By Chutima Sidasathian and Alan Morison

PHUKET: Eight Rohingya boatpeople have been apprehended on Phuket and police are tonight looking for 14 more said to have landed with them at Surin beach early today.

One group of five men walked along Phuket’s coast road from Surin, a five-star tourist destination, to Kamala, north of Patong, when they came off the boat at 4am.

Kamala Muslims visited the Rohingya today, bringing new clothes, food and water. The men told the visitors that they had been on the water for 28 days sailing south from the troubled township of Sittwe.

According to the 32 survivors, Thailand’s navy intercepted their passage and forcibly removed their boat’s engine
Associated Press in Colombo

Burmese asylum seekers rescued by Sri Lanka’s navy last week said they floated at sea for 25 days and 97 people died of starvation after Thailand’s navy intercepted them and forcibly removed their boat’s engine. The Thai navy has denied the allegation.

Thirty-two men and a boy now held at an immigration detention centre near Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, were rescued last Saturday when their dilapidated wooden vessel began sinking while making a perilous journey to Malaysia.

All are Rohingya Muslims who face heavy discrimination in Burma, and say they do not want to return there.

The survivors were suffering from serious dehydration when they were rescued about 250 miles off Sri Lanka’s east coast. The Sri Lankan navy said it was alerted to the sinking vessel by a fisherman.

Report from UN High Commissioner for Refugees

GENEVA, February 21 (UNHCR) – UNHCR on Friday said it was concerned about the growing number of people dying in the Bay of Bengal after setting out by boat in search of safety and better lives in other countries, including desperate ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar. The refugee agency called on regional governments to do more to prevent further tragedy on the high seas.

UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic, talking to journalists in Geneva, several thousand people were believed to have boarded smugglers’ boats in the Bay of Bengal since the beginning of the year, among them Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine state or from Bangladesh’s refugee camps and makeshift sites.

The UK Senior State Minister for Foreign Affairs has said that the long-standing Rohingya issue will not be settled until Myanmar recognises their citizenship with the same rights that its citizens currently enjoy.
Baroness Warsi said she talked to the Rohingya community and they said they would go back home if they get their rights.

“Nobody wants to leave their country where they born and raised until some terrible circumstances (force them),” she said on Wednesday at a press briefing after ending her three-day visit to Bangladesh.

She had been to Cox’s Bazar where she met Rohingya communities in official and unofficial camps and termed their condition ‘tragic’.

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) pushed backed 57 Rohingya to Burma yesterday, said a local elder from border area- Ukiya.

“They were arrested from different border points of Ukhiya-Teknaf area in Cox’s Bazar district on Saturday morning and Friday evening by BGB after being conducted operation.”

A BGB team of Gumdum and Taungbro out-post conducted a drive in border area and arrested 18 Rohingyas on Friday evening and arrested 10 Rohingyas on Saturday along with children, male and female who came to Bangladesh crossing the border on foot, according to Lt. Col. Md. Khalekuzzaman PSC from BGB Battalion 17 in Cox’s Bazar

Ben Doherty
South Asia correspondent for Fairfax Media

View more articles from Ben Doherty

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/world/rescued-burmese-in-limbo-after-boat-deaths-20130221-2euci.html#ixzz2Lf8QLSqU

THE 32 surviving Burmese asylum seekers who were forced to throw nearly 100 dead shipmates overboard as their Australia-bound boat drifted in open seas off Sri Lanka face a state of limbo – the Burmese embassy is so far refusing to claim them as citizens.

The 31 men and one boy were rescued from their stricken and sinking vessel by the Sri Lankan navy last Saturday, more than 200 nautical miles from land.

They told their rescuers 98 others on board died of dehydration and starvation during nearly two months adrift and their bodies had been pushed into the sea.

by Emperor
As a recent TIME article by Jason Motlagh highlights, more and more stateless Rohingya are fleeing persecution in Burma through perilous boat journeys,
    A large chunk of Abdul Rahman’s home is gone, and so is his oldest son, Shakur. The ethnic Rohingya farmer tore down nearly half his home for scrap needed to secure his son’s passage on a boat bound for Malaysia. In the wake of bloody sectarian violence last year that left hundreds dead and forced tens of thousands of minority Muslim Rohingya into camps outside the coastal city of Sittwe, Rahman, 52, insists his people are being “strangled” by a Burmese government that does not want them. While foreign donors have supplied basic food rations, checkpoints manned by armed guards prevent the displaced from returning to the paddies and markets their livelihoods depend on. “Even animals can move more freely,” says Rahman.