Muhammad Malik describes weeks at sea, with smugglers who beat Bangladeshi migrants for talking or standing up.Nathan Vanderklippe/The Globe and Mail
For months, they floated at sea in an eerie silence, slaves cowed to quiet by sword-wielding traffickers who threatened to kill them if they begged for more to drink or prayed out loud.
But now that they have found safety, food and water on land in Indonesia, hundreds of Bangladeshi men are burdened by something perhaps even worse: the weight of failure.
To pay for their passage with smugglers, fathers, wives and siblings sold homes and land and, if that wasn't enough, borrowed money from neighbours. It was a high-stakes gamble, the price to send able bodies to places like Malaysia, where they could earn enough money to buy it all back.
For those who arrived in Indonesia, the prospect of earning that money seems dim. Indonesia has said they can spend a year here, but must then leave. Not only have they starved and been beaten at sea, they now face the prospect of returning home empty-handed.
"If I go home, I will be scared to show my face to my family, because they are angry with me," said Abdul Hai, 32. "They have sold the family house. They have sold our land. But I will go home and bring back nothing."
His father is dead, leaving him a mother, six sisters and two brothers who are counting on him. "I have a responsibility to feed my family," he says.
The stress is so great that he has not called home to report his safe arrival on land. Instead, he waits with nearly 250 Bangladeshi men now kept at a makeshift refugee camp in the northern Sumatran village of Punteut, where they arrived May 10.
The fate of thousands of boat-bound migrants has sparked an international crisis in south-east Asia, where countries initially sent navies to tow boats away. Indonesia and Malaysia have now agreed to allow some to land – although in Indonesia, the top military leader on Thursday continued to say no, in defiance of political leadership.
Many on the boats are Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Myanmar that has been imprisoned in ghettoes, denied citizenship and forced to live in often horrifying conditions, compelling many to flee. But roughly half are Bangladeshi men, some of them victims of human trafficking, others in search of a better life.
Some first boarded boats on Feb. 2 and spent more than three months stranded at sea.
Muhammad Malik, 45, never meant to leave Bangladesh. He spent nearly a decade working in Malaysia before marrying, and was interested when friends told him men on a beach near his home could help him find a better job elsewhere. But when he went to ask, the men raised guns and told him they would shoot if he tried to leave.
"I absolutely did not want to go. I am a farmer. I am terrified of the sea," he said. "But they said to me, 'if you don't go with us, we will kill you.'"
He was herded onto a small boat, then transferred to successively larger boats, where he was packed together with hundreds of others. They crouched in painful positions, sleeping with the back of their heads on each other's chests, jammed in so tightly they could not lean to the side. They ate a handful of rice twice a day, and drank a small glass of water three times daily. Rain and sun beat down.
Weeks in, the Burmese captors brought out cell phones and ordered them to call home for money. Fail to transfer the proper funds to smugglers' bank accounts – fees that ranged from $2,700 to $3,600 for people whose national average annual per-capita income is under $1,500– and their captors warned the men they would be shot and kicked into the ocean.
"I said to my wife, 'please, sell anything we have,'" Mr. Malik said. She did, netting $435 for the larger of their two cows and $185 for the smaller. She petitioned neighbours to lend money for the remaining $2,500 – an amount that would take him more than two years to earn by farming his land.
One man on the boat refused to call home, saying his family had no money. He was hung upside down and beaten until his body bled and he could no longer walk. Others were beaten for less severe crimes, like talking or attempting to stand up, leaving them to spend days sitting in pained quiet. Some were lashed with steel cables, others with plastic pipe. At the camp in Indonesia, they raise shirt sleeves and expose backs to show scars snaking pink and welted across mocha skin. Out on the water, spread across numerous ships that eventually coalesced into one with 584 aboard came to Indonesia, they saw dozens die, their bodies dumped into the sea.
They arrived here after their captors abandoned the ship, saying they had run out of food and water. The captain took with him the navigation equipment. When the men managed to restart the boat engine they decided to travel with the wind at their back. After a sleepless night of loud prayers, they sighted land the next day and swam to Sumatra. The Bangladeshis were then separated from the Rohingya and brought to the camp.
But even as their skin is imprinted by what they have endured, they cast thoughts to the future. They have experience as farmers, cleaners and labourers, and are willing to take whatever job they can find, be it construction, farming or janitorial work.
Tourizar Rahman, 25, has a grade 11 education and left work in Bangladesh delivering medicine to pharmacies for very little money. His farmer sold the family paddy fields to pay his way out. "If I go back to Bangladesh, I will be a beggar on the streets," he says. "I want to go to another country. Any country."
He will likely be obligated to return home, since the Bangladeshi government has offered to take people back, and the departure of these men would ease the burden on aid agencies and their host countries. But if that happens, he says, he will do anything in his power to leave once more, even if it means heading back out onto treacherous waters.
"I will try again to go to another country," he says in English. "I don't have money, sir."