TEKNAF: Bangladesh police have clamped down on Rohingya refugees setting sail to Indonesia, officers said on Saturday, after hundreds from the persecuted Myanmar minority took the long and risky sea voyage to escape squalid camps.

Some said they had paid traffickers a relative fortune of $1,000 for a place on a boat.

Bangladesh is home to one million mostly Muslim Rohingya refugees, the majority of whom fled a violent 2017 crackdown by the Myanmar military that is now subject to a United Nations genocide probe.

Conditions in the overcrowded, dangerous and under-resourced relief camps are tough, and refugees have said the situation is worsening due to cuts in food aid, deadly gang battles and a lack of jobs. As the seas in the Bay of Bengal calm after monsoon rains, human traffickers are offering hundreds of Rohingya people berths on boats bound for Malaysia and Indonesia, police officers said.

This month has seen a spike in journeys to Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh — a voyage of about 1,800 kilometres — with more than 1,000 arrivals in the biggest such wave since the 2017 crackdown.

Police said they had “stopped and held 58 Rohingya” on Friday night as they reportedly left camps heading to board boats at Teknaf, a Bangladeshi river port just across the border from Myanmar.

“Among them nine are men, 16 are women and 33 are children. We detained two Bangladeshi human traffickers who were allegedly guiding them,” Teknaf police station chief Osman Goni said on Saturday.

“They were ready to sail in a boat from Teknaf and were going to Indo­nesia and Malaysia.”

Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2023