Rohingya and Bangladeshis migrants abandoned at sea by human traffickers had nowhere to go yesterday as Malaysia turned away two crammed boats with 800 aboard, and Thailand kept at bay a large vessel with hundreds of hungry people.
A boat crammed with scores of Rohingya was found drifting in Thai waters.
As dusk fell several visibly emaciated men jumped into the sea to retrieve food packages dropped by a Thai navy helicopter.
An AFP reporter saw one of the men eat handfuls of raw instant noodles in the water before swimming back to the boat.
“About 10 people died during the journey. We threw their bodies into the water,” one of the migrants shouted in Rohingya to a boat full of journalists.
Malaysian Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Jafaar said: “What do you expect us to do? We have treated them humanely but they cannot be flooding our shores like this.”
“We have to send the right message that they are not welcome here,” he told The Associated Press. Four days earlier, about 1,000 refugees landed on the shores of Langkawi in northern Malaysia. Another 600 arrived surreptitiously in Indonesia.
Thai Prime Minister Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha made it clear that his government does not have resources to host refugees.
“If we take them all in, then anyone who wants to come will come freely. I am asking if Thailand will be able to take care of them all. Where will the budget come from?” Prayuth said. “No one wants them,” he said.
South-east Asia for years tried to quietly ignore the plight of Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya but finds itself caught in a spiraling humanitarian crisis that in many ways it helped create. In the last three years, more than 120,000 members of the Muslim minority, who are intensely persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, have boarded ships to flee to other countries, paying huge sums to human smugglers.
Despite appeals by the UN and aid groups, no government in the region — Thai, Indonesian or Malaysian — appears willing to take the refugees, fearing that accepting a few would result in an unstoppable flow of poor, uneducated migrants.
