LANGKAWI, Malaysia — A crisis involving boatloads of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants stranded at sea deepened Tuesday as Malaysia said it would turn away any more of the vessels unless they were sinking.
The waters around Malaysia’s Langkawi island — where several crowded, wooden vessels have landed in recent days carrying more than 1,000 men, women and children — would be patrolled 24 hours a day by eight ships, said Tan Kok Kwee, first admiral of Malaysia’s maritime enforcement agency.
“We won’t let any foreign boats come in,” Tan said. If the boats are sinking, they would rescue them, but if the boat are found to be seaworthy, the agency will provide “provisions and send them away,” he said.
One boat sent out a distress signal, with migrants saying they had been without food and water for three days, according to Chris Lewa, director of the non-profit Arakan Project, who spoke by phone to people on the boat.
“They asked to be urgently rescued,” she said, adding there were an estimated 350 people on board, and that they had no fuel.
Southeast Asia is the grips of a spiraling humanitarian crisis as boats packed with Rohingya and Bangladeshis are being washed ashore, some after being stranded at sea for more than two months. A regional crackdown on human traffickers has essentially spooked agents and brokers, who have refused to take people to shore.
It reached a tipping point this weekend, when some captains and smugglers abandoned their ships, leaving migrants to fend for themselves with little food or drinking water.
In the last three days, the 1,158 people landed on Langkawi island, according to Malaysian authorities, and 600 others in Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh. With thousands more believed to be trapped in vessels at sea, that number is expected to climb, said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
Malaysia’s announcement comes a day after Indonesia also turned back a ship, giving those on board rice, noodles, water and directions to go to Malaysia.
The migrants aboard the boat that sent a distress signal described an approaching white vessel with flashing lights while she was on the phone, Lewa said. One minute they were cheering because they thought they were about to get help, she said, and the next they were screaming as the boat moved away.
“I can hear the children crying, I can hear them crying,” she said.
Lewa is an advocate for Rohingya who is considered an authoritative voice on migrant boat departures and arrivals. She has tracked about 6,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshis who have gotten on large and small trafficking boats in the region in recent months, but have yet to disembark. Based on her information, she believes the migrants and the boats are still in the Malacca Strait and nearby international waters.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the United States, Australia and other governments and international organizations, meanwhile, have held a string of emergency meetings to discuss possible next steps.
They are worried about deaths, but also the looming refugee problem. In the past, most nations have been unwilling to accept Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Myanmar who are effectively stateless. They worry that by opening their doors to a few, they will be unable to stem the flood of poor, uneducated migrants.
“In some ways it’s important,” Robertson of Human Rights Watch, said of the large numbers.
“It sets up the possibility people will finally realize this is a regional issue,” he said, “that countries are receiving Rohingya because of Burma’s bad policies of discrimination and abuse against members of the religious minority and that they need to band together to demand the government change those policies.”
Malaysia’s Home Ministry said in a statement that of the 1,158 people who landed Sunday on Langkawi island, 486 were Myanmar citizens and 672 were Bangladeshis. There were 993 men, 104 women and 61 children.
A government doctor said many survivors were being treated for diarrhea, abdominal pains, dehydration and urination problems.
For now, survivors on the island were being held in two separate holding centers, women and children in the sports hall for the Home Ministry and the men in another facility. But they would soon be transferred to a detention center on the Malaysian mainland. To prevent recurrences, the ministry said it would seek to meet with officials from Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand to address the issue.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations — a regional group that brings together all of the main stakeholders, from Myanmar and Thailand to Indonesia and Malaysia — has a strict stance of non-interference in member affairs.
At annual ASEAN meetings — the most recent, ironically, on Langkawi — Myanmar has blocked all discussion about its 1.3 million Rohingya, insisting they are illegal settlers from Bangladesh even though many of their families arrived generations ago.
For most part, member countries have agreed to leave it at that.
Labeled by the United Nations one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, the Rohingya have for decades suffered from state-sanctioned discrimination in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where they have limited access to education and adequate health care.
In the last three years, attacks by Buddhist mobs have left 280 people dead and forced 140,000 others from their homes. They now live under apartheid-like conditions in crowded camps just outside the Rakhine state capital, Sittwe.
The U.N. refugee agency estimates more than 100,000 men, women and children have boarded ships since mid-2012. Most are trying to reach Malaysia, but recent regional crackdowns on human trafficking networks have sent brokers and agents into hiding, making it impossible for migrants to disembark — in some cases even after family members have paid $2,000 or more for their release, activists say.
On Langkawi, 15-year-old Hasana was hanging out clothes to dry outside the hall where they were being kept temporarily.
She said she was an orphan, having lost both her parents when she was young, and that she told her grandmother she didn’t see a life for herself in Myanmar, where it was a struggle just to get enough food to eat. The teen said she wanted to join a group of friends who decided to go to Malaysia.
Hasana paid $200 for what turned out to be a harrowing journey by boat, she said, describing how one man was savagely attacked just for asking for food.
“Am I going to be sent back?” she asked, worriedly.
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