Malala calls for end of 'persecution'

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on Monday urged Myanmar leaders to take "immediate action" to prevent the persecution of the country's Rohingya Muslims, most of whom are considered by the government to be illegal immigrants.

The 17-year-old, who was shot by militants in her native Pakistan for campaigning for girls' rights, said that Rohingyas deserved "equal rights and opportunities" and called for them to be integrated into the country.

"I call on the leaders of Myanmar and the world to take immediate action to halt the inhuman persecution of Burma's (Myanmar) Muslim minority Rohingya people," said Malala.

"The Rohingyas deserve citizenship in the country where they were born and have lived for generations," added the teenager, who won the Nobel prize last year for her activism.

"Today and every day, I stand with the Rohingyas, and I encourage people everywhere to do so."

Myanmar considers the Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and places a raft of restrictions on them, such as family size, movements and access to jobs.

Most of the 1.3 million-strong community have no citizenship and tens of thousands have fled the impoverished Myanmar state of Rakhine after deadly communal violence there in 2012, sparking a migrant crisis.

The collapse of a transnational trafficking route following a Thai crackdown has made it even more difficult for the Rohingyas to escape persecution, with many ending up in camps in a remote region near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border.

On Monday, Bangladesh repatriated 150 undocumented migrants found last month off the Myanmar coast after the traffickers abandoned them in the Bay of Bengal, officials said. Troopers from the border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) picked the migrants up in six buses from Gundum village on the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar's Rakhine state, 320 kilometres southeast of Dhaka, after they were handed over by the Myanmar Border Police.

On Sunday, Buddhist hardliners in Rakhine State announced the plan to stage a day of protest moves to help desperate migrants found adrift on boats in the Bay of Bengal.Local groups met in the state capital Sittwe on Saturday.

"The meeting decided to stage a protest on June 14 against keeping Bengalis from Bangladesh in Rakhine state," Soe Naing, a coordinator for social programmes in Rakhine who attended the meeting, told AFP.

As this becomes an international matter, Taliban militants in Pakistan on Monday urged the beleaguered Rohingya Muslims to "take up the sword" and launch a holy war against Myanmar to stop their persecution in the country.

The Taliban message was issued by Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman of theJamaat-ul-Ahrar outfit, which is hiding in Pakistan's north-westernborder region with Afghanistan."I address Burma's youth: take up the sword and kill in the path ofGod. No doubt, God is with us," Ehsan said.