Bangladeshi migrants have their lunch at a temporary shelter
Thousands of Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshis abandoned at sea by human traffickers had nowhere to go yesterday, as Malaysia turned away two boats crammed with 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 told The Associated Press, 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.
Southeast Asia, which for years tried to quietly ignore the plight of Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya, 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 of money to human traffickers.
Meanwhile, Thai authorities also spotted a boat with migrants on the sea border between Thailand and Malaysia, Satun province governor Dejrat Simsiri told the AP by phone.
He said Thai boats, including navy and national parks vessels, are now checking out the migrants’ boat “to make sure they do not come into Thai waters.”
“We are monitoring from afar but it appears that the people are in frail condition … there are hundreds of them,” he said.
Dejrat said Thailand will provide food and fuel, and send them to a “third country” if that’s what they want.
“It’s unlikely that we will bring them to shore… we will need order from higher officials before we can proceed,” he said. Eileen Ng and Thanyarat, Doksone, Langkawi, AP
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