KUALA LUMPUR // Malaysia said on Sunday that its foreign minister would meet his Indonesian and Thai counterparts to discuss the influx of boat people from Bangladesh and Myanmar flooding to South East Asia.
Foreign minister Anifah Aman was to meet Indonesia’s Retno Marsudi in the Malaysian city of Kota Kinabalu on Monday, a government official said.
That would be followed by separate talks between Mr Anifah and Thai foreign minister Tanasak Patimapragorn later in the week, “most probably on Wednesday”. The official confirmed the meetings were called in response to the migrant crisis.
The three nations have sparked outrage by turning away vessels overloaded with migrants from Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya minority and poor Bangladeshis.
Officials have increasingly blamed Myanmar and its alleged systematic persecution of Rohingya for fuelling the mass migration.
“Myanmar should deal with the Rohingya community internally instead of forcing it on its [South East Asian] neighbours,” Malaysia’s deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin was quoted by local media on Sunday as saying.
Earlier, state media said Mr Anifah was to meet in Malaysia on Sunday with Bangladeshi foreign minister AH Mahmood Ali. His trip to Malaysia was arranged before the migrant crisis.
“It [the migrant crisis] is one of the topics and a very important issue in the agenda,” Mr Anifah said, according to the official news agency Bernama.
Nearly 3,000 migrants have been rescued or swum ashore in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand in recent days, giving grim accounts of people dying at sea of starvation, sickness or drowning when boats that were not seaworthy sank.
Activists say thousands more are feared to be drifting helplessly at sea after a Thai crackdown on human-trafficking disrupted busy migration routes from the Bay of Bengal to South East Asia.
On Saturday, Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak urged Myanmar to help solve what he called a “humanitarian catastrophe”.
“Malaysia has played a large part but we are not the source of the problem,” Bernama quoted him saying.
Myanmar has previously steadfastly refused to discuss the issue in regional forums. It considers Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, denies them citizenship, and disavows responsibility for them.
It has already rejected an invitation from Thailand to attend a May 29 meeting there to address the crisis.
In contrast to the Rohingya, the Bangladeshi boat people are believed to be mainly economic migrants seeking to escape their country’s grinding poverty.
Bangladesh foreign secretary Shahidul Haque on Saturday said his country was struggling to contain surging illegal migration through the Bay of Bengal.
He blamed the high numbers of Rohingya fleeing abroad and called for international pressure on Myanmar.
“The Rohingya crisis has been created by Myanmar, which will have to find a solution,” Mr Haque said.
* Agence France-Presse
