KUALA LUMPUR, May 17 — Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (Isma) urged Putrajaya yesterday to aid the Rohingya, pointing out that Malaysia once accepted Vietnamese refugees and offered asylum to Bosnian Muslims.
The conservative Muslim group’s vice president Abdul Rahman Mt Dali said Malaysia, as a Muslim-majority country, is obliged to take in the Muslim refugees who suffer state-sanctioned discrimination in Myanmar.
“At one time, we used to accept Bosnian and Vietnamese refugees. Why not the Rohingya?” Abdul Rahman said in a statement published on Isma’s website.
“Rescue them. Aren’t we obliged to help our fellow brethren who suffer persecution? It’s impossible that our country can’t afford the costs of doing so when we claim to be wealthy,” he added.
Abdul Rahman said the Rohingya refugees can be given training and job opportunities.
Malaysia reportedly offered refuge to Bosnian Muslims in 1994 fleeing ethnic conflicts, as well as to some 250,000 Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s until the Pulau Bidong refugee camp in Terengganu closed in 1990, with the last Vietnamese refugee leaving Malaysia in 2005.
International newswire Reuters reported that Malaysian vessels intercepted yesterday on Malaysian waters a boat full of migrants after the Thai navy pushed it back to the sea.
International newswire AFP reported that Malaysia turned away Thursday two vessels carrying about 600 migrants off Penang and Langkawi.
A recent Thai crackdown on human trafficking has caused people smugglers to abandon ship, leaving thousands of Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants stranded in the Andaman Sea.
Some 800 migrants, however, reportedly managed to land in Acheh in Indonesia on Friday, while 1,158 migrants had reached Langkawi last week and are being sent to the Belantik detention centre in Kedah before Putrajaya deports them back to their home countries.
Reuters reported yesterday the International Organization for Migration as criticising the region’s governments for playing “maritime ping-pong” with the migrants’ lives.
National news agency Bernama reported Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak as saying yesterday that Malaysia must not be burdened with the “problem” of Rohingya refugees as it is an issue which needs to be addressed collectively by all Asean countries.
