
A boat with Rohingya migrants on board that was found drifting on the sea border between Thailand and Malaysia on Thursday.
Thousands of Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshis abandoned at sea by human traffickers have nowhere to go after Malaysia turned away two boats crammed with more than 800 migrants, and Thailand kept at bay a third boat with hundreds more.
“What do you expect us to do?” Malaysian deputy home minister Wan Junaidi Jafaar said. “We have been very nice to the people who broke into our border. 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 said, just days after about 1,000 refugees landed on the shores of Langkawi, a popular resort island in northern Malaysia near Thailand. Another 600 have arrived surreptitiously in Indonesia.
The Thai prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, said his government did 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. Everyone wants a transit country like us to take responsibility. Is it fair?”
South-east Asia, which for years tried to quietly ignore the plight of Burma’s 1.3 million Rohingya, finds itself caught in a spiralling humanitarian crisis. In the last three years, more than 120,000 members of the Muslim minority, who are intensely persecuted in Buddhist-majority Burma, have boarded ships to flee to other countries, paying huge sums of money to human traffickers.
But faced with a crackdown by security forces of various countries, the smugglers have been abandoning the ships, leaving an estimated 6,000 refugees to fend for themselves, according to reliable aid workers and human rights groups.
“This is a grave humanitarian crisis demanding an immediate response,” said Matthew Smith, executive director of nonprofit human rights group Fortify Rights. “Lives are on the line.”
Despite appeals by the UN and international aid agencies, no government in the region – neither the Thai, Indonesian nor Malaysian – appears willing to take them in, fearing that accepting a few would result in an unstoppable flow of poor, uneducated migrants.
Wan Junaidi said about 500 people on board a boat found on Wednesday off the coast of northern Penang state were given provisions and then sent on their way. Another boat carrying about 300 migrants was turned away near Langkawi island overnight, according to two Malaysian officials.
Meanwhile, Thai authorities also spotted a boat with migrants on the sea border between Thailand and Malaysia.
They had been given food and water, Captain Chayut Navespootikorn, a senior naval official, said.
“To bring them into our country is not our policy,” he said. “If they need fuel or food to go on [to a third country] we would help them with it.”

Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants arrive by truck at a naval base in Langkawi, Malaysia.
Malaysia, which is not a signatory to international conventions on refugees, is host to more than 150,000 refugees and people seeking asylum, the majority from Burma. More than 45,000 of them are Rohingya, according to the UN refugee agency.
But because they have no legal status, job opportunities are limited. They also have little or no access to basic services such as education and healthcare, and are vulnerable to arrests and deportation. A small number are resettled in third countries.
Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch Asia accused Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia of playing “a three-way game of human ping pong”. At the same time, the three countries and others in south-east Asia have for years bowed to the wishes of Burma at regional conferences, avoiding all discussions of state-sponsored discrimination against the Rohingya.
Denied citizenship by national law, members of the Rohingya minority are effectively stateless. They have limited access to education or adequate healthcare and cannot move around freely. They have been attacked by the military and chased from their homes and land by extremist Buddhist mobs.
Wan Junaidi said it was time to put pressure on Burma, a former pariah state, to address the Rohingya crisis.
“You talk about democracy, but don’t treat your citizens like trash, like criminals until they need to run away to our country,” he said.
Increasingly over the years, Rohingya boarding boats in the Bay of Bengal have been joined by people from neighbouring Bangladesh, most of them seeking an escape from poverty.
For those fleeing, the first stop until recently was Thailand, where migrants were held in jungle camps until their families could raise hefty ransoms so they could continue onward. Recent security crackdowns forced the smugglers to change tactics, instead holding people on large ships parked offshore.
Initially they were shuttled to shore in groups on smaller boats after their “ransoms” were paid. But as agents and brokers on land got spooked by arrests – not just of traffickers but also police and politicians – they went into hiding.
That created a bottleneck, with migrants stuck on boats for days and weeks.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/m ... 500-aboard
Malaysia tells thousands of Rohingya refugees to 'go back to your country'.
Minister says his country is unwilling to accept boatloads of people fleeing poverty and persecution in Bangladesh and Burma.

Rohingya refugees get some rest in a stadium in Aceh, Indonesia on Wednesday. The UN’s refugee body said that between January and March this year, almost 25,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshis boarded smugglers’ boats.
Malaysia said on Wednesday it would no longer accept new arrivals of ethnic minority Rohingya fleeing persecution in Burma, as the UN refugee agency expressed surprise that south-east Asian nations were now turning back boats.
Up to 8,000 impoverished Bangladeshi migrants and Rohingya asylum seekers are still believed to be stranded at sea close to Malaysia and Indonesia.
Nearly 2,000 were rescued from abandoned people-smuggling boats in the two countries at the weekend.
One vessel that reached Indonesian waters early on Monday was turned away by the country’s navy after being given supplies and directions to Malaysia.
Malaysia’s deputy home minister, Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, however, said his country would use tough measures, including turning back asylum-seeker boats and deportation in order to send the “right message”.
“We don’t want them to come here,” the deputy minister said. His ministry oversees the police and immigration agencies.
“We are not prepared to accept that number coming into our shores and those people who are already in, we are sending them home anyway.
“I would like them to be turned back and ask them to go back to their own country. We cannot tell them we are welcoming them.”
He said Malaysia would only consider rescuing asylum seekers on humanitarian grounds if their boats had capsized. He added that a meeting will be convened soon involving Burma and Bangladeshi embassy officials to discuss how to send the migrants back.
His statement signals a change in stance for authorities in Muslim-majority Malaysia, which in the past quietly tolerated the arrival of Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority in predominantly Buddhist Burma.
For many Rohingyas, relatively affluent Malaysia came to be seen as one of the last safe havens in a region where many countries have been cracking down on boat people in recent years.
Rohingya asylum seekeers in Malaysia were given documents issued by the UN refugee agency, acknowledging their need to be protected, although the country is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention. While they are not officially allowed to work, authorities turn a blind eye to those working in the informal sector.
International groups have expressed concerned at the south-east Asian nations’ decision to turn away migrant boats, a controversial practice that has been used by Australia against immigrants seeking to reach its shores and has sparked heated debate.
“UNHCR is surprised at reports of Indonesia turning back one of the boats,” its Bangkok-based regional spokeswoman Vivian Tan said. “Such a practice is inconsistent with Indonesia’s search-and-rescue efforts to date, which have focused on saving lives.
“We continue to appeal to countries in the region to share responsibility and avert a humanitarian crisis.”
Some of the estimated 8,000 Bangladeshi and Rohingya boat people have been on the perilous sea journey since early March and are in urgent need of medical treatment to save their lives, International Organisation for Migration Asia-Pacific spokesman Joe Lowry said.
The 1,158 migrants who are held on Malaysia’s Langkawi island appeared “hungry and tired” when they were rescued, according to Langkawi police chief Harith Kam Abdullah.
He said they face deportation once the immigration authorities complete their investigation, and that Malaysia is stepping up sea patrols along its borders “to prevent any further illegal encroachment into Malaysian waters”.
The sudden jump in the number of migrants stuck at sea comes after Thailand cracked down on people-smuggling networks following the grim discovery of mass graves along the Thai-Malaysia border, a traditional route for the Rohingya.
About 25,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingya boarded rickety smugglers’ boats in the first three months of this year, almost double the number in the same period of 2014, according to a UNHCR report released last week.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/m ... ur-country