The Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea became the deadliest maritime corridor in South and Southeast Asia last year, with reports indicating nearly 900 Rohingya refugees dead or missing in 2025. The figure appears to mark the highest annual death toll for Rohingya sea crossings, a grim milestone that has led advocates to compare the waters south of Myanmar to a graveyard for desperate Rohingya refugees.
The announcement, reported by Al Jazeera on Thursday, arrived just over a week after another overcrowded trawler capsized in the Andaman Sea on April 8, 2026, carrying roughly 250 Rohingya and Bangladeshi nationals toward Malaysia. Hundreds remain missing.
A record written in water
Numbers rarely carry the weight of a sea, but these do. Estimates suggest that some 5,000 Rohingya have drowned over the past decade attempting to reach safer shores. The 2025 figure alone accounts for nearly one-fifth of that total. Reports indicate that more than 2,800 Rohingya have already attempted sea crossings in 2026, a pace that suggests last year’s record will not stand long.
Over half of those making the journeys in recent years have been women and children, according to refugee agency reports, a demographic fact that shapes the nature of the risk. Traffickers target the most vulnerable. The sea does the rest.
The April 8 capsizing
The most recent tragedy unfolded with a familiar choreography. The trawler, carrying approximately 280 people, departed Teknaf in southern Bangladesh on April 4, bound for Malaysia. Four days later it sank in heavy winds and rough seas, overcrowded far beyond any reasonable capacity, according to The Guardian, which cited statements from UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration.
Reports indicate the Bangladesh Coast Guard rescued nine survivors from deep water near the Andaman Islands on April 9. They had been clinging to drums and logs.
One of the rescued, identified in media reports as Rafiqul Islam, 40, said that traffickers had lured him aboard with the promise of a job in Malaysia. He said he was burned by spilled oil in the trawler’s holding area and that some passengers died there before the boat capsized. He floated for nearly 36 hours before rescue.
Why they keep leaving
The decision to board a boat that is statistically likely to kill you is not irrational. It is the calculation of people who have run out of alternatives.
More than a million Rohingya live in camps around Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh, where they fled after the Myanmar military’s 2017 offensive drove hundreds of thousands of people across the border. A UN fact-finding mission later concluded that the campaign amounted to genocide, a determination Myanmar rejects.
What awaits those who survived is not a future but a holding pattern. The camps have no schools beyond informal learning centers. No legal work. No citizenship prospects in either direction. Humanitarian funding has collapsed in the past two years, and the consequences are tangible: families rationing cooking gas, children pulled out of informal classes, aid agencies warning that basic food security is eroding.
Humanitarian officials have described the situation plainly: ongoing conflict, persecution, and the absence of citizenship prospects leave refugees with little hope.
A war that never ends, a border that won’t open
Return to Myanmar is not an option. Rakhine state, the Rohingya homeland, has become a battlefield between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army, an ethnic rebel group that now controls much of the territory. Neither side has offered the Rohingya a path to citizenship or safety.
The regional politics of asylum are scarcely more welcoming. Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand have at various points refused entry to Rohingya boats, pushed them back to sea, or held survivors in indefinite detention. A decade ago, BBC correspondent Jonathan Head documented a fishing boat carrying hundreds of Rohingya stranded for a week in the Andaman Sea without food or water, turned away from Thai shores while people died aboard. The scene he described then has become a template.
The funding collapse
What has changed in the last two years is the money. Major donor governments, including the United States, have slashed humanitarian budgets. The World Food Programme has cut rations in Cox’s Bazar more than once. Aid agencies have issued statements calling on the international community to increase and sustain funding for life-saving assistance for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as well as support for Bangladeshi host communities.
The appeal has the tone of an agency that has made it many times before. The cycle of displacement driven by conflict and climate that the UN has warned about for years is not abstract in Cox’s Bazar. It is cooking fuel that runs out. It is a daughter who cannot go to school. It is a trafficker with a phone number and a promise.
What a record means
A record year is, in one sense, a statistical artifact. Deaths at sea are notoriously undercounted. The reported 900 figure rests on reports from survivors, coast guards, and the occasional recovered body. The real number is almost certainly higher.
But records also function as mirrors. When 2025 becomes the deadliest year on record for maritime movements in South and Southeast Asia, it reflects something about the international system that produced it. Persecution without accountability. Protracted displacement without resolution. Aid budgets traded for domestic political gains in distant capitals. The Rohingya did not choose the sea. They were left with it.
In the days since the April 8 sinking, Bangladeshi authorities have continued to search for bodies. Nine survivors have been interviewed. Hundreds more have not been found, and will not be. Another trawler is already being loaded somewhere on the coast near Teknaf, because the conditions that drive the journeys have not changed, and the warnings from humanitarian agencies have not produced the funding they requested.
The Andaman Sea is calm this week. That will not last.
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