All at sea

FOR nearly three months a small green fishing boat has chugged around South-East Asia’s vast blue waters, packed with people no one wants. At first the 300 or so refugees on board—most of them Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic-minority persecuted in Myanmar—were guided by people-smugglers. But after their traffickers fled, fearing arrest, they sailed on alone and with no clear destination, prevented from reaching the shores of Thailand and Malaysia by naval patrols. When a small vessel carrying journalists from the BBC and New York Times pulled alongside, hurling bottled water onto the decks, one passenger claimed that ten of their number had died. Their voyage finally ended on May 20th when Indonesian fishermen rescued them.

The ship was one of many which have drifted in the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea in recent weeks, bearing thousands of people. Some of them are escaping poverty and oppression in their home countries, mainly Myanmar and Bangladesh; a few are victims of kidnappings, their captors intending to demand ransoms for their release. Since the start of May, when a police crackdown in Thailand started to block the land routes over which criminals have long smuggled Rohingyas and other migrants, more than 3,000 of them have scrambled onto beaches in Malaysia and Indonesia. Yet all three countries have turned boats away in sight of shore, at times giving them directions to their neighbour’s waters. On May 20th Malaysia and Indonesia at last agreed to stop pushing away boats, but only after much international pressure. It has been a callous and haphazard response from a region that boasts of its deepening integration, and which wants to bolster its standing in the world.

South-East Asian countries rightly insist that the problem’s source, and its only lasting solution, lies in Myanmar. For years it has persecuted its Rohingya minority. The country’s government—and, as far as can be gauged, almost all its people—regards Rohingyas as illegal Bengali immigrants; violence against them by other ethnic groups has given officials an excuse to herd some 140,000 of them into rancid refugee camps. In recent years the trafficking networks that sprang up to sneak Rohingyas away from such horrors have also successfully targeted better-off people living on the shores of neighbouring Bangladesh.

Yet Myanmar’s neighbours share considerable blame for the emergency. Only Cambodia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste have signed the UN Convention on Refugees, under which “pushbacks” are outlawed. Regional politicians agree they are morally obliged to resupply the boats, and to rescue those whose vessels have capsized. But until this week they said that allowing seaworthy boats to land only encouraged more to attempt the crossing. That reasoning was largely accepted by their electorates, even though it was flawed. Increasing migrant deaths in the Mediterranean have not reduced the numbers of those attempting to get from Africa to Europe. Some of the Asian boat people had taken to flinging themselves into the water at first sight of land, believing (correctly) that coastguards would usually take them to shore when seeing lives at immediate and grave risk.

Several South-East Asian countries have tolerated—and benefited from—the people-smuggling they decry. For years Thai officials are thought to have quietly allowed refugees discovered within its borders to proceed to Malaysia. That gave the smuggling networks space to flourish, and helped enrich a few corrupt locals (many Thai fishing and seafood businesses have used migrants forced into what amounts to slavery). Malaysians, for their part, have sometimes turned a blind eye to the influx—Rohingyas help make up a shortage of cheap, unskilled labour.

The crisis has highlighted the woeful inadequacy of regional governance and of its main implementer, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN)—a talking-shop with minuscule resources and a shared belief in the dubious principle of “non-interference”. The region’s leaders promise not to meddle in each other’s internal affairs, thus helping Myanmar (which chaired ASEAN last year) escape broad censure for its treatment of Rohingyas. It has also allowed ASEAN leaders to sign flowery declarations—such as a convention in 2012 in support of human rights—without having to fear that their neighbours will actually hold them to account. ASEAN leaders mutter that quiet diplomacy is more likely to lead to reform than public hectoring would. They are sometimes right, but often wrong.

Since the start of the year ASEAN bigwigs have been talking up how much more closely bound the region is becoming with the formation of the ASEAN Economic Community, a collection of regional trade agreements which are supposed to take effect by the end of 2015. But attempts to co-operate on tricky social and security issues are lagging far behind. ASEAN was sluggish in its response to the devastation wreaked by Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines in 2013. So far it has bungled again.

Here be dragons

Richer countries would be in a better position to criticise if they could set high standards in dealing with their own refugee problems. They do not push boat people back to sea. But Europe’s approach in the Mediterranean is clearly inadequate; hundreds might have been saved from shipwrecks in April had it kept up spending on maritime rescue. Australia diverts migrant boats before they reach its waters; on May 17th Tony Abbott, its prime minister, refused to criticise his South-East Asian neighbours.

It is tempting for ASEAN countries to think that these weak records excuse their own failure. But by swiftly resettling the rescued migrants, and by better handling Myanmar, a region that tires of Western moralising could seize an opportunity to lead. Many South-East Asians see ASEAN as a tool to enrich its elites, not as a bulwark against egregious abuses and suffering. Here is a chance to change their minds.