Thailand’s defence minister, General Pravit Wongsuwan, on Monday (May 18) denied that the country was pushing migrant boats back into the open sea.
Pravit presided over a meeting with the Royal Thai Navy’s Region 3 in the country’s southern beach town of Phuket, to follow up on the navy’s operation on the migrant crisis in southeast Asia.
Southeast Asian governments have so far shown little sign of a coordinated response to the boatloads of Bangladeshi migrants and Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar arriving in their waters.
Some 2,500 migrants have landed in Malaysia and Indonesia over the past week, while around 5,000 remain stranded at sea in rickety boats with dwindling supplies of food and water.
Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand have turned back or towed overcrowded migrant boats away from their coastlines, in what the International Organization for Migration has described as “maritime ping-pong with human lives”.
For several days, about 300 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants on one particular boat have zig-zagged across maritime borders just out of sight of gleaming Thai beach resorts.
Their boat, which those on board said has been at sea for up to three months, was found drifting last Thursday (May 14) near Koh Lipe island, close to the Malaysian border, with parts of its engine missing. Thai sailors fixed the engine and handed the migrants food and water, before turning them back out to the Andaman Sea.
Migrants have long made their way from the Bay of Bengal’s southeast corner to Thailand, but a crackdown on traffickers by the Thai government disrupted the route and several thousand were left at sea with nowhere to go, though more than 2,000 have made it to the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia.
“For any boats outside the Thai waters, we warn them not to enter to Thai territory. If they enter, they would be entering the country illegally. If they still intend on entering (into Thai waters) they will have to be held in custody immediately,” Pravit told reporters after the meeting in Phuket on Monday.
When asked about the push-back policy, the defense minister quickly denies that Thailand is doing so.
“Thailand doesn’t push anyone away. It depends on what they (migrants) want to do. Don’t ask whether we push away the migrants. We don’t push back anyone. Human rights is important which we have to respect,” he said.
Thailand’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it had informed the people on the boat found off Koh Lipe that they could come ashore for humanitarian assistance, but “they informed the Thai side that they wished to travel onwards.”
After being towed out on Friday (May 15), it headed southwest, according to Thai navy radar tracking seen by Reuters. It then took a jagged counterclockwise arc towards Malaysian waters, before its engine stopped and it drifted again in the sea.
The United Nations has called on Southeast Asian nations not to push back the boatloads of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis – men, women and children who fled persecution and poverty at home, and now face sickness and starvation at sea.
An estimated 25,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingya boarded smugglers’ boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many as in the same period of 2014, the United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR has said.
A clampdown by Thailand’s military junta has made a well-trodden trafficking route into Malaysia – one of Southeast Asia’s wealthiest economies – too risky for criminals who prey on Rohingya fleeing oppression in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and on Bangladeshis looking for better livelihoods abroad.
Reuters
