Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Southeast Asia has witnessed a refugee crisis over the past few years. According to the UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, more than 120,000 Rohingya refugees have boarded ships to flee from Myanmar in the past three years. There are currently around 200,000 Rohingyas living in Bangladesh.

Thousands of Rohingya refugees are stranded at sea, turned away by a number of countries and at risk of disaster. Not long ago, a total of 139 graves of suspected refugees were uncovered in a jungle of northern Malaysia on border with Thailand.

The Rohingya refugee issue appears to be a problem concerning certain countries, but is actually becoming a challenge for Southeast Asia and the entire Asian region. It has hampered collaboration and development of countries within the area.

The issue of Rohingya refugees is a highly complex one. Those displaced people are stateless. Although most of them have been living in Myanmar for generations, they are still not officially recognized as the country's citizens.

Most of the Rohingyas live in Rakhine State of southwest Myanmar, where there has been a lot of large-scale violence in recent years due to the long-simmering tensions between Muslims and the Myanmar Buddhist majority.

The Myanmar government has adopted emergency measures in the state, gathering Rohingyas together in areas protected by the military. This policy has temporarily stabilized the situation, but disrupted Rohingyas' lives, pushing them to flee in the end.

No country in Southeast Asia is willing to provide permanent aid for those refugees. Even though Indonesia and Malaysia agreed to provide temporary humanitarian assistance to Rohingya migrants, they have urged the international community to complete their resettlement and repatriation in one year.

Cooperation among not only Southeast Asian countries, but also other Asian nations, especially major powers, is needed to solve the problem. The refugee crisis is a problem for Asia, but also an opportunity to improve collaboration and coordination.

Europe faces the same refugee flow from the ongoing wars in the Middle East and North Africa, and the EU has played an important role in tackling the crisis. It set out a package plan, which asked its 28 members to share the responsibility on accepting refugees according to settled quotas.

Indeed, the conditions for Asian countries to share the Rohingya refugee crisis are not yet mature, but strengthening coordination as the EU has done will definitely help. Meanwhile, the nations can also explore ways of dealing with such crises through such coordination.

The focus of resolving the Rohingya refugee flow is fixed on Myanmar, where the crisis stemmed from. Thailand will host a regional meeting on the flow of migrants on Friday this week, but whether Myanmar will join remains unknown.

Major countries in Asia should put more pressure on Myanmar. Only when the country could actually protect the lives and livelihoods of Rohingyas in Myanmar, can the number of refugees be reduced. At the same time, other countries should also deliver aid to Myanmar.

Last week, when US Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Myanmar, he passed a "suggestion" from the White House to Myanmar's government, which called on Myanmar to improve conditions for Rohingyas in Rakhine State. Washington has apparently gone much further than Asian nations in this respect, and still calls the tune in Asian political issues.

The Rohingya problem is an Asian problem. If Asian countries cannot work it out themselves, and have to depend on major powers beyond the region to "guide" or "coordinate," it will be impossible for regional security and order to stand on its own feet. There are many other similar regional issues that either involve several Asian countries or need collaboration of more nations to reach a resolution.

Sometimes, regional cooperation can get a breakthrough from a specific problem, thus boosting each side's confidence for future joint work and setting up basic principles on human rights.

The Rohingya refugee crisis might be such a chance.

The author is a senior editor with People's Daily. He is now stationed in Brazil. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn. Follow him on Twitter at @dinggangchina