The United States should play a key role in negotiating with Myanmar to take back thousands of Rohingya migrants who are being sheltered in several provinces of Thailand, a seminar was told yesterday.

Col Teeranan Nandhakwang, deputy director of the Strategic and Security Affairs Division at Royal Thai Armed Forces, said Thailand should ask the US to help negotiate with the Myanmar government to move Rohingya migrants back to the country.

Col Teeranan was speaking at the seminar titled “Rohingya: Testing for Asean” held by the Institute of Asean Studies of Chulalongkorn University.

COLOMBO – Sri Lanka’s navy on Saturday rescued 38 Myanmar nationals who were drifting off the island’s east coast, the second batch of Rohingya boat people to be saved in as many weeks, officials said.

Sri Lankan naval craft responding to a distress call plucked the 38 people from a rickety boat drifting about 400 kilometres off the east coast, a navy official said.

The UN says rights abuses are still going on in Burma despite government reforms.

Human rights abuses are still going on in Burma, according to the United Nations, despite reforms made by the military-backed government.

The UN has singled out the arbitrary arrest and torture of alleged ethnic Kachin rebels.

Tomas Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, was speaking at the end of a five-day mission to the country, where President Thein Sein has pushed through reforms since the end of military rule in 2011.

UNICEF began this week delivering footballs and other play and recreation supplies to eight Ministry of Social Development and Human Security shelters caring for Rohingya children in southern Thailand.

Some 270 Rohingya children, many who were separated from their parents or who came to Thailand unaccompanied by adults, are being cared for at nine shelters in eight provinces across the South.

Activists say that up to 19,000 people – mostly Rohingya Muslims – have set sail from Myanmar’s western Rakhine state to Thailand to escape violence and deteriorating living conditions.

There are around 800,000 Rohingyas living in Myanmar, also known as Burma. The minority group lives predominantly in the western state of Rakhine. They are not officially recognized by the Myanmar government as an ethnic minority group, and for decades they have been subjected to discrimination and violence by the Buddhist majority.

Rohingya illegal immigrants in temporary shelters face a rough time in the near future, forced to deal with psychological and physical challenges as isolated women and teenagers receive little or no information about their husbands and sons.

Communications is the most common and urgent issue in the holding centres, as quarrels among the Rohingya escalate, and psychological problems increase.

The International Committee of Red Cross, United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), and the UN refugee agency UNHCR have access to the Rohingya in holding areas, but not to those detained at immigration centres.