Buddhist nationalists pressure Myanmar govt as 700 boat people disembark

Hardliners call for asylum seekers to be turned back.

(Photo: AFP)

Mandalay:  Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar have raised concerns over the government’s hosting of boat people as more than 700 rescued by the navy arrived in Rakhine state on Wednesday.

U Than Tun, a community leader in Sittwe, Rakhine state, said that the navy brought ashore 727 boat people to Maungdaw township in Rakhine state on Wednesday.

Women and children have been sent to Taung Pyo Let Waa village, near the border, where the 200 Bangladeshis rescued last month have been kept. The men would be sent to a separate area in Maungdaw township and the process of nationality verification carried out for all.

U Than Tun warned that the arrivals could lead to protests and “anger” from the majority-Buddhist Rakhine community.

“We strongly call on the government to repatriate the first group of 200 boat people as soon as possible as 700 more people arrived in Rakhine, prompting much concern and anger among the Rakhine community,” U Than Tun told ucanews.com on Wednesday.

Local officials from Rakhine state couldn’t be reached for comment.

Rakhine state has been on edge since 2012 when religious conflict between majority Rakhine Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims left more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, dead, and more than 140,000 people displaced.

Ashin Tilawkar Bhivamsathe, chair of the committee for the Protection of Nationality and Religion known as Ma Ba Tha, sent a statement to the president on Tuesday calling on the government to think about the long term situation for boat people and to send them back to sea after providing aid by replicating Australia’s controversial push-backs.

“Myanmar has already hosted 200 Bengalis rescued and brought to Rakhine that can’t be sent back to their home. Every racial and religious conflict erupting in Myanmar stems from accepting non-Buddhist and non-Myanmar people,” said the statement.

U Parmaukkha, a hardline senior monk from Ma Ba Tha, said that the UN and United States must stop pressuring Myanmar to accept “Bengalis” who are “not from our country”.

“We are much concerned that more boat people disembark in Myanmar and actually they are from Bangladesh. But they attempted to enter into Myanmar as migrants so these Bengalis must be sent back to their home,” U Parmaukkha told ucanews.com on Wednesday.

More than 3,500 hungry and bedraggled Rohingya Muslims, a persecuted minority in Myanmar, and Bangladeshi economic migrants, have arrived on Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian soil in recent weeks in a regional migration crisis.

The current migrant crisis was sparked by a Thai police crackdown on people smuggling after the discovery of mass graves at migrant holding sites in the jungle. The crackdown threw the well-worn routes into chaos with smugglers abandoning their human cargo in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal.

An estimated 2,500 migrants are still believed to be stranded at sea.

“We urge Myanmar to provide full protection and assistance to these migrants in coordination with UNHCR and IOM referring to the UN refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration,” US State Department Marie Harf said in a daily news briefing on Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, Hla Swe, an upper house lawmaker from Myanmar’s ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) raised an emergency proposal in parliament that calls on the government to set an exact time frame for assisting rescued boat people.

“If we adopt the way practised in the world’s leading democratic countries — America and India — we would handle it succinctly by shooting all illegal migrants without any investigation, then that would frighten them and we wouldn’t need to worry about these cases anymore,” said Hla Swe who was quoted by the Myanmar Times newspaper.

Additional reporting by AFP