transnational smuggling networks operated the same Thai-Malaysian border routes. Hundreds died in captivity when they could not secure their release payments on time, including those buried in the mass graves discovered at Wang Kelian in 2015. Thousands more were sold into debt bondage, labouring under harsh conditions to pay off their journey costs. The brutality of the networks was well known, but the involvement of high-ranking security officials and civilian authorities on both sides of the border allowed this inhumane traffic to continue with impunity for many years.
Even after the international outcry following the discovery of mass graves and the arrests of several key figures, these networks were not eradicated completely but merely went dormant.
Why do Rohingya keep embarking on these deadly journeys? The answer lies in a regional protection vacuum that leaves them with few alternatives.
In Bangladesh, where approximately one million Rohingya refugees remain, protection and basic care have deteriorated sharply. Some camps in Cox’s Bazar are now controlled by criminal gangs who attack residents with impunity. Forced recruitment of young men by militias is omnipresent. Neither the Bangladeshi government nor UNHCR can guarantee safety in the camps. Under these conditions, the desire to leave has become a necessity to survival and only hope for a better future.
Malaysia, the preferred destination, offers no security either. Rohingya there face arrest, arbitrary detention, and exploitation in informal labour markets. Many live in constant fear of immigration raids.
Some went to Pekanbaru in Indonesia, with the expectation to get financial assistance from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and to reunify with their family members there. Others have been promised passage to Australia via Indonesia only to find themselves stranded or abandoned by smugglers there.
Indonesia, meanwhile, has become an increasingly hostile transit point. Since November 2023, waves of disinformation targeting Rohingya have spread nationally, eroding public sympathy and placing refugees at risk. In Aceh and elsewhere, local resistance to hosting Rohingya has intensified. UNHCR Indonesia has struggled to counter these narratives, finding its own credibility targeted in the misinformation campaigns. For Rohingya stranded in Indonesia, the pressure to move onward and therefore into the hands of smugglers has only intensified.
This protection gap continues to drive people smuggling across the Andaman Sea. When states fail to provide safety, smugglers fill the void. The demand for their services is not cultural or criminal in origin. It is produced by policy failure.
Rohingya refugees lining up for a medical check-up Jangka, Bireuen, Aceh in 2022 (Supplied)
Regional governments have responded with intensified law enforcement, particularly in Aceh, where arrests of alleged smugglers have surged over the past three years. But the targets are overwhelmingly the “hired hands” – fishermen who brought rescued refugees ashore, or locals facilitating short segments of longer journeys. These individuals have little connection to the logistics of operations spanning Bangladesh to Malaysia.
The architects of these networks remain untouched, and the structural conditions that sustain the trade – including persecution in Myanmar, warehouse camps in Bangladesh and Thailand, pushbacks at sea, detention in Malaysia – remain unaddressed.
Law enforcement that targets the bottom of the chain while ignoring the root causes is window dressing at best and pure theatre at worst.
Thus, the business of transporting Rohingya across the Andaman Sea has not diminished. It has adapted, becoming more clandestine, more dangerous, and once again entangled with the jungle camps and extortion networks that produced the torture camps and mass graves of Wang Kelian. Regional states may prefer not to see what is happening, but wilful blindness does not make the boats disappear.
Rohingya require vision and hope for a life beyond the camps and beyond the intolerable conditions in Myanmar. Only Southeast Asian governments, with the support of regional partners, can provide this in the short and long term. Such durable solutions require addressing the protection failures that drive these journeys: safety in Bangladesh, legal regularisation in Malaysia, and regional cooperation that treats Rohingya as refugees deserving protection rather than as threats to be repelled.
This article was developed during a writeshop in Kuala Lumpur for the Maritime Refugee Lab, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
About the authors
Gerhard Hoffstaedter
Gerhard Hoffstaedter is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Queensland, specialising in Refugee Studies in Southeast Asia.
Antje Missbach
Antje Missbach is a senior research fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Freiburg.
Chris Lewa
Chris Lewa is the founder and director of The Arakan Project, an NGO documenting the situation of the Rohingya in Rakhine State of Myanmar, and monitoring their migration movements across the Asian region since 1999.
Erik Ramadhanil
Erik Ramadhanil is a practitioner in the refugee and migration field, and the founder of Resiliensia Institute Indonesia.
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