Next month thousands of young Burmese Muslims, persecuted in their own land, will attempt to voyage across the sea to a better life – but a sinister fate awaits them. John Carlin investigates.
Here’s a formula for making a killing in times of crisis. Go to the south-eastern tip of Bangladesh, on the border with Burma, and buy an old fishing boat. It’ll cost 100,000 taka, or about £900.

Then budget 450 pounds, for rice and drinking water, and maybe another £450 for bribes. Then head off and trawl for clients among the most destitute communities in Bangladesh – a country so densely populated country and so poor that for Britain to be on similar economic terms it would have to have a population of 200 million with an average income around four per cent of what a Briton’s is today,

But the target market we are looking at here is several times more impoverished than that. We are talking about quite possibly the most neglected people in Asia, or anywhere else. They call themselves Rohingyas, a Muslim minority from Burma, 30,000 of whom have been so cruelly persecuted by their country’s military junta, in large measure because of their religion, that they have chosen to flee over the border to live in a refugee camp that they themselves built, without the help of the United Nations or anybody else. It is on a little hillside that is so hot, cramped, stinking, hungry and disease-ridden that, by contrast, the neighbouring string of squalid Bangladeshi fishing villages feels like the Costa del Sol.

Of the 30,000 people living in the Kutupalong refugee camp, a third are children under 10. They laughed and horsed around when I visited them accompanied by a photographer and an aid worker. They would not have laughed had they had any sense of the possible destiny awaiting them, just around the corner. When the mothers get desperate, when no other possibility of survival exists, they sell their children off, usually to become slaves; sex slaves, if they are little girls.

But these are not the clients that the region’s investors-in-people most are interested in. What they look for is young men, typically between 16 and 25 years old, who dare to dream of a future brighter than the best that Bangladesh has to offer them – which is to pedal day and night as rickshaw drivers, earning just enough crumbs to allow their bodies to keep pedalling the day and night after that.

For these young men, the promised land is Malaysia, an Asian Tiger of shimmering skyscrapers, vast bridges and smooth motorways that is 1,000 miles south of Bangladesh but felt – when I arrived there on a Malaysian airlines Airbus 330 – like another world, in another century. There is no Airbus option for the Rohingyas, who do not have passports, not being considered citizens in their own land.

This is where the fishing boats, the rice, drinking water and the bribes come in. The canny entrepreneur, who regards himself as a sort of travel agent, offers these ambitious young men a sea trip to Malaysia for a fee the equivalent of £180 a head. The boat, about 60ft long, would usually hold a dozen fishermen. But for this kind of voyage the aim is to carry up to 100 people.

That means an income of £18,000 on an outlay of £1,800: a profit approaching 1,000 per cent.
One limitation of the business is that it is only feasible at year’s end. December is the time to set sail, when the storms in south-east Asian waters abate, and the currents and the winds are favourable for Malaysia. As I write, boats are being bought and packages sold – as they were a year ago when more than 1,000 Rohingya refugees set off from the Bangladeshi coast.
I spoke separately to half a dozen of these sea-faring adventurers; the stories of three of them are recorded here. Storms, starvation, disease, thirst, beatings, jail was what befell them. At several steps along the way they lived with what seemed then the certain knowledge that they were to die slow and terrible deaths.

Another type of slow death was what they had fled from in Burma. The travellers’ stories of life in their home country matched those I heard from a group of Rohingya elders at the Kutupalong camp, painting a picture that suggested images of the slave era in the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Rohingyas live in north-west Burma, in a state called Arakan, a name that sounds like a beautiful fairyland in a C.S. Lewis Narnia story, but in this case one ruled without respite by a regime almost as darkly impenetrable as North Korea’s. Since its government refused to accept the results of the last democratic elections in 1990, Burma has been a country closed to foreign journalists. Talking to the Rohingyas, one can understand why. They are discriminated against because they are Muslims in a Buddhist country; because they tend to have darker skin than most Burmese (a senior Burmese diplomat described them recently as “dark brown” and “ugly as ogres”), and because of a complex history of resistance to central control (they sided with the British in the Second World War instead of the Japanese, whom the majority of Burmese favoured). They find themselves stateless slaves in the country where they were born. They cannot move from one village to another without permission from the local military authorities; they cannot marry or have children without permission; they are helpless to resist as their land is confiscated bit by bit and given to Buddhist settlers brought in from the cities; they are forced to work the land that has been stolen from them, without pay; they are forced to do all the menial labour that the military might require, from building roads to cutting grass; and they are not allowed to worship freely. After nightfall, when their religion demands that they go to the mosque and pray, they are not allowed to leave their homes. And there is a policy clearly aimed at the erosion of Islam in Arakan state: anyone who is caught performing any repairs on a mosque, from fixing a roof to painting a wall, is punished with jail and a fine.

“They tell us it is their country, not ours,” said one of the Rohingya boat people I spoke to, a gentle, devoutly religious boy of 19 called Mohammed. The eldest of eight siblings, his father marked him out as the family’s saviour. His his mission was to set off for Malaysia, find a job and send money back home. “My father was terribly sad but he said I was the only hope the family had.”

For more, visit: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-terrifying-voyage-of-burmas-boat-people-1826417.html