Solutions expected from migration meeting

The special meeting on irregular migration in the Indian Ocean to be held on Friday is expected to mete out solutions to the crisis over Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants stranded in the Andaman Sea, National Security Council chief Anusit Kunakorn said on Tuesday.

The meeting, hosted by the Thai Foreign Ministry, will be attended by 16 other countries and three United Nations agencies.

Mr Anusit said migration and human trafficking are a long-standing regional problem and cooperation from international organisations is needed to solve it.

The NSC chief expected the meeting to find favourable ways out of the crisis.

It was believed the migrants stranded at sea were partly from Cox’s Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh run by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and partly from Rakhine State of Myanmar, he said.

Mr Anusit said he believed the UNHCR would be able to find ways of taking the migrants back to where they were from and convince them with development and security plans so that they would stay there without seeking resettlement elsewhere.

Some of the migrants fleeing the refugee camps in Bangladesh as well as from Myanmar's Rakhine might want to join their relatives who had previously migrated to Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, he said.

Asked whether the UNHCR would play a key role in solving the problem at the May 29 meeting, Mr Anusit said: "In fact, international organisations, particularly the UNHCR, should take such role because Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand are not the root cause of the problem."