BANGKOK, 17 April 2009 (IRIN) - A key Asian conference in Bali, Indonesia, on people smuggling and human trafficking has failed to discuss in detail or resolve the issue of the Rohingya ethnic minority, tens of thousands of whom are holed up in various Asian countries, having fled Myanmar.

The Rohingyas, a mainly Muslim minority with a distinct culture and language, have been fleeing persecution at the hands of Myanmar's military-led government for the past two decades - mostly to Bangladesh, where there are an estimated 200,000, but also to many other Asian countries.

A few are classed as refugees, but the majority are stateless migrants without rights. The conference focused only on the Rohingya problem as it related to people smuggling and human trafficking, though some had hoped for more.

"We had high hopes the Bali meeting might try to find a comprehensive regional approach to the whole Rohingya problem, but it did not really address any proper solution," said Chris Lewa, an expert on Rohingya issues with the Arakan Project, a human rights organisation which works mainly in Bangladesh.

The Bali [see: http://www.baliprocess.net/] meeting (14-15 April) was attended by over 40 Asian countries. Several previous attempts to tackle the issue - including the regional summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in February - deferred the matter to the "Bali Process".

"The Bali Process is a very attractive and viable option for the region to get together, to discuss the Rohinya issue," Surin Pitsuwan, the ASEAN secretary-general, told IRIN on the eve of the conference.

"ASEAN member states affected by the problem can come together and pool their expertise and resources to put this problem into a proper context and manage it together," he said.

However, the Rohingya issue was not discussed at the plenary session, nor was it explicitly mentioned in the concluding statement by chair-countries Australia and Indonesia.

"The issue was discussed bilaterally and multilaterally, though there was no mention of it in the formal proceedings of the meeting," according to several participants.

What was critical, some diplomats said, was reference to re-invigorating the process and the need to activate the working groups.

The meeting agreed to allow any member country to trigger an emergency working group of affected countries to tackle a specific crisis, a provision that was driven by the Rohingya issue.

Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia and Bangladesh have agreed to continue to work together to resolve the issue.

Myanmar's position

The key Myanmar representative at the meeting, police chief Gen Khin Yi, repeatedly refused to accept the Rohingya were Myanmar citizens and strenuously denied any persecution.

But he did acknowledge the principle of the need for working groups and offered Myanmar's cooperation with international efforts to provide aid and development in Myanmar's Rakhine State, northern Myanmar, where Rohingyas are estimated to make up some 700,000 of the state's more than one million population. No census of the Rohingyas has ever been carried out.

"We will have to see what the working group does," said Lewa. "But with Myanmar's attitude they are unlikely to come up with a real regional response - which is needed if the mass exodus of Rohingyas from Myanmar is to be stemmed."

Some participants at the Bali meeting - also attended by 19 observer countries and 13 international organisations - said the fact that Myanmar had agreed to discuss the Rohingya issue at an international forum for the first time was a positive sign.

The next step, according to human rights activists, is to try to gather information on more than 1,000 Rohinyas who have been detained in India, Indonesia and Thailand in the last few months, after risking their lives crossing the Andaman sea in small boats.

So far the International Organization for Migration has been given access to some 193 Rohingyas in Sabang, on the Indonesia island of Aceh, and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has interviewed the 78 detained in Ranong in southern Thailand. UNHCR is also currently in the process of interviewing Rohingya refugees in Indonesia.

The countries of Southeast Asia have asked ASEAN to draw up a "census" of the Rohinyas and establish a framework for tackling the issue.

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