Myanmar’s navy has brought ashore 200 Bangladeshis found in a boat off its coast, after its military chief said some of the thousands of migrants that have landed in Malaysia and Indonesia this month are pretending to be Rohingya Muslims to get UN aid.
In response, a senior U.S. official said on Friday (May 22) that the majority of the more than 3,000 migrants that have come ashore are Rohingya fleeing desperate conditions in Rakhine State in western Myanmar.
Two Thai boats were discovered by Myanmar’s navy on Thursday (May 21), one carrying migrants and the other empty, the Rakhine state government said in a press release on Friday.
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR estimated on Friday (May 22) that some 3,500 migrants are still stranded on boats with dwindling supplies, and repeated its appeal for the region’s governments to rescue them.
Myanmar has faced international criticism for not doing enough to help those at sea or stem to flow of migrants.
Most of Myanmar’s 1.1 million Rohingya are stateless and live in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine state. Almost 140,000 were displaced in deadly clashes with majority Buddhists in Rakhine in 2012. They are denied citizenship and have long complained of state-sanctioned discrimination.
Myanmar denies discriminating against the group and has said it is not the source of the problem. It classifies the group as Bengalis, a term rejected by most Rohingya for implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite having, in many cases, lived in Rakhine for generations.
Scores of Rohingya are paying off people smugglers and returning to the squalid camps they used to live in after being held for months on overcrowded ships off the coast of Myanmar.
As well as Rohingya, many Bangladeshis seeking to escape poverty at home are also on the boats.
Southeast Asia’s migrant crisis blew up after a Thai crackdown on human trafficking led criminals to abandon overloaded boats in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea rather than risk trying to smuggle or traffic them through preferred transit routes in Thailand.
Reuters
