Myanmar’s navy on Sunday refused to let journalists approach a remote island where more than 700 migrants are said to be held following their rescue last week, as US actor Matt Dillon put a rare star-powered spotlight on the nation’s long-persecuted Rohingya Muslims.
Reporters have been trying to access Thamee Hla Island at the mouth of the Irrawaddy River since authorities said that 727 people, including 74 women and 45 children, had been found drifting in a boat off Myanmar’s coast and been taken there. They are part of a recent exodus of persecuted Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshi economic migrants who have fled the region in a crisis that regional nations have struggled to address.
Journalists who tried to take small boats out to Thamee Hla Island were being turned around by navy patrol vessels and ordered to delete any footage on their memory cards, an Agence France-Presse reporter on the nearby island of Haigyi said.
Those returning said they had been ordered to sign documents promising not to try to make the journey again.
The navy was unavailable for comment on Sunday.
Dillon visited a hot, squalid camp for tens of thousands people displaced by violence and a port that has served as one of the main launching pads for their exodus by sea.
It was “heartbreaking,” he said after meeting a young man with an open leg wound from a road accident and no means to treat it.
Mothers carrying babies with clear signs of malnutrition stood outside rows of identical bamboo huts, toddlers playing nearby in the chalky white dust.
“No one should have to live like this, people are really suffering,” said Dillon, one of the first celebrities to get a first-hand look at what life is like for Rohingya in the western state of Rakhine. “They are being strangled slowly, they have no hope for the future and nowhere to go.”
Though Rohingya have been victims of state-sponsored discrimination for decades, conditions started deteriorating three years ago after the predominantly Buddhist nation of 50 million began its bumpy transition from a half-century of dictatorship to democracy.
Myanmar refuses to recognize its 1.3 million Rohingya living in the western state of Rakhine as citizens.
Instead it refers to them as “Bengalis” and alleges they are illegal immigrants from across the border. They face daily discrimination including controls on their movements, family size and access to jobs, forcing tens of thousands to flee overseas — usually to Malaysia.
Yesterday, the migrants were still being held offshore by Myanmar’s navy, more than three days after the converted fishing vessel was intercepted off the coast.
“The government is checking their identity, asking what they want to do and where they want to go,” government spokesman Ye Htut said, without providing further details of the boat’s location.
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