Indonesia has “given more than it should” to help hundreds of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants stranded on boats by human traffickers, its foreign minister said Tuesday, a day before she was to meet with her counterparts from the other countries feeling the brunt of the humanitarian crisis.

Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said that at Wednesday’s meeting with Malaysian and Thai officials, she will discuss how to solve the migrant problem with help from their countries of origin, the U.N. refugee agency and the International Office for Migration.

“This irregular migration is not the problem of one or two nations. This is a regional problem which also happens in other places. This is also a global problem,” Marsudi told reporters after a Cabinet meeting at the presidential palace.

Marsudi said Indonesia has sheltered 1,346 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants who washed onto Aceh and North Sumatra provinces last week. The first batch came on May 10 with 558 people on a boat, and the second with 807 on three boats landed on Friday.

Even before the crisis, nearly 12,000 migrants were being sheltered in Indonesia awaiting resettlement, she said, with most of those Rohingya Muslims who have fled persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. No more than 500 of those migrants are resettled in third countries each year, she said.

“Indonesia has given more than it should do as a non-member-state of the Refugee Convention of 1951,” she said.

The crisis emerged this month as governments in the region began cracking down on human trafficking. Some captains of trafficking boats abandoned their vessels — and hundreds of migrants — at sea. About 3,000 of the migrants have reached land in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, but all three countries have pushed some ships away. Aid groups estimate that thousands more migrants — who fled persecution in Myanmar and poverty in Bangladesh — are stranded in the Andaman Sea.

Myanmar’s co-operation is seen as vital to solving the crisis, but its government has already cast doubt on whether it will attend a conference to be hosted by Thailand on May 29 that is to include 15 Asian nations affected by the emergency.

Like Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have not signed the U.N. convention, which would obligate them to accept some refugees. All have said they can longer accept Rohingya; Malaysia, the country many Rohingya try to reach, already has tens of thousands of them.

On Monday, Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said the country will help those who end up on its shores, but “would be more active in helping Rohingya migrants if there is an international pledge to accept them in a third country.”

Kalla, speaking to reporters on a visit to southern Borneo, noted that the UNHCR set up a refugee camp on the Indonesia island of Galang to process tens of thousands of refugees, mostly Vietnamese, from 1979 to 1986.

The Philippines has signed the U.N. refugee convention, but its justice secretary, Leila de Lima, said Tuesday that genuine asylum seekers would need to be sorted from those “just seeking greener pastures” before Manila would take in migrants. That process can take years.

In the meantime, she said, “at most we can offer to these affected countries, some kind of an assistance in terms of offering our experience, our best practices in handling refugees and also stateless persons because we are a signatory to these conventions and we have considerable experience and track record in that area.”

“Thankfully the Philippines is not affected by this problem, by this issue. The so-called boat people are not anywhere near the waters of the Philippines,” de Lima told reporters after meeting with UNHCR Representative Bernard Kerblat.

The Philippines may be able to provide rescue boats if needed to provide aid to those aboard trafficking boats, de Lima said.

“We’re talking here about human beings drifting at sea and gradually dying. A number of them have died already because of the situation that they are in,” de Lima said. “As a community of nations, we cannot just sit idly by and allow that to happen.”

In a joint statement Tuesday, the UNHCR, International Organization for Migration and other U.N. groups said they “strongly urge the leaders of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand to protect migrants and refugees stranded on vessels ... to facilitate safe disembarkation, and to give priority to saving lives, protecting rights and respecting human dignity.”

Kerblat said the UNHCR is working with governments in the region “to put together ideas and the basic message here is what can be done collectively to save lives.”

“We’re calling on all the people of goodwill around the world to join forces to look at ways and means about how to solve this crisis. It’s not easy. There’s no magic touch.”

Rohingya have a long history of persecution, discrimination

Poverty-stricken and loathed at home, Myanmar’s Rohingya are one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, yet their dire situation has long been ignored in Southeast Asia.

An estimated 1.3 million Rohingya scratch out an existence in Rakhine, one of Myanmar’s poorest states – tens of thousands are trapped in displacement camps, with conditions outside often worse.

Even though many Rohingya have generations-long ancestry in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, they are stateless and have long been viewed as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.

Denied citizenship, they face daily discrimination and a raft of restrictions including controls on their movement, family size, religious freedom and access to jobs.

More than 25,000 people, including many Rohingya but also economic migrants from Bangladesh, made the dangerous sea journey south from the Bay of Bengal between January and March this year, the UN says.

The current boat exodus began in earnest after 2012, when fierce communal violence broke out between local Buddhists in Rakhine and the Rohingya, leaving more than 200 dead and 140,000, mostly from the Muslim ethnic group, in camps.

Since then, each spring a series of boats laden with desperate people has built up as Rohingya try to beat the monsoon storms on the sea journey south.

Hundreds die every sailing season, according to the UN refugee agency.

Myanmar, facing a crucial election year after decades of military rule and a surge of Buddhist nationalism, has shown no appetite to address the plight of the Rohingya.

Even Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning democracy champion, has failed to come to their defence, with critics saying she is reluctant to alienate her supporters among the Buddhist majority. (AFP)

Some countries have exacerbated the humanitarian emergency

Myanmar

The crisis stems from Myanmar’s decades-long persecution of its 1.3 million Rohingya. Rohingya have endured violence at the hands of the military and extremist Buddhists, they have limited access to education and medical care, and they cannot move around or practise their religion freely.

The Rohingya have been fleeing Myanmar by boat for years. Since mid-2012, an estimated 100,000 Rohingya have fled aboard ships, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

Thailand

Thailand has been at the centre of Southeast Asia’s human-trafficking industry for years. Syndicates have used the country as a transit stop to offload migrants at hidden jungle camps before moving them onto third countries, including neighbouring Malaysia.

At the beginning of May, Thai authorities found more than 30 corpses buried at the traffickers’ abandoned jungle camps and launched the crackdown. A flurry of arrests sounded an alarm to traffickers, who promptly abandoned their ships and left their human cargoes at sea without fuel, food and clean water.

Thailand says it cannot solve the problem alone. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha reiterated what has become his mantra: “Thailand is a transit country. Their destination is not Thailand, so this has to be solved by other countries.”

Indonesia

In the past, Indonesia has been fairly welcoming to Rohingya who have reached the country, many of them by accident after their boats failed to land in Malaysia. Many Indonesians in the mostly Muslim country have sympathized with their plight, staging protests to condemn Rohingya persecution in Myanmar. The former president and foreign minister also openly pushed the Myanmar government to stop discriminating against the Rohingya.

Malaysia

Malaysia has bluntly said it will turn away crowded vessels carrying Rohingya unless they are sinking.

“We won’t let any foreign boats come in,” Tan Kok Kwee, first admiral of Malaysia’s maritime enforcement agency, said. Boats deemed seaworthy would be given provisions and sent away, he said.

Although the Rohingya are Muslims, the overwhelmingly Muslim countries of Indonesia and Malaysia appear to be putting their national interests ahead of religious solidarity with actions that send the message — it is not in their interest to welcome this wave of boat people.

Malaysia is host to more than 150,000 refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from Myanmar. More than 45,000 of them are Rohingyas, according to the U.N. refugee agency. (The Associated Press)