Myanmar yesterday said it had reached an agreement with neighbouring Bangladesh to repatriate 200 Bangladeshis rescued from a boat off the Myanmar coast last week.
A migrant crisis has flared up in Southeast Asia as Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar and Bangladeshis trying to escape poverty at home become prey to human traffickers.
After Thailand cracked down on the practice, traffickers began abandoning overloaded boats on the open sea rather than trying to smuggle travellers through Thailand. Some 3,500 are stranded, the United Nations refugee agency has said.
Monday’s agreement followed talks involving Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry, Myanmar’s ambassador to Bangladesh and Bangladesh officials in Myanmar, the state-owned Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper said.
Myanmar said there were 200 Bangladeshis among the 208 men aboard the vessel rescued on Friday by its navy off the coast of western Rakhine State, describing the rest as Bengalis from Rakhine.
Southern Thailand and northern Malaysia have been a major route for smugglers and traffickers bringing people to Southeast Asia by boat from Myanmar and Bangladesh.
The men aboard the ship are from Bangladesh’s coastal resort of Cox’s Bazar, the port city of Chittagong and the capital, Dhaka, the newspaper said.
It ran interviews with four of the men, who said they had been tricked, or forced, into boarding the boat.
“I visited Cox’s Bazar beach,” the paper quoted a man, identified as Mohamod Mufa Zalhusin, as saying.
“Two guys forcibly took me to a boat,” he added. “The guys on the boat told me they had bought me. They headed to Thailand. Later we were asked for a ransom of Tk50,000 to return to Bangladesh, as security was tight on the Thai coast.”
Washington and the UN have urged Myanmar to fight discrimination and violence against ethnic Rohingya Muslims, saying its policy toward them is a root cause of mass migration behind the crisis.