Myanmar’s navy yesterday brought ashore 200 migrants – calling them Bangladeshis – found in a boat off its coast, after its military chief said some of the thousands of migrants that have landed in Malaysia and Indonesia this month are pretending to be Rohingya Muslims to get UN aid, Reuters reports.
In response, a senior US official said yesterday that the majority of the more than 3,000 migrants that have come ashore are Rohingya fleeing desperate conditions in Rakhine State in western Myanmar.
The senior US diplomat yesterday urged Myanmar to extend citizenship to the oppressed Rohingya minority.
“They should have a path to citizenship,” US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Yangon, referring to the Rohingya – 1.3 million of whom live in Myanmar yet are dismissed as Bangladeshi illegal immigrants by the authorities, AFP reports.
Noble Peace Prize winning opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is yet to comment on the current crisis.
Yesterday’s naval rescue by Myanmar could be a sign of compromise after widespread criticism for not taking any responsibility for the crisis. “The people on the boat were all from Bangladesh,” said Rakhine State government executive secretary Tin Maung Swe. “We will deport them.”
Southeast Asia’s migrant crisis blew up after a Thai crackdown on human trafficking led criminals to abandon overloaded boats in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.
“The majority are, in fact, from Rakhine State, are Rohingya and have left because of the desperate conditions they face in Rakhine State,” Blinken told reporters yesterday, speaking of the thousands of migrants that have come ashore in the region.
Most of Myanmar’s 1.1 million Rohingya are stateless and live in apartheid-like conditions in the state. Almost 140,000 were displaced in deadly clashes with majority Buddhists in Rakhine in 2012. They are denied citizenship and have long complained of state-sanctioned discrimination.
Myanmar military chief General Min Aung Hlaing cast doubt on the origin of many of the refugees in comments carried in Myanmar’s state media yesterday, hinting that most migrants claimed to be Rohingya from Myanmar in the hope of receiving assistance from UNHCR.
Myanmar has seen surging Buddhist nationalism in recent years and spates of violence targeting Muslim minorities. Both the US and UN have raised concerns about laws proposed by Myanmar President Thein Sein, seen as a response to campaigns by hardline Buddhist monks in a key election year.
A raft of laws spanning interfaith marriage, religious conversion and birth rates, are seen by activists as particularly discriminatory against women and minorities.
Monsoon looms
The rescue by Myanmar’s navy was welcomed by the UNHCR which said it was helping local authorities provide assistance to the migrants.
But fears remain for many more still left on boats in the Bay of Bengal with monsoon rains looming.
“We hope that this recent positive development will be followed by other disembarkations in Myanmar and across the region, well in advance of the coming monsoon rains,” UNHCR spokeswoman Vivian Tan told AFP.
The imminent monsoon season, when heavy rains and cyclones lash the region, usually lead to a significant drop off in regional boat migrant numbers.
In the Bay of Bengal, the UNHCR believes up to 2,000 migrants are still stuck on vessels controlled by people smugglers who have been unwilling to begin the journey south because of the crackdown.
Giving updated figures the International Organization for Migration said that over 3,600 people had disembarked in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh since the beginning of the crisis. Scores of Rohingya are paying off people smugglers and returning to the squalid camps they used to live in after being held for months on overcrowded ships off the coast of Myanmar.
Earlier this week, Malaysia and Indonesia relented on a hardline policy of pushing back the boats, and said their nations would accept the migrants for one year, or until they can be resettled or repatriated with the help of international agencies.
