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Ushar Daniele

For nine days, Nurul Nisa was crammed onto one of four fishing boats with 130 others, fleeing her village in Myanmar in search of safety. She was a child then, but she still remembers the crying, the sleepless nights and the hunger.
“We had to drink seawater,” she said, recalling the journey she made with her mother and two sisters in 2010, after their village had been burnt down.
To secure the four wooden fishing boats needed for the voyage, the villagers pooled their resources and sold everything they had.
“We did not care whether it was Malaysia or Indonesia,” Nurul told This Week in Asia. “As long as we could eat anywhere we landed, that was enough.”
They worried about being detained, she said, but not because of the loss of liberty. The prospect of being sent back to Myanmar was enough to keep them up at night.
Then, on the ninth day of their journey, Malaysian authorities intercepted their boats as they entered the country’s waters.

“I said we had left because if we did not leave, they would shoot us,” Nurul said. “They [the Malaysian authorities] gave us food and water. They did not leave us to die at sea.”
The boats were helmed by Rohingya already living in Malaysia who knew the waters well, she said. “That is why it was only nine days. If people do not know the way, it can take two or three months and people can die.”
Nurul is among the thousands of Rohingya who have fled Myanmar to escape persecution and violence. Activists say their journeys are born of desperation and driven by the hope of finding safety elsewhere.
Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani, president of the Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organisation Malaysia, said that those who made the treacherous sea crossings to reach Malaysia or other Southeast Asian nations typically searched for family and friends upon arrival.
“Some choose to come by boat because they want a better life, but when they arrive, they face many hardships,” Zafar said, referring to refugees who were held in detention for prolonged periods.
Hundreds of Rohingya have been intercepted near Langkawi in recent years, but Zafar said the Malaysian archipelago was not in itself the main objective.
“They go wherever they can be safe,” he said, adding that the Rohingya “just want to escape persecution”.


The Rohingya are among the world’s most persecuted minorities: a Muslim ethnic group from Myanmar’s westernmost Rakhine state who have been systematically denied citizenship since the 1970s and cast as foreign interlopers in a land where many families have lived for generations.
In 2017, the Myanmar military, working with ethnic Rakhine militias, launched a campaign of mass killing and destruction that drove nearly 1 million Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh. Others fled south by sea towards Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The United Nations later described the campaign as a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing and found it was committed with genocidal intent. The International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor has since requested an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity against Myanmar’s military chief turned president Min Aung Hlaing.
Since the military seized power in a coup led by Min Aung Hlaing in February 2021, conditions for those who remained in Myanmar have deteriorated further. Violence has intensified and vital humanitarian aid has been cut off, pushing more Rohingya towards the sea.
As of February 2026, the UNHCR had registered 215,600 refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia – 126,144 of them Rohingya.

Legal grey zone
Malaysia has no formal refugee law, however. The Rohingya exist in a legal grey zone: undocumented, unrecognised and routinely detained.
Advocacy group Fortify Rights has documented what it describes as a blanket enforcement approach at key arrival points such as Langkawi, where intercepted boats are processed as immigration violations before any assessment of the individuals aboard is conducted.
“Intercepted migrant and refugee boats are too quickly treated as ‘illegal immigration’ cases, without proper individual screening for trafficking indicators,” said Yap Lay Sheng, a senior human rights specialist at Fortify Rights.
Malaysia’s Anti-Trafficking in Persons and Anti-Smuggling of Migrants Act 2007 outlines a framework for protecting trafficking victims. When trafficking is suspected, the law mandates that individuals be brought before a magistrate, for a protection order and placed under care rather than face immediate deportation.
“The problem is that these safeguards are often not applied in practice,” Yap said.
This was particularly troubling for Rohingya arriving by boat, he said, because the line between refugee, smuggled migrant and trafficking victim was often blurred. Many begin their journeys having paid smugglers for passage, only to find themselves subjected to debt bondage, threats and abuse before reaching shore.
“Treating Rohingya boats purely as illegal crossings risks punishing the very people the law is supposed to identify and protect,” Yap said.
That concern has been heightened by a new government biometric registration scheme introduced earlier this year. Fortify Rights has warned that Rohingya, including children held in detention, are at risk of further persecution under the programme.

Back in Langkawi, Nurul has built something resembling a life. She runs a small sundry shop in the island’s north, where she has lived for the past 12 years. She is grateful, even though she has learned not to expect too much.
“I was happy before. We could play. I miss my village. I miss my home,” she said. “Living here is OK. compared with Myanmar, Malaysia is OK, thank God.”
For Rohingya refugees, surviving the sea journey is only the first challenge. The harder crossing – into safety, recognition and belonging – remains, for most, out of reach.


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A Rohingya woman recalls her days adrift at sea and the legal limbo that has defined the 16 years since she reached Malaysia’s shores


A Rohingya woman recalls her days adrift at sea and the legal limbo that has defined the 16 years since she reached Malaysia’s shores.


For Malaysia’s Rohingya refugees, survival is just the start

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A Rohingya woman recalls her days adrift at sea and the legal limbo that has defined the 16 years since she reached Malaysia’s shores

A Rohingya woman recalls her days adrift at sea and the legal limbo that has defined the 16 years since she reached Malaysia’s shores