By Timothy Mclaughlin and Aubrey Belford
YANGON/MAUNGDAW, Myanmar (Reuters) - Myanmar said on Thursday that persecution of its Rohingya Muslim population was not the cause of Southeast Asia's migrant crisis, a day after the United States called on the country to give full rights to the minority to help end the exodus.
President Barack Obama said this week that Myanmar needed to end discrimination against the Rohingya if it was to succeed in its transition to a democracy, as Washington upped the pressure on the country to tackle what it sees as one of the root causes of a migration that the region has struggled to cope with.
Myanmar does not recognise its 1.1 million Rohingya as citizens, rendering them effectively stateless. Many have fled apartheid-like conditions in the country's western Rakhine state.
"It has been portrayed that discrimination and persecution are causing people to leave Rakhine state, but that is not true," Myanmar's Minister of Foreign Affairs Wunna Maung Lwin told diplomats and international agencies at a briefing in Yangon.
He pointed to the number of Bangladeshis on board a migrant boat that landed in May as proof that the influx of "boat people" was a regional problem linked to human trafficking.
"This incident... has shown to the region as well as the international community this is not the root cause," he said.
The boat he referred to was intercepted by Myanmar's navy last month. Myanmar has said 200 of the 208 people aboard were economic migrants from Bangladesh.
But a Reuters investigation found that 150-200 Rohingya had also been aboard that boat, but were spirited away by people smugglers in the week before the navy brought it to shore.
Some paid a fee to be smuggled back into the camps for displaced people that they had boarded the boats to escape.
Tareque Muhammad, deputy chief of mission at the Bangladesh embassy in Yangon, told Reuters that only 150 people from that boat had been identified and documented as Bangladeshis.
Zaw Aye Maung, the Yangon Region Ethnic Rakhine Affairs Minister, said at the same briefing that people were "living happily" in the camps for displaced people.
His words contrasted with those of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard, who on Wednesday described Rakhine State as "one of the most oppressive atmospheres I've ever travelled in".
DUMPED AT SEA
The crisis blew up last month after a Thai crackdown on trafficking camps along its border with Malaysia made it too risky for people smugglers to land their human cargo. Smugglers abandoned boats full of migrants at sea.
Images of desperate people crammed aboard overloaded boats with little food or water focused international attention on the unfolding disaster.
Myanmar was in the process of verifying the place of origin of 734 migrants the navy brought ashore on Wednesday, Wunna Maung Lwin said. They were found drifting in the Andaman Sea on Friday in an overloaded fishing boat that was taking on water.
Several migrants said that smugglers had loaded them from three smaller boats onto the larger vessel in which they were found before abandoning them.
"The traffickers told us 'we can't go to Thailand, so you have to go alone'," Marmod Toyo, who said he was a Rohingya, told Reuters.
He said he was at sea for two months after being offered 50,000 kyat ($45.25) by an agent to get on a boat to Malaysia. Marmod, who has a wife and four children, said he knew it was a trick but that his family needed the money.
"There's not enough food back home and no work," he said. "The human trafficker came and gave me money. I knew he might sell me, but I needed it."
A common practice has been for traffickers to hold migrants in squalid camps on the Thai-Malaysian border until their family pays a ransom.
Another migrant said his uncle, who was also on the boat, was beaten to death by one of the crew before the body was dumped overboard.
"My uncle was eating rice and asked for some water, so they killed him," said Siszul Islam, from the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.
There was no way of independently corroborating the migrants' accounts.
Some 4,000 migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar have landed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar in the past month.
Indonesia said on Thursday it was continuing search and rescue operations to find migrant boats. The United Nations estimates around 2,000 migrants may still be adrift.
Indonesia would repatriate economic migrants from Bangladesh as soon as it could, but how to handle Rohingya migrants was more complex, said Andi Rachmianto, the international security and disarmament director at the foreign ministry.
"We need to differentiate between Rohingya migrants and migrants from Bangladesh because their motivations are different," Rachmianto said, noting that most of the Bangladeshis were economic migrants.
"So resolving this is relatively easy compared with resolving the case of our Rohingya brothers"
(Additional reporting by Hnin Yadana Zaw in YANGON and Fergus Jensen in JAKARTA; Writing by Simon Webb; Editing by Alex Richardson)