‘Boat people’ are illegals, says Home Ministry

Rohingyas, Bangladeshis will be documented and deported, says deputy minister

KUALA LUMPUR: The Rohingya people from Myanmar who were found on a beach in Langkawi on Monday have Malaysian authorities worried about another flow of “boat people” into the country.

Exactly 40 years ago, in May 1975, the first boatload of Vietnamese refugees landed in Bidong Island off Terengganu. A refugee camp was set up to accommodate up to 4,500 and by 1979, it overflowed with about 40,000 refugees.

Top government officials sat down in a hastily convened meeting yesterday to deal with the new wave of 1,158 boat people who are mostly Rohingya fleeing religious persecution, and a sprinkling of Bangladeshis who are economic migrants.

The Rohingya and Bangladeshis who landed on Langkawi have been declared illegal immigrants and will be moved to the Belantik detention camp in Sik, Kedah, that can accommodate 2,000 but which already has 1,000 immigrants at its facility.

Some of the newer illegal immigrants would be sent to other detention camps nearby.

“The Immigration Department will document the illegal immigrants who will be deported,” said Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar in a Star Online report.

We simply cannot host thousands of illegal immigrants, he added.

Foremost on the minds of Malaysian authorities is the presence of some 8,000 illegals still on boats in the Straits of Malacca and nearby international waters waiting to land in Malaysia.

It is believed that human traffickers loaded some 25,000 Rohingyas and Bangladeshis on boats in the first few months of the year and set sail for southern Thailand enroute to Malaysia. International agencies say this is twice as many as in the same period last year.

It is believed that many boats had already landed in Thailand where human traffickers had held the illegal immigrants in squalid jungle camps before they were taken across the border into Malaysia.

The recent crackdown by Thailand has forced many boats to stay at sea.