SE Asia migrant crisis meetings begin
KUALA LUMPUR— Malaysia said on Sunday its foreign minister would meet his Indonesian and Thai counterparts to discuss the influx of boat people to Southeast Asia as international pressure grew for a regional solution.
The three nations have sparked outrage by turning away vessels overloaded with migrants from Burma’s (Myanmar) ethnic Rohingya minority and with poor Bangladeshis.
“Burma should deal with the Rohingya community internally instead of forcing it on its [Southeast Asian] neighbors,” Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin was quoted by local media on Sunday as saying.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman was to host Indonesia’s Retno Marsudi in the city of Kota Kinabalu on Borneo island on Monday, a government official said.
That would be followed by separate talks between Anifah and Thai Foreign Minister Tanasak Patimapragorn later in the week, most probably on Wednesday.
The official declined further comment but confirmed the meetings were called in re- sponse to the migrant crisis.
Earlier, state media said Anifah was to meet in Malaysia on Sunday with Bangladeshi Foreign Minister A.H. Mahmood Ali. His trip to Malaysia was arranged before the migrant crisis.
“It (boat people) is one of the topics and a very important issue in the agenda,” Anifah was quoted as saying in a brief dispatch by official news agency Bernama.
Nearly 3,000 migrants have been rescued or swum ashore in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thai- land in recent days, giving grim accounts of people dying at sea of starvation, sickness or drowning when rickety boats sank.
Activists say thousands more are feared to be drifting helplessly at sea after a Thai crackdown on human-trafficking disrupted busy migration routes from the Bay of Bengal to Southeast Asia.
On Saturday Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak urged Burma to help solve what he called a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
Burma has previously stead- fastly refused to discuss the issue in regional forums. It considers Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, denying them citizenship and disavows responsibility for them.
It has already rejected an invitation from Thailand to attend a May 29 meeting there to address the crisis.
“The Rohingya crisis has been created by Burma, which will have to find a solution,” Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Shahidul Haque said.