WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has urged Myanmar to end discrimination against its ethnic Rohingya minority if it wants to succeed in its democratic transition from decades of junta rule.
The plight of the Muslim group, 1.3 million of whom live in western Myanmar but are mostly denied citizenship, has come under scrutiny as a migrant crisis unfurls in Southeast Asia.
Around 3,500 people, mainly Rohingya or economic migrants from Bangladesh, have reached land in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, while thousands more are feared trapped on boats adrift at sea.
Obama has thrown his political weight behind the complex transition in Myanmar, which was ruled by the military with an iron fist until reforms began in 2011.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya have lived in displacement camps since 2012 when deadly communal violence tore through the western state of Rakhine. “The Rohingya have been discriminated against significantly, and that’s part of the reason they’re fleeing,” Obama said Monday in Washington at an event with young leaders from Southeast Asia.
Addressing what is “required for Myanmar to succeed”, Obama said “one of the most important things is to put an end to discrimination against people because of what they look like or what their faith is.” “I think if I were a Rohingya, I would want to stay where I was born. But I’d want to make sure that my government was protecting me and that people were treating me fairly,” he added.
“And that’s why it’s so important, I think, as part of the democratic transition, to take very seriously this issue of how the Rohingya are treated.”
Myanmar does not recognise the Rohingya as a separate ethnic minority, instead calling them “Bengalis”. It insists they are illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. As a result they face restrictions on movement and on access to jobs and services, prompting thousands each year to brave the dangerous sea journey south towards Malaysia and Indonesia.
Myanmar’s first census in three decades, held in 2014, did not include them in the tally after authorities refused to allow the group to identify themselves as “Rohingya”.  A powerful Buddhist nationalist campaign for tighter restrictions on all of Myanmar’s Muslim population has deepened hostility to the Rohingya - and has been met with a muted response from political leaders, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Her opposition party is set to contest elections in November, which Obama has backed as a key stepping stone towards democracy.
Meanwhile, Muslim Rohingya women who were held at human-trafficking camps in Thailand and Malaysia were subjected to gang rapes by their captors, assaults that left at least two of them pregnant, a Malaysian media report said.
Malaysia’s state-run Bernama news agency quoted a Rohingya survivor of the camps, Nur Khaidha Abdul Shukur, as saying young women would be taken away nightly from the jungle post where she was held near Padang Besar in Thailand.
She passed through the camp last year, according to the report released late Monday. “Every night, two or three young and pretty Rohingya women were taken out from the detention pens by the guards to a clandestine place,” she was quoted saying.
“They would be gang raped by the guards. Two young women at the camp became pregnant after the gang rape.”
The report also quoted her husband Nurul Amin Nobi Hussein saying he witnessed similar crimes taking place at nearby camps on the Malaysian side of the border.
The discovery last month of human-trafficking camps - and scores of nearby graves - first in Thailand and then over the border in Malaysia has caused shock and revulsion in Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, Myanmar’s navy on Tuesday escorted a boatload of more than 700 migrants towards its western state of Rakhine, authorities said, five days after it was found adrift in the Bay of Bengal.
Around 3,500 migrants, mainly Rohingya from Myanmar or economic migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, have come ashore in Southeast Asia in recent weeks in an ongoing migrant crisis.
Some 2,500 more are believed still trapped at sea, heaping pressure on both countries to take back the migrants and improve living conditions to stem the outflow.
Soon after the boat was found on Friday Myanmar authorities said the 727 passengers onboard were “Bengalis” and threatened to send them across the border.
Myanmar describes its persecuted Rohingya Muslim community living in the western state of Rakhine and numbering around 1.3 million as “Bengalis”. Most have no citizenship and are considered to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
On Tuesday officials in both Myanmar and Bangladesh said the packed boat was on its way to Rakhine - a frequent upstream departure point for many Rohingya journeys south.
“It’s heading to Rakhine. We heard they were being taken to Maungdaw by the navy but we can’t confirm that,” an unnamed official in Maungdaw, a town in the state, told AFP.
Bangladesh’s Border Guard also said it had been told by its neighbour that the passengers would be taken to Maungdaw.
It is unclear when the boat was due to arrive or what would happen to the passengers once they reached the town, which is separated from Bangladesh by a wide river. But in a warning to Myanmar, a coast guard official, Captain Shahidul Islam, said Bangladesh would block any attempt to push them across the frontier.
“This ship with migrants is being shifted to Maungdaw through Myanmar waters,” he said. “We have intensified patrols in our territory so that they cannot push back their citizens to Bangladesh territory.”
The Rohingya flee Rakhine in droves each year to escape poverty and persecution in a region where their movements are controlled and they lack access to jobs or basic services. The exodus increased dramatically after 2012 when scores were killed in communal bloodletting involving Buddhist nationalists in the state.