Chapter 4. Abandoned at Sea: The May 2015 Crisis
In May 2015, boats carrying Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi passengers became places of abandonment as crews departed and neighbouring governments prevented vessels from reaching shore. The closing of the trafficking route through Thailand left people already at sea without a safe destination. Human Rights Watch documented how traffickers responded by attempting to unload passengers elsewhere or abandoning vessels altogether. For the people aboard, enforcement against traffickers had become an immediate emergency requiring rescue.
The crisis developed through separate journeys and encounters. Some passengers reached Aceh early in the month; others remained afloat after repeated interceptions. Examining those events individually preserves the experiences of Rohingya survivors and shows how decisions made after crews abandoned their boats prolonged their exposure to danger.
9 May: A Crew Leaves Its Passengers Behind
Amnesty International later collected consistent accounts from passengers whose crew abandoned them on 9 May. Armed men arriving by speedboat removed equipment from their vessel, including navigation equipment, ropes, lights and the anchor. After delivering a final ration, they departed. The speedboats returned after dark to collect the crew, leaving the passengers to continue without the people who had controlled the voyage.
Some survivors recalled that the steering wheel was secured and the boat pointed towards Indonesia before the crew left. By the following morning, it had grounded near Kuala Cankoi in North Aceh. This testimony describes abandonment as an organized withdrawal: people were left aboard while those responsible for transporting them removed equipment and arranged their own escape.
10 May: The First Group Reaches Aceh
Researcher Graham Thom’s reconstruction recorded 578 passengers aboard the boat that reached northern Aceh on 10 May. People swam ashore or received assistance from local residents. Their arrival preceded the later agreement by national governments to offer temporary shelter. The immediate response therefore depended on people near the coast acting while regional policy remained unsettled.
UNHCR’s contemporary reporting described fishermen rescuing Rohingya and Bangladeshi passengers and communities mobilizing food, water and support. Among those who survived was an eighteen-year-old Rohingya mother, identified under the protective name Fatimah, travelling with her two daughters. Their presence records the family dimension of the emergency: women responsible for small children were stranded alongside adults whose strength had already been depleted by lengthy voyages.
Assistance Followed by Turnbacks
Reaching a government vessel did not necessarily mean reaching safety. On 14 May, Human Rights Watch reported that Indonesian authorities acknowledged directing a boat towards Malaysia on 11 May after providing supplies. Malaysian officials announced that further boats would be turned away, while senior Thai officials described supplying provisions and pushing vessels away from Thai shores.
Food and fuel could temporarily sustain passengers while leaving the central danger unresolved. The people aboard still lacked permission to disembark, obtain medical treatment or rest on land. Assistance delivered before a turnback consequently needs to be recorded together with the decision that followed it; the provision of supplies alone does not describe what happened to the boat.
13 May: Distress Was Already Known
Before the widely circulated photographs from Koh Lipe appeared, Amnesty International reported on 13 May that approximately 350 people, including children, were drifting near Thailand and Malaysia. The crew had left several days earlier, passengers lacked food and water, and medical care was urgently needed. Thai naval vessels were searching for the boat.
The same statement reported another vessel carrying approximately five hundred people near Penang. These accounts demonstrate that the emergency was known while people remained at sea. The difficulty was not simply obtaining information about distressed boats: authorities also needed to act on that information and provide a place where those aboard could safely land.
14 May: The Boat off Koh Lipe
AFP photographer Christophe Archambault reached an overcrowded boat off Koh Lipe on 14 May. His eyewitness account described severely emaciated passengers, including women, children and babies. People cried out and gestured to communicate hunger and thirst. Through a Rohingya-speaking interpreter, passengers said that ten people had died since their journey began. That was a survivor report about this vessel, rather than a verified total for the maritime crisis.
Journalists shared the water they carried, and nearby Thai fishing boats offered supplies. Later, a military helicopter dropped food into the sea because the crowded deck left no suitable space for delivery. Young men jumped into the water to retrieve the packages. The photographs captured people expending their remaining strength to obtain provisions while still stranded aboard a vessel.
This scene became internationally recognizable, but the people pictured had names, relatives and lives beyond their visible suffering. The boat’s subsequent journey is therefore essential to the historical record: being photographed and receiving emergency supplies did not end its passengers’ ordeal.
ARNO’s Appeal for Immediate Rescue
On 14 May, the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation issued an appeal specifically addressing abandoned people in distress at sea. ARNO warned that Rohingya women and children faced starvation, trauma and the danger of disappearing without rescue. It called on coastal countries to provide search-and-rescue services and invoked Article 98 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The statement placed rescue and timely shelter at the centre of the response. Its significance here is the urgency expressed by a Rohingya organisation while people remained afloat. Rohingya representatives were asking governments to locate endangered passengers and save their lives before further deaths occurred, rather than waiting for a later assessment of the disaster.
Violence and Drowning on Another Vessel
A separate boat experienced deadly violence on 14 May. UNHCR’s reconstruction described fighting over dwindling drinking water, attacks on Rohingya passengers and people falling or jumping into the sea. Eleven-year-old Setara Begum became separated from her mother, Kulsuma, who was struggling to protect her two sons. The vessel subsequently began taking on water.
UNHCR also recorded passengers helping others survive. Abdul Jolil, a Rohingya man from Kyauktaw, threw wooden planks towards a family in the water before jumping in himself. Such testimony preserves Rohingya action within the catastrophe: passengers attempted to protect children and provide flotation while facing the same danger themselves.
15 May: Fishermen Rescue the Passengers
Thom’s research recorded the rescue of 820 passengers by fishermen off eastern Aceh on 15 May. The boat had previously been directed towards Malaysia by Indonesian naval authorities. After violence aboard, Rohingya passengers were among those rescued from the water. The rescue brought people ashore after encounters with state vessels had failed to secure their disembarkation.
The fishermen’s role must remain explicit. The presence of government officials during the reception of survivors should not obscure who intervened at sea. In these documented events, fishing crews reached endangered people and carried out the actions that allowed them to survive.
19 May: Thousands Still Await Rescue
On 19 May, UNHCR warned that nearly four thousand people from Myanmar and Bangladesh remained stranded with diminishing supplies. Its estimate included approximately two thousand people on at least five boats near the Myanmar–Bangladesh coasts who had been waiting for more than forty days. The emergency extended beyond the vessels then visible around Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The estimate was a contemporary assessment, not a final passenger register. Its importance lies in what it communicated at that moment: rescues already reported did not mean that everyone had been located or brought ashore. Attention to a few photographed boats could leave other groups beyond public view.
20 May: The Green Boat Finally Reaches Land
On 20 May, fishermen rescued 409 passengers from another vessel off eastern Aceh. AFP journalists subsequently identified it as the green boat photographed off Thailand on 14 May. The connection established that the people whose distress had become international news remained at sea for several more days before reaching land.
UNHCR recorded a survivor, using the protective name Roshid, who had earlier swum for help with an empty container tied to his back for buoyancy. Fishermen pulled him and other swimmers aboard and returned to provide food to the larger vessel. His account shows that passengers actively sought rescue even when doing so required entering the open sea in an exhausted condition.
Restoring Names to the Photographs
AFP’s follow-up reporting identified Rohingya people pictured aboard the green boat, including twenty-one-year-old Ronji and her six-year-old son. Another mother, Ambihatu, required urgent treatment after arrival for malnutrition, dehydration and diarrhoea while her young son remained beside her. Rescue stopped their exposure at sea, but emergency medical needs continued on land.
Photographer Chaideer Mahyuddin reported that survivors welcomed further photographs because they hoped relatives in Myanmar and Bangladesh would learn that they were alive. Connecting faces with names therefore served a purpose beyond documenting visible distress. For separated families, an identifiable photograph could communicate survival after weeks of uncertainty.
The distinct history of the May emergency is the interval between abandonment and safe arrival. During that interval, Rohingya passengers encountered turnbacks, struggled to obtain assistance, protected others and sometimes lost relatives before rescue came. The actions of fishermen and fellow passengers belong alongside the decisions of governments in explaining who reached shore alive.