BANGKOK — A regional conference called to address the swelling tide of boat people in Southeast Asia ended Friday with no major breakthroughs, as Myanmar criticized those blaming it for fueling the crisis and warned that “finger pointing” would not help.
But delegates agreed on one thing at least— the need to keep talking.
In Myanmar, state television announced the navy had seized a boat carrying 727 migrants a few dozen miles off the coast of the Irrawaddy Delta region, the latest vessel found in the past few weeks. The report identified those on board as “Bengalis” — a reference to Bangladesh — and said they were taken to a nearby island. Forty-five of them were children.
Friday’s meeting in Bangkok was attended by representatives of 17 countries directly or indirectly affected by the growing crisis, along with the United States and Japan and officials from international organizations such as the U.N. refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration. That so many countries — including Myanmar — participated was considered progress in itself.
“The most encouraging result was the general consensus that these discussions need to continue,” said IOM Director-General William Lacy Swing. “It cannot be a one-off.”
Southeast Asia has been beset for years by growing waves of desperate migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar. In the past several weeks alone, at least 3,000 people have been rescued by fishermen or have made their way ashore in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Several thousand more are believed to still be at sea after human smugglers abandoned their boats amid a regional crackdown that has unearthed the graves of dozens of people who died while being kept hostage in illegal trafficking camps.
Some are Bangladeshis who left their impoverished homeland in hope of finding jobs abroad. But many are Rohingya Muslims who have fled persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, which has denied them basic rights, confined more than 100,000 to camps and denies them citizenship. More than 1 million Rohingya live in the country formerly known as Burma.
At the start of the meeting, the U.N.’s assistant high commissioner for refugees responsible for protection, Volker Turk, said there could be no solution if root causes are not addressed.
“This will require full assumption of responsibility by Myanmar toward all its people. Granting citizenship is the ultimate goal,” he said. “In the interim …recognizing that Myanmar is their own country is urgently required, (as well as) access to identity documents and the removal of restrictions on basic freedoms.”
Htin Linn, the acting director of Myanmar’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, shot back in a speech afterward, saying Turk should “be more informed.”
“Finger pointing will …take us nowhere,” he said.
