Their thin, hunger-wracked bodies and empty, desolate stares have become a familiar image, their plight is one of growing concern: they are Southeast Asia's new boat people, either stateless Rohingya people from Myanmar's western-most Rakhine state, or job-seeking migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.
The month or more they spend at sea on leaky fishing boats crossing the Bay of Bengal to land on the white sand shores of the Andaman Sea in Thailand or Malaysia is as costly as it is perilous. Many die of starvation or dehydration on the journey over, only to face the predations of criminal gangs who then smuggle the vast majority into Malaysia, where they join an estimated 2 million other unregistered workers from all over Asia in menial, mostly poorly paid jobs without benefits.
Almost 100,000 of these people have made this dangerous journey since last year, and the UNHCR calculates 25,000 just in the first quarter of 2015, a two-fold increase over the same period last year. It's hard to calculate how many have died, but the UNHCR hazards a guess of around 1,000. At sea they die from dehydration, or are tossed overboard if they are too weak and food supplies run low. The discovery of a jungle graveyard in southern Thailand early last month tells a grim story of abuse at the hands of people smugglers, who operate with the complicity and connivance of local officials.
Pictures of the graves, and interviews with the survivors, who tell stories of being held in cages like animals, have finally alerted the world to the tragedy of these people, and prompted a call for action in the region. The situation brings to mind the Vietnamese boat people crisis that erupted at the end of the Indochina War in 1975. Then, as now, the question is whether the Southeast Asian countries where the migrants land have the compassion and the will to forge coordinated policies that address the problem humanely and effectively.
This will be challenging, and as in the 1980s, the time it takes to find a meaningful, effective solution means that many hundreds more, even thousands will die.
The most immediate challenge is what to do with the estimated 7,000 who are still on boats waiting to land. The crackdown on the jungle camps in southern Thailand has panicked the traffickers who are now in the process of abandoning thousands of people being held on boats offshore, according to Chris Lewa, a Belgian researcher who has followed the plight of the Rohingya from Myanmar for many years.
Governments in the region initially threatened to push these people off and demanded that Myanmar and Bangladesh take them back. The lucky ones, almost 3,000, have landed in Aceh and along the coast of Malaysia and Thailand.
Thailand, where the majority of these people land, has declared the need for regional action to address the issue. Both Malaysia and Indonesia have said they will provide temporary shelter for those who land so long as the international community promises to resettle them.
A meeting of affected states has been called for this Friday in Bangkok. Australia will attend in its capacity, along with Indonesia, as co-chairs of the Bali process, a wider grouping of nations that meets regularly to discuss migration issues.
Key to developing a plan of action will be Myanmar's participation. There are an estimated 1.1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar's Rakhine state, the largest single group of stateless people in Asia. They have lived in the area for generations, but have never been recognised by the Myanmar state as one of the 135 official ethnic minorities.
Some 200,000 of them live in squalid refugee camps over the Bangladesh border, the product of an earlier exodus. The rights of Rohingya in Rakhine state itself are severely curtailed, particularly freedom of movement and access to services. Communal violence that erupted in 2012 in Rakhine state has further segregated the ethnic Rakhine and Rohingya, and left 140,000 in temporary camps.
Ever since then, waves of Rohingya have been leaving on boats, most of which originate from Bangladesh, even though the traffickers may be from Myanmar, often Rohingya themselves.
For the government of President Thein Sein in Myanmar, the Rohingya are a constant reminder of the limitations of reform and change in the country. An enormous challenge for this government and any new administration that replaces it is the fact that Myanmar public opinion is highly unsympathetic to the plight of the Rohingya.
Despite a tentative process of democratisation and opening up of the economy, there is little hope that the Rohingya's ethnicity will be formally recognised. Privately, officials admit most of them are eligible for some form of citizenship. A verification process has managed to confer citizenship on less than 2,000, but on terms that most Rohingya are not willing to accept because it compels them to be classified as Bengali as opposed to Rohingya.
The difficulty of making progress in Rakhine state means that the exodus is likely to continue. There is a real risk that elections due at the end of 2015 will spark further communal violence in Rakhine state and the problem could get worse.
So what can be done? It now looks like those already on boats will somehow find temporary shelter and eventual resettlement. The United States has announced it is ready to take Rohingya screened by the UNHCR as refugees.
Beyond the immediate humanitarian situation, the current blaze of publicity around the appalling conditions under which these people are being trafficked is a real chance to formulate a regional plan of action. Ideally, a plan of action would involve the agreement among the affected states — Bangladesh, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand — to interdict the people smugglers to cut off the supply of transport for migrants. This could be done with intelligence sharing, anti-money-laundering measures and joint patrols of the area — none of which are currently in place.
Second, the region could agree on giving international humanitarian agencies, such as the UNHCR, a formal role in providing better protection for the boat people. This would involve setting up reception centres, processing procedures and enabling either repatriation or resettlement. This is easier said than done: neither Thailand nor Malaysia are signatories to the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees.
Finally, there needs to be a regional effort to assist the issues at the points of origin in Bangladesh and especially Myanmar. The Thein Sein government now appears to appreciate the gravity of the situation and is sending signals of concern about the humanitarian suffering of those smuggled from the country. One idea would be to establish a fund for addressing the root causes of unauthorised migration by providing humanitarian and development assistance in Bangladesh and Rakhine state, which the region could contribute to.
Sadly, there is precious little regional coherence or agreement on the issue. Thailand is after a short-term gain in image terms, Malaysia is ambivalent because half of its labour force is made up of migrants and there are always jobs for people smuggled in, whilst Myanmar feels ganged up on. A sense of shared responsibility rather than finger pointing is more likely to engender a regional solution.
Sadly, the issue will fade when the monsoon arrives and the boats no longer sail. But life for the Rohingya will only get more miserable. Conditions on the ground will deteriorate with the rains, there may be more violence nearer the election due in November, and so come this time next year, the boats will undoubtedly sail again, and governments will have forgotten all about the level of complicity in assisting the smugglers. More graves will be dug on land and countless people lost at sea.
Michael Vatikiotis is Asia regional director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue based in Singapore.
