ICC Note:

While the refugee crisis spotlight rests on the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and the reaction of Western countries to the influx of refugees, very few have taken notice of the nearly 1 million refugees in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, fighting with militant Muslims has driven out nearly 20,000 people from their homes. In Thailand, half-a-million live in statelessness, including people from the hill tribes and Christian asylum seekers from the Middle East. In Myanmar there are an estimated 100,000 refugees on the Thai border in refugee camps, and this number does not even include the Rohingya. In Malaysia nearly a quarter-million live in refugee like conditions. Many of these people are religious refugees, kicked out either by religious intolerance at the local level, or formalize persecution implemented by the state. For the most part, the international community has remained silent about the crisis. The UN Refugee Agency received only 32% its funding needs for Southeast Asian refugees this year.

11/1/2016 Southeast Asia (UCA News) – As waves of refugee crises continue to make international headlines, Southeast Asian nations face their own challenges to support and protect millions of refugees and asylum seekers.

Across the region, people continue to flee conflict and political persecution and have sought to make new homes with varying degrees success or failure. For some nations the numbers are overwhelming

In this five-part series, UCAN reporters explore the situation facing refugees displaced by ongoing fighting between Islamic militant groups and government forces in Mindanao. Recent fighting in the province of Sulu has displaced some 20,000 people but this represents a fraction of the refugee population in Southeast Asia.

An unknown number of people have fled from the Philippines into eastern Malaysia — estimates run from the tens of thousands and higher. There, undocumented and uncounted, living an area with porous sea borders, they are Southeast Asia’s latest group of forgotten refugees from a decades long conflict existing on the edges of society and the focus of this series.

Yet they are just the latest group in a region where so many are now living away from their homeland, many in a stateless condition with limited access to education and decent health services beyond those aid agencies can provide.

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