Arakan News Agency
More than 1,000 monks and activists staged a protest Wednesday in Myanmar’s commercial capital Yangon urging the government not to accept the stateless Rohingya Muslims who have been rescued or are still stuck at sea after fleeing the country.
About 20 local nongovernmental organizations organized the protest urging the government not to give in to pressure from the international community to accept the Rohingya and Bangladeshi boat people or grant the Rohingya minority more rights.
The protestors also accused the United Nations and western countries of unfairly blaming Myanmar for the boat people crisis, in which thousands of trafficked Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants have washed up on shores in Southeast Asia in recent weeks.
“The reason we organized this protest today is because the U.N. and representatives from 15 countries are having a meeting in Bangkok on May 29 to discuss the boat people issue, and they may pressure the Myanmar government to accept these people,” an unidentified male protester told RFA’s Myanmar Service.
Myanmar blames the current boat people crisis on human trafficking and smuggling networks and has rejected claims that are widely held among human rights activists, experts and the Rohingya themselves that Myanmar’s policies towards the Muslim minority have caused them to flee.
Representatives from the U.N. and several countries will meet in Bangkok on Friday to discuss how to resolve the humanitarian crisis of boat people stranded at sea for months and tackle the issue of human trafficking.
“We are reiterating that the president [Thein Sein] and the government never accept the Rohingya and boat people,” said Parmaukkha, a senior monk of Ma Ba Tha, a group of Extremist Buddhist monks in Myanmar.
Thousands of Rohingya fleeing persecution and poverty in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and economic migrants from Bangladesh have tried to land in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia since a Thai crackdown on people smugglers in early May forced traffickers to abandon them at sea.
The U.N. estimates that more than 2,500 migrants could still be stranded on boats in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, although other international agencies have put the figure at 3,000-4,000 people
Source : RFA
