Indonesia | Minister: We’ve already given too much to help boat people

An Acehnese man carries boxes of mineral water to be distributed to ethnic Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants at a temporary shelter in Langsa, Aceh province

Indonesia has “given more than it should” to help hundreds of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants stranded on boats by human traffickers, its foreign minister said yesterday, a day before she was to meet with her counterparts from the other countries feeling the brunt of the humanitarian crisis.
Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said that at yesterday’s meeting with Malaysian and Thai officials, she will discuss how to solve the migrant problem with help from their countries of origin, the U.N. refugee agency and the International Office for Migration.
“This irregular migration is not the problem of one or two nations. This is a regional problem which also happens in other places. This is also a global problem,” Marsudi told reporters after a Cabinet meeting at the presidential palace.
Marsudi said Indonesia has sheltered 1,346 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants who washed onto Aceh and North Sumatra provinces last week. The first batch came on May 10 with 558 people on a boat, and the second with 807 on three boats landed on Friday. Even before the crisis, nearly 12,000 migrants were being sheltered in Indonesia awaiting resettlement, she said, with most of those Rohingya Muslims who have fled persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. No more than 500 of those migrants are resettled in third countries each year, she said.
“Indonesia has given more than it should do as a non-member-state of the Refugee Convention of 1951,” she said.
Myanmar’s cooperation is seen as vital to solving the crisis, but its government has already cast doubt on whether it will attend a conference to be hosted by Thailand on May 29 that is to include 15 Asian nations affected by the emergency.
Like Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have not signed the U.N. convention, which would obligate them to accept some refugees. All have said they can longer accept Rohingya; Malaysia, the country many Rohingya try to reach, already has tens of thousands of them. Niniek Karmini, Jakarta, AP