SE Asia urged to save migrants feared lost at sea

JAKARTA: Thousands of migrants believed to be stranded at sea without food and water could die unless Southeast Asian governments act urgently to rescue them, migrant groups and the UN warned on Tuesday.

Despite the escalating alarm, Indonesia's navy said it had turned away one boat carrying hundreds of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh to an uncertain fate.

Nearly 2,000 boatpeople from Myanmar and Bangladesh — including many ethnic Rohingya — have swum ashore, been rescued or intercepted off Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days, many of them thin, weak or in poor health after weeks at sea.

The Arakan Project, a group advocating for the rights of Rohingya — a Muslim minority that is unwanted by Myanmar's government — says as many as 8,000 other people may be adrift.

Ali Hussein, a 31-year-old Rohingya from Myanmar, is among more than 1,000 people who swam ashore in Malaysia from their smuggling ships on Sunday and Monday.

Like thousands from the Rohingya community, he fled sectarian violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar in recent years.

"I was running for my life," he said on Tuesday.

Hussein said he and about 800 other people endured 43 days on an overcrowded vessel as their meagre food and water supplies dwindled to nothing.

Their Thailand-bound ship diverted to Malaysia's Langkawi island where the hungry passengers leapt into the sea in a desperate swim to safety.

"There was no more food or water so we just jumped out of the boat," he said.

Rohingya survivors of the route have previously told the reporter of harrowing sea passages in which passengers died of hunger or sickness or were beaten to death by smugglers, their bodies tossed overboard.

People-smugglers are believed to be dumping their human cargoes after being diverted from Thailand — a key stop on illicit migration routes — where authorities have cracked down on the trade. The International Organisation for Migration said search-and-rescue operations were urgently needed.

"It needs a regional effort... we don't have the capacity to search for them, but governments do. They have boats and satellites," said Joe Lowry, a Bangkok-based spokesman for the IOM, a 157-member-state intergovernmental organisation.

Agence France-Presse

http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/se-asia-urged-to-save-migrants-feared-lost-at-sea/