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 "The government is checking their identity, asking what they want
to do and where they want to go," government spokesman Ye Htut told
Reuters, without providing further details of the boat's location.
"Usually, most of them want to go back to Bangladesh, so we will
arrange according to their wishes."
Government officials have been tight-lipped about the identities of
727 migrants on the overcrowded fishing boat, found drifting and
taking on water early Friday, as well as their eventual destination.
The government initially labeled the migrants "Bengalis", a term
used to refer to both Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims, a largely
stateless minority in Myanmar that the government refuses to refer
to by name. Officials later said they believed most of those on
board were from Bangladesh.
Myanmar has come under harsh criticism for its treatment of
Rohingya, more than 100,000 have fled persecution and poverty in
Rakhine State since 2012. Myanmar denies discriminating against the
Rohingya.
 Journalists from Reuters and other foreign media were briefly
detained and turned back to land after approaching the boat on
Sunday, as it was seen surrounded by navy patrol vessels.
Navy officials made journalists delete photographs and footage of
the boat, and at one stage a sailor pointed a rifle at reporters.
A navy officer, who declined to be named, told Reuters on Sunday
that some migrants on board were able to speak Rakhine - a local
language in the western state that is not widely spoken in
Bangladesh.
Myanmar's government says the Rohingya are illegal migrants from
neighboring Bangladesh, and denied during a 17-nation meeting on the
crisis in Bangkok last week that it was to blame for a crisis that
has seen more than 4,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshi "boat people"
arrive across Southeast Asia in recent weeks.
The migrants were abandoned at sea by people smugglers after
Thailand launched a crackdown on trafficking in early May.
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"Just days after the Bangkok summit on the boat people and the
Myanmar authorities are already shamefully violating what was agreed
there," Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's
Asia division in Bangkok, told Reuters.
Myanmar should immediately grant access to the migrants to
international agencies, Robertson said, "especially since no one in
the international community believes Naypyidaw's rash and rushed
assessment that these people are all from Bangladesh".
Kasita Rochanakorn, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) in Yangon, said the organization
had previously been invited to help refugees at a disembarkation
point in southern Myanmar, but had been "subsequently told that the
place of disembarkation had been changed".
The UNHCR was still waiting for more information on where the
migrants would be unloaded, she said in an emailed statement.
Myanmar officials had said last month that another migrant boat
found at sea with more than 200 people on board was mostly filled
with Bangladeshis.
But interviews by Reuters found more than 150 Rohingya had earlier
been on the same boat, but were quietly whisked off by traffickers
before authorities brought the boat to shore.
(Additional Reporting By Soe Zeya Tun and Aubrey Belford in Yangon;
Writing By Aubrey Belford in Yangon; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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