BANGKOK/JAKRATA: A boat crammed with migrants was towed out to sea by the Thai navy and then held up by Malaysian vessels on Saturday, the latest round of "maritime ping-pong" by Asian states determined not to let asylum seekers come ashore.
The United Nations has called on countries around the Andaman Sea not to push back the thousands of desperate Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar now stranded in rickety boats, and to rescue them instead.
"We're not seeing any such moves from any governments in the region even though we're calling on the international community to take action because people are dying," said Jeffrey Savage, who works with the UNHCR refugee agency in Indonesia, where some 1,400 migrants have landed over the past week.
Nearly 800 came ashore near Langsa in Indonesia's Aceh province on Friday, many with stories of a gruelling voyage that included push-backs from the Malaysian and Indonesian coasts.
An estimated 25,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingya boarded smugglers' boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many as in the same period of 2014, the UNHCR has said.
A clampdown by Thailand's military junta has made a well-trodden trafficking route into Malaysia — one of Southeast Asia's wealthiest economies — too risky for criminals who prey on Rohingya fleeing persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and on impoverished Bangladeshis looking for work.
In response, many people-smugglers appear to have abandoned their boats in the Andaman Sea, leaving thousands thirsty, hungry and sick, and without fuel for their vessels' engines.
One of those boats was towed away from the Thai coast by Thailand's navy on Saturday, only to be intercepted off the Malaysian coast.
The International Organisation for Migration has criticised Southeast Asian governments for playing "maritime ping-pong" with the migrants and endangering their lives.
US Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday urged Thailand to considering sheltering the homeless Rohingya and called on its neighbours not to send the migrants back out to sea.
Responding to the pressure, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said his country already had 120,000 illegal migrants from Myanmar and the "humanitarian catastrophe" was a global issue to be resolved by the international community.
"We allow some of them to land and provide humanitarian aid to them but Malaysia must not be burdened with this problem as there are thousands more waiting to flee from their region," Najib told the state news agency Bernama on Saturday.
The United Nations said this week that the deadly pattern of migration across the Bay of Bengal would continue unless Myanmar ended discrimination.
Most of Myanmar's 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims are stateless and live in apartheid-like conditions.
Almost 140,000 were displaced in clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012. Myanmar terms the Rohingya "Bengalis", a name most Rohingya reject because it implies they are immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh despite having lived in Myanmar for generations.
Thailand is hosting talks on May 29 for 15 countries to discuss the crisis.
Myanmar had not received an invitation to the meeting and would not attend if the word Rohingya was used, Zaw Htay, a senior official from the president's office, said on Saturday.
"We haven't received any formal invitation from Thailand officially yet," he said in an emailed response to questions.
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/migrants-in-maritime-ping-pong-iom/
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