For young Rohingya brides, marriage means a perilous, deadly crossing

Haresa counted the days by the moon, waxing and waning over the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Her days on the trawler, crammed into a space so tight that she could not even stretch her legs, bled into weeks, the weeks into months.

“People struggled like they were fish flopping around,” Haresa, 18, said of the other refugees on the boat. “Then they stopped moving.”

Dozens of bodies were thrown overboard, some beaten and some starved, survivors said. Haresa’s aunt died, then her brother.

Six full moons after she boarded the fishing boat in Bangladesh with hopes that human traffickers would ferry her to Malaysia for an arranged marriage, Haresa, who goes by one name, and almost 300 other Rohingya refugees found sanctuary in Indonesia last month. Her sister, 21, died two days after the boat landed.

Banished from their homes in Myanmar and crammed into refugee settlements in neighboring Bangladesh, thousands of Rohingya have taken the perilous boat crossing to Malaysia, where many from the persecuted minority group toil as undocumented workers. Hundreds have died along the way.

Most of those now undertaking the trip, like Haresa, are girls and young women from refugee camps in Bangladesh whose parents have promised them in marriage to Rohingya men in Malaysia. Two-thirds of those who landed in Indonesia last month with Haresa were female.

Amira Bibi and her family escaped their native Rakhine state, in Myanmar’s far west, as the military torched hundreds of Rohingya villages three years ago. The fourth of nine siblings, she said she knew her place in life.

“My parents are getting old and my brothers are with their own families,” she said. “How long are my parents going to bear the burden of me?”

Through the matchmaking of a cousin in Malaysia who works as a grass-cutter, Bibi’s parents found a fiancé for her. She asked for details about the man but none were provided, apart from his name, she said.

After surviving more than six months at sea in a failed attempt to reach him, Bibi spoke from Indonesia with her fiancé a country away. The phone call lasted two minutes. “He sounded young,” she said. That is the extent of what she knows about him.