THE ANDAMAN SEA--For several days, the fate of roughly 300 desperate Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants has been subject to a repetitive dance in waters just out of sight of gleaming Thai beach resorts.
Their boat, which those on board say has been at sea for up to three months, was found drifting last Thursday near Koh Lipe island, close to the Malaysian border, with parts of its engine missing. Thai sailors fixed the engine and handed the migrants
food and water, before turning them back out to the Andaman Sea.
That was the beginning of what local Thai navy chief Lieutenant Commander Veerapong Nakprasit calls "a cycle", with the overcrowded fishing vessel bouncing between the waters of two countries determined not to take them in.
This rickety boat was just one of many that are at the centre of a regional crisis triggered by a flood of Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar.
Migrants have long made their way from the Bay of Bengal's southeast corner to Thailand, but a crackdown on traffickers by the Thai government disrupted the route and several thousand were left at sea with nowhere to go, though more than 2,000 have made it to the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia.
Thailand's foreign ministry said in a statement that it had informed the people on the boat found off Koh Lipe that they could come ashore for humanitarian assistance, but "they informed the Thai side that they wished to travel onwards".
After being towed out on Friday, it headed southwest, according to Thai navy radar tracking seen by Reuters. It then took a jagged counterclockwise arc towards Malaysian waters, before its engine stopped and it drifted again in the sea.
REUTERS
