The world’s deadliest sea route keeps getting busier

The world’s deadliest sea route keeps getting busier.

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh — Abdul Nur last heard from his son Jani Alom in early June, weeks before the 15-year-old boy was forced onto a boat embarking on one of the world’s most dangerous sea crossings.
“Oh ba,” a teary and panicked Alom said over the phone, his father recounted to CNN. Alom used the word for “father” in Rohingya, the language spoken by the ethnic group of the same name.

“I am going to be put on a boat to Malaysia.”

The boy had been abducted one evening two months earlier while walking home from school in the Bangladeshi refugee camp where the family has lived for nearly a decade, alongside more than one million other Rohingya exiled from western Myanmar.

The Rohingya are a stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, who have faced decades of state-sponsored persecution, violence and what the US has classified as genocide.

Each year, thousands of Rohingya refugees, many of them women and children, pack into the crammed cargo holds of old fishing trawlers departing from Bangladesh or Myanmar to cross rough, open waters in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea in search of safety or opportunity in Indonesia or Malaysia.