Myanmar navy finds 102 boat people on southern island

YANGON, Myanmar

Myanmar’s navy has found more than 100 boat people on a southern island near Thailand, according to state media Tuesday.

The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar cited the government as saying Monday that the 102 “Bengali” men had been rescued between June 30 and July 12 on an island near Kawthoung township.

Myanmar has been announcing the discovery of boats carrying hundreds of migrants since Thailand launched an anti-human trafficking crackdown in May, scaring people smugglers into abandoning vessels crammed with Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims fleeing western Myanmar.

The nationality of the migrants has been an especially contentious in Myanmar because the government denies that the Rohingya are a genuine ethnicity, and claims the group are in fact interlopers from its neighbor. It prefers to use the term "Bengali."

According to Tuesday’s report, an investigation determined that all the recently discovered migrants were from Bangladesh, citing some as saying they were taken by force while others were allegedly lured by human traffickers into seeking employment in Malaysia.

It added that the migrants would be sent back to Bangladesh.

They were reportedly abandoned on the island off Myanmar’s southernmost region of Taninthayi in early June.

Last month, Myanmar sent more than 180 people who it had found abandoned off its shores to Bangladesh.

On May 29, Myanmar's Ministry of Information claimed in a Facebook post that its navy had discovered 727 "Bengali" migrants -- including "74 women and 45 children" -- crammed on a fishing trawler.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya – a largely stateless people described by the United Nations as among the most persecuted groups worldwide -- have fled Myanmar on crowded boats in recent years.

The Rohingya have suffered systematic discrimination for decades, but their plight has ironically become worse since the reformist government of President Thein Sein came to power in 2011.

His political reforms have been accompanied by outbreaks of anti-Muslim rioting that first flared in Rakhine, leaving hundreds dead and more than 140,000 Rohingya confined to internal displacement camps.

In recent years, around 130,000 Rohingya have fled the country by sea, according to the United Nations.

Myanmar’s government has repeatedly denied that persecution of the Rohingya is the root cause of the current migrant crisis, and has instead pinned the blame on people traffickers.