At Least 23 Rohingya Dead After Boat Sinks Off Myanmar

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Facts

  • The death toll of a Rohingya boat that capsized after reportedly being hit by a large wave near Myanmar's Rakhine state capital, Sittwe, has risen to at least 23 people — 13 women and 10 men — with 30 passengers still missing.1
  • A spokesperson for the Shwe Yaung Matta Foundation rescue group stated that eight people have been found alive so far, all of them currently held at a local police station.2
  • The boat, which was on its way to Malaysia, reportedly departed in bad weather as thousands of Muslim-majority Rohingya seek to flee Myanmar and Bangladesh in search of better living conditions.3
  • The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, reported earlier this year that more than 3.5K Rohingya risked their lives to cross the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal last year, a steep increase compared to around 700 people in 2021.4
  • The minority group in Buddhist-majority Myanmar is deemed among the most persecuted people in the world, with 750K Rohingya having fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh since 2017 following a military crackdown in Rakhine.5
  • Rakhine is home to around 600K Rohingya Muslims, who are considered migrants from Bangladesh and have been denied citizenship and freedom of movement.6

Sources: 1BBC News, 2CNN, 3Al Jazeera, 4UN News, 5The Guardian, and 6The Irrawaddy.

Narratives

  • Pro-establishment narrative, as provided by Al Jazeera. The Rohingya people have desperately risked their lives crossing the ocean for years, trying to find a safe place to live after suffering human rights abuses in Myanmar. This crisis has exposed structural flaws in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as its rules made it possible for Myanmar to prevent regional powers from investigating the scale of human rights abuses and taking action to halt them.
  • Establishment-critical narrative, as provided by DW. It's hypocritical to criticize solely ASEAN when Western democracies have done nothing to help the Rohingya — even though the International Court of Justice has long called for measures to protect those persecuted. While this is likely to be a consequence of fears that Myanmar would strengthen ties with Beijing if pressed, not acting to preserve the universal validity of human rights can only damage the West's reputation — the plight of the Rohingya at sea is the world's responsibility.