No ordinary Hajj for pilgrims abandoned on a beach in Abu Dhabi

Two haunted faces stare out from the past. A man and a woman, clutching cards with names replaced by numbers and in a language they almost certainly cannot read and barely understand.

They were part of a group of 83 men, women and children who fled poverty and persecution, only to fall into the hands of people smugglers.

In an overcrowded boat they travelled by sea, to be dumped without food and water on a deserted and unfamiliar shore. Only by a miracle did they escape death.

It is a familiar story, but this is not 2021 and overcrowded rubber boats from Africa sinking in the Mediterranean. Instead it is Abu Dhabi, on the eve of Hajj 1957.

The group, mostly families, were from Burma, today officially Myanmar. They were Muslims, from villages and towns close to what is now the border of Bangladesh but was then East Pakistan. Today, we would probably identify them as Rohingya, a stateless people.

The miracle that spared their lives was a long-range patrol by the Trucial Oman Scouts, the internal security force of British officers and Arab soldiers that kept order in the days before the creation of the United Arab Emirates.

In early May 1957, the patrol had reached Khor Al Odaid, a finger of land stretching into the Arabian Gulf that marked Abu Dhabi’s western border.

As the soldiers stopped for a break, their commanding officer climbed a sand dune to take in the view. What he saw was later recorded by Susan Hillyard, a resident of Abu Dhabi at the time, for her book Before the Oil.

“Below his unbelieving eyes was a group of about 100 darkskinned people, men, women, babies, children.

“One of the men looked up and tried to shout. The officer roared for his men to bring all the water they had. They spoke no known language, a baby had been born the day before.

“Another two days and the officer would have found 100 corpses.”

The group had been trying to reach Makkah, to perform Hajj, beginning that year on July 7. They were pilgrims, but also refugees. All the evidence suggests they had no desire to return to Burma, where, as Muslims, they were the minority and claimed to face violence from communist fighters.

Boats, including the Ruler’s personal dhow, transported them to Abu Dhabi, where shelter was found, including in one of the town’s handful of mosques. Gradually, their story began to emerge, preserved today, more than 60 years later, in an archived file from the British government.

The group had left Burma, where they lived around Maungdaw, a town across the border from Bangladesh and close to the city of Cox’s Bazaar, which today includes the Kutupalong refugee camp, home to tens of thousands of Rohingya who have fled persecution in Myanmar.

They had crossed the border and made their way to Chittagong, where they bought passage to Karachi on the British India Line steamer Aronda.

After spending a week in Karachi, they found another ship to take them to Dubai.

There, a nakhoda, or sea captain, agreed to take them in his dhow to Qatar, which should have been one of the safer land routes to Makkah.

Instead he landed them at Khor Al Odaid, even today one of the least populated parts of the region. The nakhoda was reported to have pointed inland with the words: “Makkah that way. Not far.”

In fact, they faced a 1,300-kilometre trek across the pitiless sands of Rub’ Al Khali, the Empty Quarter. The nearest Saudi Arabian city was Riyadh, 550 kilometres away. In the soaring heat of May, all would have perished in days.

They were safe for the moment. But for Abu Dhabi, which was also caring for another 150 pilgrims whose dhow had broken down before it could reach Qatar, the influx was becoming expensive.

This was a time before oil had been discovered, and the town, with barely 2,000 inhabitants, was not the wealthy city of today.

Burmese, UK and Pakistani officials argued over whose responsibility the people were.

Many of them were in poor health. Within weeks, two had died, but there had also been two births.

By October, only one man could be found in Abu Dhabi, the rest having apparently left for Karachi, to the relief of the British.

It emerged they had actually moved to Dubai and were living in the warren of streets in Naif, Deira.

A month later it was rumoured that they had earned enough money to sail to Karachi. True or not, for London the matter was officially closed.