Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Anifah Aman will meet his Bangladeshi counterpart A H Mahmood Ali at Kota Kinabalu after migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh arrived on Malaysian shores.
Malaysia’s Foreign Minister will meet his Bangladeshi counterpart Sunday (May 17) to discuss the crisis involving a surge in stricken boat people from Bangladesh and Myanmar flooding to Southeast Asia, state media said.
“It is one of the topics and a very important issue in the agenda,” Foreign Minister Anifah Aman was quoted saying in a brief dispatch by Malaysia’s official news agency Bernama.
The meeting with Bangladesh’s A H Mahmood Ali will take place in the Malaysian city of Kota Kinabalu.
Reports in Bangladeshi media suggested that the country’s top diplomat was in Malaysia as part of a pre-planned trip rather than in response to the growing international uproar over the migrant influx.
Malaysian foreign ministry officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
More than 1,000 migrants have washed ashore in Malaysia over the past week, with hundreds of others reaching Indonesia.
Activists said thousands more are feared to be drifting at sea in rickety boats after a Thai crackdown on human-trafficking disrupted busy smuggling routes to Southeast Asia.
International pressure on the region to take in the starving migrants arriving in rickety vessels has mounted after Malaysia and Indonesia turned away boats.
The arrivals from Bangladesh are believed to be mainly economic migrants seeking to escape their country’s grinding poverty, while those from Myanmar are predominantly members of that country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.
Thousands of such migrants make it to Malaysia every year, which is sought after for its relatively prosperous economy and for being majority Muslim.
Source: ChannelNewsAsia
