Yangon--Poverty-stricken and loathed at home, Myanmar's Rohingya are one of the world's most persecuted minorities -- yet their dire situation has long been ignored in Southeast Asia.
The Muslim community's friendless status angers activists, who say that regional negligence can now be counted in lives lost as a wave of migrants find themselves in desperate straits at sea.
In recent years, sectarian violence and a thicket of discriminatory laws against the Rohingya in Buddhist-majority Myanmar have sparked the region's largest exodus of boatpeople since the Vietnam War.
More than 25,000 people, including many Rohingya but also economic migrants from Bangladesh, made the dangerous sea journey south from the Bay of Bengal between January and March this year, the UN says.
An estimated 1.3 million Rohingya scratch out an existence in Rakhine, one of Myanmar's poorest states -- tens of thousands are trapped in displacement camps, with conditions outside often worse.
"The (Myanmar) government has created conditions of life designed to be destructive to the Rohingya, leading people to take the seas in huge numbers," Matthew Smith, from the human rights group Fortify Rights, told AFP.
Even though many Rohingya have generations-long ancestry in Myanmar, they are stateless and have long been viewed as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.
Denied citizenship, they face daily discrimination and a raft of restrictions including controls on their movement, family size, religious freedom and access to jobs.
The current boat exodus began in earnest after 2012, when fierce communal violence broke out between local Buddhists in Rakhine and the Rohingya, leaving more than 200 dead and 140,000, mostly from the Muslim ethnic group, in camps.
Since then, each spring a series of boats laden with desperate people has built up as Rohingya try to beat the monsoon storms on the sea journey south.
Hundreds die every sailing season, according to the UN refugee agency.
AFP
