Bangladeshis have a deserved international reputation as champion migrants. But the trauma and tragedy experienced by the boatpeople in the Andaman Sea in recent weeks has focused world attention on a small but equally resourceful community of Muslims who have faced extreme persecution at home in western Myanmar.
According to the human rights group Amnesty International, the Rohingya - descended, according to legend, from Arabs who plied the ancient trade routes in the Indian Ocean - suffered 'widespread killing, rape, destruction of mosques and religious persecution' in the 1970s in their enclaves in Myanmar's Arakan (now also called Rakhine) state bordering Bangladesh.
In recent times, the Myanmese junta added another atrocity - the Rohingya were forced to work, sometimes without pay, on infrastructure projects in a region on the cusp of an oil and gas boom. As a result, large numbers fled to the Bangladeshi port town of Cox's Bazar, driven as much by poverty as persecution. The more enterprising have gone further afield - Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Malaysia.
Siddique Ahmed, whose village is near the Arakan capital Sittwe, is typical of such a Rohingya economic refugee. Unable to find work in his home country, he crossed illegally into Bangladesh in September last year. He was hired as a fisherman by a company in Teknaf, near Cox's Bazar. The pay would have been paltry - the region is desperately poor even by Bangladeshi standards. Two months later, Mr Ahmed made a decision that would take him into a living hell.
The Cox's Bazar area, according to official interrogation reports of the boatpeople now housed in a camp in Port Blair, capital of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, is crawling with 'job agents' - human traffickers who prey on the desperate dreams of the poor for a better life. From November to April, when the sea is not rough, the 'promised land' is Malaysia - reachable illegally in fishing boats via Thailand.
Mr Ahmed met one such trafficker, and got a cut-price package - Malaysia for 5,000 takas (HK$575). Coastguard officials say the rate can go up to 20,000 takas. By the end of November he was in a boat with 14 other Myanmese and Bangladeshis heading for a new life when he said soldiers intercepted them near Thailand and, after brutalising them, set them adrift along with 400 others in an unpowered wooden hull.
