More than a thousand Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugees, including dozens of children, were detained by Malaysia, police said, a day after authorities rescued hundreds stranded off the coast of Indonesia’s western tip.
Some 555 Bangladeshis and 463 Rohingya will be handed over to the immigration department, police in Malaysia told Reuters yesterday.
The number of refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar headed towards Malaysia and Indonesia has spiked in recent days after Thailand, usually the initial destination in the region’s people smuggling network, announced a crackdown on the trafficking.
Malaysia, one of South-east Asia’s wealthier economies, has long been a magnet for illegal immigrants from poorer countries in the region.
Nearly 600 migrants thought to be Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshis were rescued from at least two wooden boats stranded off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province on Sunday, authorities said.
The overcrowded boats, which were carrying nearly 100 women and dozens of children among the refugees, were towed to shore by fishermen after running out of fuel.
Myanmar disavows boat people
Myanmar authorities yesterday described Bangladesh as “the root” of the migrant crisis facing the region.
More than 1.3 million Rohingya, a stateless
Muslim ethnic group viewed by the United Nations as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, live in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State.
Myanmar denies them citizenship, refusing to recognise them as one of the nation’s minority groups and labels them “Bengalis” - shorthand for foreigners on their soil.
“The root of this problem is Bangladesh. Bangladesh carries the major responsibility for this,” Zaw Htay, the director of the Myanmar’s president office told AFP, disputing the existence of a “Rohingya” minority in Myanmar.
“We do not accept that term,” he added.
Deadly communal violence between local Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya in impoverished Rakhine in 2012 left some 200 dead and tens of thousands - mainly Rohingya - trapped in squalid camps, setting off the exodus by sea.
The Rohingya say they can trace their ancestry in Myanmar back generations yet they remain expunged from the nation’s official narrative.
Many tens of thousands languish in fetid camps for the displaced, unable to work, attend school or access healthcare.
Deadly passage
Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha ordered a clean up of suspected human trafficking camps around the country after 33 bodies, believed to be of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, were found in shallow graves in the south of the country, near Malaysia.
Over 100 refugees from the two countries were found wandering around in southern Thailand last week, apparently after they were abandoned by smugglers.
An estimated 25,000 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis boarded people smugglers’ boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many in the same period of 2014, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
Most travel in rickety traffickers’ boats to Thailand, where they are held in squalid jungle camps until a ransom is paid.
An agency official estimated that around 300 people had died at sea in the first quarter of this year as a result of starvation, dehydration and abuse by boat crews.
First Admiral Maritime Zulkifli bin Abu Bakar, the head of criminal investigations in the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, said the arrivals in Malaysia were a surprise and couldn’t say if they were linked to the Thai crackdown.
“We didn’t expect large numbers like this to come down,” he said.
Thai police spokesman Lieutenant General Prawut Thawornsiri said: “Yes, our crackdown is affecting the boats.
“They are going to Indonesia. Why else would they go to Indonesia? It is so far … Our job is to block the boats and not let them land on our shores.”
Of those rescued off Indonesia, around 50 were taken to hospital. “In general, they were suffering from starvation and many were very thin,” said North Aceh police chief Achmadi.