News from Bangkok
The plight of the rohingya refugees has suddenly become a hot topic after nearly 650 of them were rescued in the territorial waters of India and Indonesia. The Royal Thai Navy was alleged by international human rights organisations of pushing back these refugees out to the Andaman Sea where they had come from. Several hundreds of people, it has been contended, might have died at sea.
Thailand's Burmese boat people Cast adrift
Jan 22nd 2009 | BANGKOK
From The Economist
OF ALL the myriad groups fleeing the misery of modern Myanmar, few have suffered more than the Rohingyas, a shunned Muslim minority, concentrated in Rakhine state. Denied full citizenship at home, many end up in Bangladesh, where some 200,000 live in squalid border camps. Another 28,000 are housed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The lure of further migration is strong. Every winter thousands pay to board rickety smugglers’ boats for Thailand, whence a bus can take them to Malaysia, to seek work or asylum.
This season Thailand’s soldiers had a nasty surprise in store. After being held for days on a remote island off Ranong, two groups of nearly 1,000 captured Rohingyas and Bangladeshis were forced, at gunpoint, out to sea in the Indian Ocean on several boats. The vessels had little food and, crucially, no engines. read more
'Six million Burmese need food'
By Jonathan Head
BBC South East Asia correspondent The United Nations has warned of acute food shortages in parts of Burma, despite a better than expected rice harvest over the past year.
Its World Food Programme has issued a report warning that six million people in Burma are now in need of food aid.
They include a million in the Irrawaddy Delta, hit by Cyclone Nargis last year.
But the WFP says it cannot get enough food aid to the western Rohingya and Chin areas, because of restrictions imposed by the military government. read more
From Strategy page
For the last three decades, several hundred thousand Rohingya (out of a total population of some three million) have been fleeing into Bangladesh, but Bangladesh wouldn't take them, and forced many of them back into Burma. In the last few years, many Rohingya have been trying to get into Thailand, and then overland to Moslem Malaysia or Indonesia. In the last year, about 5,000 Rohingya tried to get into Thailand. The year before it was 3,000 and 1,500 in 2006. Given the years of Moslem terrorism in Thailands south, the army did not want thousands of Burmese Moslems wandering the length of the country trying to reach Malaysia. Just sending them to Malaysia would not work, since neither Malaysia nor Indonesia (nor any Moslem country, for that matter) was willing to take the Rohingya. So the army decided to use force. They put a thousand of the most recent refugees in boats and towed them out ... read more
"neither Malaysia nor Indonesia (nor any Moslem country, for that matter) was willing to take the Rohingya."
These words from www.strategypage.com's article reprinted above is quite annoying and might not be true as I knew of some burmese having refugee paper working in KL.
