Migrant crisis ‘alarming’
South Asia meeting on refugees offers few answers, much strife.
BANGKOK, Thailand — Representatives from 17 countries gathered Friday at a Bangkok hotel to discuss a refugee crisis that has engulfed the South Asia region for weeks, with thousands of migrants thought to still be adrift on the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal with dwindling supplies of food and water.
The influx of migrants “has reached an alarming level,” Thai Foreign Minister Gen. Tanasak Patimapragorn said in introductory comments at the Anantara Siam hotel. “The situation has affected various countries in the region. No country can solve this problem alone.”
About 3,500 migrants have arrived in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia in recent weeks, after either washing ashore or being rescued by fishermen. Most are Rohingya Muslims from western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, widely considered one of the world’s mostpersecuted minority groups. Other migrants are Bangladeshi, fleeing desperate poverty at home. Many have spoken of torture and starvation at sea.
Delegates to the meeting included high-ranking officials from South Asia, as well as the United States, Switzerland, Japan and a few international organizations.
The meeting yielded a list of policy recommendations, but no breakthrough agreements.
“I think the problem is that these governments are viewing these movements of people on boats through a security prism rather than a humanitarian prism,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
The meeting began with a tense back-and-forth between Volker Turk, the United Nations assistant high commissioner for refugees, and Myanmar’s dele- gate, Foreign Ministry Director-General Htin Lynn, underscoring the intractability of the crisis’ underlying issues.
During opening remarks, Turk said that Myanmar should shoulder “full assumption of responsibility … toward all its people.”
Myanmar’s delegate quickly replied, “Fingerpointing will not serve any purpose. It will take us nowhere.”
Myanmar refuses to grant the Rohingya citizenship, leaving them essentially stateless. Since ethnic violence in 2012, an estimated 140,000 have been living in ghettos with poor nutrition, poor sanitation and few political rights. Myanmar officials call the group “Bengali Muslims,” implying that they immigrated to the country from Bangladesh.
Htin Lynn did not use the word “Rohingya” in his opening remarks. The U.N. should “be more informed,” he said.
At least 100,000 Rohingya have fled the country by boat since 2012, according to the Arakan Project, a Bangkok-based nonprofit that tracks migration.
Myanmar’s navy found 727 people packed onto a fishing boat, the country’s Ministry of Information said Friday in a Facebook post, referring to them as “Bengali.” The migrants, who included 45 children, were arrested, the brief post said.
Indonesia and Malaysia — both on the front lines — did not send ministerial-level delegates to the meeting. Thailand has yet to reverse a long-running policy of turn- ing back migrant boats that enter its waters. On Wednesday, Bangladesh announced plans to move Rohingya refugees within its borders to an island off of the southern coast, where critics say they will face extremely poor living conditions.
Indonesia and Malaysia agreed to temporarily take in the migrants for up to a year before they’re resettled elsewhere, and both countries have ordered searchand-rescue missions. Yet about 2,600 people may be on boats still at sea, according to U.N. estimates.
“It’s kind of like when you go shopping in a glass store with a 5-year-old, the principle is ‘you break it, you own it,’ ” Robertson said. “In this sense, it’s ‘if you find it, you own it.’ So they want the other guys to find the boatload of Rohingya.
“It’s like an Easter egg hunt where nobody wants to find the eggs,” he said.
Experts say the current crisis began in early May, when the Thai government cracked down on smuggling groups after finding mass graves in the country’s south. The move wreaked havoc in the multimilliondollar industry, leading many smugglers to abandon their human cargo.
“We started off as saying there were 6,000 to 8,000 [migrants] at sea, and about 4,000 have landed. Where’s the balance?” said Joe Lowry, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration.