Myanmar offers to take Rohingya boat people back with conditions

Feb 27, 2009, 9:20 GMT

   Cha-am, Thailand - Myanmar's junta has tentatively offered to screen Rohingya refugees for repatriation on the condition that they admit they are of Bengali descent and have fixed addresses in Myanmar, the Thai foreign minister said Friday.

   'If they can prove they are from Bangladesh and lived in Myanmar, then they are ready to take back these people,' Kasit Piromya said.

   Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win made the proposal at an informal dinner of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Thursday night in Cha-am, a beach resort 130 kilometres south-west of Bangkok.

   The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group who have lived in Myanmar's Arakan state for generations. They have been denied citizenship by Myanmar's military regime on the grounds that they are not on the government's list of 131 recognized ethnic minority groups and are rather deemed immigrants from Bangladesh.

   For the Rohingya to admit they are Bengali would deny their special ethnic status in Myanmar.

   There are about 800,000 Rohingya living in Arkaan state, where they are denied the right to own property, work and travel freely and are frequently subject to persecution. Without owning property, it would be difficult for the Rohingya to prove they have lived in Myanmar.

   About 200,000 others live in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, and thousands of others work abroad, mostly illegally in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

   The Rohingya have recently risen as a regional priority after the Thai military was criticized for pushing back about 1,000 Rohingya refugees from Thailand's southern shores in December, leaving them at sea in boats without engines and insufficient food and water.

   Some of the boat people were rescued by the Indonesian Navy off the coast of Aceh, where they told officials they were rounded up and beaten by Thai military personnel. The remaining Rohingya remained missing.

   The issue of what to do with the Rohingya boat people has been kept off the official agenda for the 14th ASEAN Summit in Cha-am this weekend, but it was discussed informally on the sidelines of the foreign ministers meeting.

   Myanmar tentatively agreed to allow the ASEAN Secretariat to play a role in the screening process, Kasit said.

   Myanmar also agreed to send a delegation to attend the Bali Process meeting in Bali on April 14 to 15 when the Rohingya issue is to be discussed.

   The Bali Proccess, created in 2002, brings participants together to work on measures to help combat people-smuggling and related transnational crimes in the region.

   Thailand has insisted that the Rohingya issue be solved regionally with participation from the concerned countries, which include Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand.

   ASEAN's members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.