1,000 survivors of violence, hunger at sea land in SE Asia

More than 1,000 people fleeing persecution in Myanmar and poverty in Bangladesh came ashore Friday around Southeast Asia, describing murder, extortion and near-starvation after surviving a harrowing journey at sea. An increasingly alarmed United Nations warned against “floating coffins” and urged regional leaders to put human lives first. The waves of weak, hungry and dehydrated migrants arriving Friday were the latest to slip into countries that have made it clear they’re not welcome. But thousands more migrants are still believed to be stranded at sea in what has become a humanitarian crisis that no one in the region is rushing to solve.

If I had known that the boat journey would be so horrendous, I would rather have just died in Myanmar.

Manu Abudul Salam, 19, a Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine State

Southeast Asia for years tried to quietly ignore the plight of Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya but is now being confronted with a dilemma that in many ways it helped create. In the last three years, more than 120,000 Rohingya have boarded ships to flee to other countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency. No countries want them, fearing that accepting a few would result in an unstoppable flow of poor, uneducated migrants. But Southeast Asian governments at the same time respected the wishes of Myanmar at regional gatherings, avoiding discussions of state-sponsored discrimination against the Rohingya.

Asia-Pacific migrants