By Fatih Erel
GENEVA
While charges of leaving migrants boats stranded have thrust Myanmar's neighbors into the international spotlight, the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights has pointed his finger at the origins of the problem.
Myanmar needs to solve this issue, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in statement Friday.
"Until the Myanmar Government addresses the institutional discrimination against the Rohingya population, including equal access to citizenship, this precarious migration will continue."
Al Hussein noted "the importance of addressing the serious human rights situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, which he described as “one of the principal motivators of these desperate maritime movements."
With some 6,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants still stranded at sea in South East Asia following Thai attempts to clamp down on people smuggling camps, Al Hussein accused Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia of "actively implementing a policy of pushing boats back to sea."
Zeid urged governments in the region to take swift action to protect the migrants, underlining that the present situation "will inevitably lead to many avoidable deaths."
Most of the Rohingya who fall victim to the smugglers are from Rakhine state in Western Myanmar.
After violent clashes in the summer of 2012 with Buddhist Rakhine, they began to flee en masse to find safety and work in Malaysia and beyond.
At first, they boarded rickety boats controlled by human smugglers -- which sometimes sank during the trip across the Andaman Sea -- but since last year they have been travelling on larger vessels.
Bangladeshis are also increasingly using human smugglers to go to what they see as the economic promise of Malaysia. But some of them -- along with the Rohingya -- are kidnapped and forced to board the boats.
The United Nations estimates some 920 migrants - predominantly Rohingya - are known to have perished in the Bay of Bengal between Sep. 2014 and March this year.
On Friday, the International Organization for Migrants (IOM) announced it would release US$1 million to help "the estimated 6,000 stranded at sea."
"We cannot stand by and watch as men, women and children die agonizingly of thirst, mere kilometers from safety," IOM Director General William Lacy Swing said in a statement.
