By Joshua Carroll
YANGON, Myanmar
Myanmar began Monday to repatriate 150 people found abandoned on a people smuggling boat off its shores, local media reported, amid an ongoing tussle with Bangladesh over the nationality of hundreds of others held by Myanmar authorities.
Two boats carrying over 900 people were found adrift by the Myanmar navy in recent weeks amidst a migrant crisis that began after an anti-trafficking crackdown by Thai authorities scared smugglers into abandoning thousands of people at sea.
But Myanmar authorities, as well as local Buddhist nationalists, have argued that most of those found are from neighboring Bangladesh.
Aid agencies say that as well as Bangladeshis, Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya Muslims make up a large proportion of those caught up in the crisis, but Myanmar refuses to acknowledge Rohingya as a real ethnicity.
The Bangladeshi ambassador to Myanmar last week refuted claims that the majority of the migrants were from his country.
Buddhist nationalists in western Rakhine state have announced plans to protest against their government hosting the abandoned migrants.
“The government is making Rakhine State a landfill of Bengalis,” Than
Tun, an organizer, told the Myanmar Times, using a term for Rohingya that implies the group are interlopers from across the border.
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 UN. 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.
Myanmar state media reported Monday that there had been no reports of human trafficking cases in Rakhine, although police have arrested 93 traffickers nationwide in the last five months.
