They Come by the Tens of Thousands
- Billions of poverty stricken people around the world want what you own and are pouring across borders. Everyone has a sob story and they all want you to provide them with free food, clothing and shelter.
(Toronto Star) - Thousands of Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshis abandoned at sea by human traffickers had nowhere to go Thursday, as Malaysia turned away two boats crammed with migrants, and Thailand kept at bay a third boat with hundreds more.
“What do you expect us to do?” Malaysian Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Jafaar said. “We have been very nice to the people who broke into our border. We have treated them humanely but they cannot be flooding our shores like this.”
“We have to send the right message that they are not welcome here,” he told The Associated Press, just days after about 1,000 refugees landed on the shores of Langkawi, a popular resort island in northern Malaysian near Thailand. Another 600 have arrived surreptitiously in Indonesia.
Southeast Asia, which for years tried to quietly ignore the plight of Burma’s 1.3 million Rohingya, finds itself caught in a spiraling humanitarian crisis that in many ways it helped create. In the last three years, more than 120,000 members of the Muslim minority, who are intensely persecuted in Buddhist-majority Burma, have boarded ships to flee to other countries, paying huge sums of money to human traffickers.
But in the face of a crackdown by security forces of various countries, the smugglers have been abandoning the ships, leaving the refugees to fend for themselves. An estimated 6,000 remain stranded at sea.
Malaysia, which is not a signatory of international conventions on refugees, is host to more than 150,000 refugees and asylum seekers, the majority whom are from Burma. More than 45,000 of them are Rohingya, according to the UN refugee agency, many more than almost any other country.
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A group of Rohingya and Bangladeshi illegal aliens, who arrived in Indonesia by boat. |
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