‘I thought I would die on that boat’: Mother recalls the horror of month at sea

Aceh, Indonesia
CNN
—

Hatemon Nesa weeps as she clings to her 5-year-old daughter, Umme Salima, at a rescue shelter in Indonesia’s Aceh province. Their faces appear gaunt, their eyes sullen, after drifting for weeks at sea on a boat with little food or water.

“My skin was rotting off and my bones were visible,” Nesa said. “I thought I would die on that boat.”

Nesa also cries for her 7-year-old daughter, Umme Habiba, who she says she was forced to leave behind in Bangladesh – she couldn’t afford any more than the $1,000 the traffickers demanded to transport her and her youngest child to Malaysia. “My heart is burning for my daughter,” she said.

Nesa and Umme Salima were among around 200 Rohingya, members of a persecuted Muslim minority, who embarked on the dangerous voyage in late November from Cox’s Bazar, a sprawling refugee camp in Bangladesh crowded with around a million people who fled alleged genocide by the Myanmar military.

But soon after they left, the engine cut out, turning what was supposed to be a 7-day journey into a month-long ordeal at sea, exposed to the elements in the open-topped wooden boat, surviving only on rainwater and just three days’ worth of food.

Nesa said she saw starving men jump overboard in a desperate search for food, but they never returned. And she witnessed a baby die after being fed salt water from the sea.

As the weeks wore on, the passengers’ families and aid agencies pleaded with governments in multiple countries to help them – but their cries were ignored.

Then on December 26, the boat was rescued by Indonesian fishermen and local authorities in Aceh, according to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). Of the 200 or so people who boarded the boat, only 174 survived – around 26 died on the boat, or are missing at sea, presumed dead.

Babar Baloch, an Asia spokesperson for the agency, said after a lull during Covid, the numbers of people fleeing are back to pre-Covid levels. Some 2,500 boarded unseaworthy boats last year for the journey, and as many as 400 of them died, making 2022 one of the deadliest years in a decade for Rohingya escaping Cox’s Bazar.

“These are literally death traps that once you get in … you end up losing your life,” he said.

Umme Habiba remains in Cox's Bazar, where she is unable to go to school.
Umme Habiba remains in Cox's Bazar, where she is unable to go to school.
Courtesy Mohammed Rezuwan Khan
‘We are starving. We are dying here’
Nesa and Salima’s journey began on November 25 from the overcrowded refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, where she said her children couldn’t go to school, leaving her with little hope for their future.

Nesa said she had carried around two kilograms of rice for the journey, but shortly after the boat left the port, its engine died and they started drifting.

“Starving with no food, we saw a fishing boat nearby and tried to go close,” she said, crying as she recalled the horror. “We jumped in the water to swim close to that boat but in the end, we could not.”