After Husaina’s 20-year-old son boarded a boat to escape poverty and discrimination in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, she heard nothing from him for seven months.
Then, in a shocking phone call, she was told the young Rohingya Muslim was in the hands of people smugglers in Thailand, and had fallen severely ill. The only way for him to be released was to somehow find the money to pay a ransom.
“The man said: ‘If you don’t pay money, he will die ... I was so upset. How did he get into the hands of the brokers? How did he become so ill?’” she said, sitting in her dank and crumbling one-room temporary home in Thet Kel Pyin displacement camp, a few kilometres from the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe.
They found an employer in Malaysia willing to pay about $1,600 in exchange for Mamed Rohim’s labour. That was over a year ago and Rohim is still working to repay the debt.
He only manages to send home about $50 every two or three months, which the family uses to repay their own debts - run up since they fled communal violence and their home in Sittwe for the camp.
Now barred from returning home, the family - seven other children and an asthmatic husband - is struggling to make ends meet. But Husaina says Rohim’s plight continues to haunt her.
“Even though I want to send other children on the boat so they could find jobs, I’m really worried about the brokers so I dare not,” she told Myanmar Now, an independent news service supported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Waves of Rohingya Muslims have fled sectarian violence and apartheid-like conditions in Myanmar in recent years, many of them swept up in trafficking rings, some of which hold men like Rohim for ransom, making threats to their impoverished families that their loved ones will be killed.
But human rights groups say there has been a dramatic drop in the number of Rohingya leaving Myanmar this year. They attribute this to a crackdown on human trafficking by countries such as Thailand and Malaysia.
Experiences such as Rohim’s are common among the Rohingya, confined to the squalid displacement camps outside Sittwe. The stories are shared among residents, making many fearful of the multi-day journey.
Matthew Smith, executive director of Thailand-based human rights group Fortify Rights, agrees numbers leaving Rakhine have dropped, even though it is difficult to quantify the decrease in departures due to the clandestine nature of the voyages.
Since 2012 - when communal violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya displaced some 140,000 people, an overwhelming majority of them Muslims - tens of thousands have left Rakhine State by boat.
What began decades ago as a journey that would take weeks on rickety boats, has in recent years become a mass people trafficking and smuggling business. The trafficking grew to such a scale that it lead to a crackdown by Thai and Malaysian authorities last year.
Despite continued government restrictions, some Rohingya have not left because they are holding out hope for the new government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD.
The NLD, however, did not field a single Muslim candidate in the November elections and has remained quiet on the persecution faced by the Rohingya, who are viewed with suspicion by many in Myanmar.
