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 President Barack Obama said this week that Myanmar needed to end
discrimination against the Rohingya if it was to succeed in its
transition to a democracy, as Washington upped the pressure on the
country to tackle what it sees as one of the root causes of a
migration that the region has struggled to cope with.
Myanmar does not recognize its 1.1 million Rohingya as citizens,
rendering them effectively stateless. Almost 140,000 were displaced
in deadly clashes with Buddhists in the country's western Rakhine
state in 2012.
"It has been portrayed that discrimination and persecution are
causing people to leave Rakhine state, but that is not true,"
Myanmar's Minister of Foreign Affairs Wunna Maung Lwin told
diplomats and international agencies in Yangon.
He pointed to the number of Bangladeshis on board a migrant boat
that landed in May as proof that the influx of "boat people" was a
regional problem linked to human trafficking.
"This incident... has shown to the region as well as the
international community this is not the root cause," he said.
The boat he referred to was intercepted by Myanmar's navy last
month. Myanmar has said 200 of the 208 people aboard were economic
migrants from Bangladesh.
But a Reuters investigation found that 150-200 Rohingya had also
been aboard that boat, but were spirited away by people smugglers in
the week before the navy brought it to shore.
Tareque Muhammad, deputy chief of mission at the Bangladesh embassy
in Yangon, told Reuters that only 150 people from that boat had been
identified and documented as Bangladeshis.
Zaw Aye Maung, the Yangon Region Ethnic Rakhine Affairs Minister,
said at the same briefing that if genocide was taking place in
Rakhine state then it was against ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.
"We are now in danger of being overrun by these Bangladeshis," said
Zaw Aye Maung, in comments that visibly angered the ambassador from
Bangladesh, Mohammad Sufiur Rahman. Sufiur Rahman declined to talk
to reporters after the briefing.
The powerful speaker of Myanmar's parliament, Shwe Mann, wrote an
open letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
appealing for international organizations to "avoid creating
misconceptions about our country and aggravating communal tensions
and conflict."
The letter, dated June 3 and published in Myanmar state media on
Thursday, came after the UN Security Council held its first
closed-door briefing on human rights in Myanmar last week. A council
diplomat inside that briefing said UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad
Al Hussein described the Rohingya as facing institutional
discrimination.
DUMPED AT SEA
The current crisis blew up last month after a Thai crackdown on
trafficking camps along its border with Malaysia made it too risky
for people smugglers to land their human cargo. Smugglers abandoned
boats full of migrants at sea.
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Myanmar was in the process of verifying the place of origin of 734
migrants the navy brought ashore on Wednesday, Wunna Maung Lwin
said. They were found drifting in the Andaman Sea on Friday in an
overloaded fishing boat that was taking on water.
Several migrants said that smugglers had loaded them from three
smaller boats onto the larger vessel.
"The traffickers told us 'we can't go to Thailand, so you have to go
alone'," Marmod Toyo, who said he was a Rohingya, told Reuters.
He said he was at sea for two months after being offered 50,000 kyat
($45.25) by an agent to get on a boat to Malaysia. Marmod, who has a
wife and four children, said he knew it was a trick but that his
family needed the money.
"There's not enough food back home and no work," he said. "The human
trafficker came and gave me money. I knew he might sell me, but I
needed it."
Another migrant said his uncle, who was also on the boat, was beaten
to death by one of the crew before the body was dumped overboard.
"My uncle was eating rice and asked for some water, so they killed
him," said Siszul Islam, from the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.
There was no way of independently corroborating the migrants'
accounts.
Some 4,000 migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar have landed in
Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar in the past month.
The United Nations estimates around 2,000 migrants may still be
adrift.
Indonesia would repatriate economic migrants from Bangladesh as soon
as it could, but how to handle Rohingya migrants was more complex,
said Andi Rachmianto, the international security and disarmament
director at the foreign ministry.
"We need to differentiate between Rohingya migrants and migrants
from Bangladesh because their motivations are different," Rachmianto
said.
(Additional reporting by Hnin Yadana Zaw in YANGON and Fergus Jensen
in JAKARTA; Writing by Simon Webb; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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