Disaster looms for migrant boats turned away from SE Asian shores

Thousands of refugees abandoned by human traffickers in boats on the Andaman Sea risk drowning or starvation if they are not quickly rescued, migration and human rights organisations have warned.

At least 6,000 refugees - and possibly many thousands more - fleeing oppression and poverty in Myanmar and Bangladesh are believed to be stranded at sea. Their plight threatens to become a humanitarian disaster rivalling that of the Mediterranean, where hundreds of African migrants seeking a better life in Europe have drowned in recent weeks.

Boats carrying refugees, mainly members of the stateless and persecuted Rohingya minority, have been turned away from Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, leaving them to drift at sea.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said the three countries involved should stop what he called "this cruel game of human ping pong". Many of the refugees had been at sea for weeks or even months, he said, and were running out of food and water.

"This will end up with people dying at sea," Mr Robertson said. Governments of the three countries were morally obliged to find the boats and put the refugees in camps where the international community could provide food and medicine and come up with a longer-term solution, he said.

The brewing humanitarian disaster was triggered after a crackdown by Thai authorities on illegal "ransom for release" camps in southern Thailand. That followed the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of 33 migrants in one of the camps. Several Thai police officers and officials have been arrested for their alleged complicity in people smuggling.

According to experts who track the smuggling rings in the Andaman Sea, the Thai camps are holding stations for refugees on their way to Malaysia where tens of thousands of Rohingya have found a home in recent years. Though their legal status is sometimes tenuous, one person said, they felt more welcome in Muslim-majority Malaysia than in Buddhist Myanmar.

Some of the migrants, enticed on to boats with the promise of jobs in Malaysia, are imprisoned in the Thai camps until their relatives pay ransoms of up to $3,000, several of the experts said. Those for whom no ransom is paid may be beaten, starved, raped or killed, according to Joe Lowry, a spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration, who estimated that human traffickers made $250m a year from the Rohingya trade.

With the Thai camps closed and other countries refusing to allow the boats to land, the smugglers' moneymaking opportunities have been choked off. Migrants contacted by relief organisations say the smugglers have abandoned them to their fate at sea. Those on one desperately crowded boat, whose engine had been disabled by smugglers, told a BBC correspondent that 10 people had already died on board.

The numbers of Rohingya leaving the Bay of Bengal in the first quarter of this year reached 25,000, about double that in the same period of 2014 and 2013 and more than in the whole of 2012, according to estimates from refugee agencies.

One western official said many Rohingya were convinced they would never be allowed to leave the camps, making the prospect of trying their luck abroad more attractive. Last month temporary identity cards held by hundreds of thousands of Rohingya expired, making them potentially even more vulnerable to travel restrictions and arbitrary treatment from security forces. "It's all a bit reminiscent of 1930s Germany," the official said.

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority who live mainly in the border regions between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Although many of the 1m or so Rohingya in Myanmar trace their roots back several generations, they were stripped of their Myanmar citizenship in 1982.

Persecution of the Rohingya by the Buddhist majority has, if anything, intensified in the years since 2010 when military dictatorship gave way to a form of managed democracy. More than 100,000 Rohingya are confined to bleak camps with almost no schooling and limited medical supplies in the westernmost Rakhine state. Many fled to the camps after Buddhist mobs attacked their villages in 2012, killing at least 170.

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