BANGKOK ? The plight of stateless Muslim boat people from military-ruled Myanmar is set to be a thorny issue when Southeast Asian leaders meet this week.

Obscure until just recently, refugees from the Rohingya ethnic minority hit the headlines last month when Thailand's army allegedly towed hundreds of them out to sea in barges with little food or water.

Many have been rescued in Indonesian and Indian waters but rights groups fear that scores died -- and with countries across the region passing the buck there is little hope of a solution, they say.

Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya said earlier this month that there would be a meeting on the issue on the sidelines of the at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, which starts on Friday.

"Definitely there will be some sort of meeting to discuss the possibility of cooperation on the Rohingya question," he said.

He said that as well as working within ASEAN, Thailand would also cooperate with Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are living as refugees, and with the United Nations refugee agency.

Numbering around 800,000 in total, the Rohingyas mostly live in the North Rakhine region of Myanmar. About 300,000 of them have however crossed over the border to live in Bangladesh.

Their woes stem from a change in mainly Buddhist Myanmar's nationality law 27 years ago, which classified the Muslim Rohingyas as foreigners and denied them the right to citizenship.

Since then they have faced relentless official repression that has left them beset by poverty, food insecurity, child malnutrition and lack of work.

As a result a growing number have taken to the seas despite the deadly risks, many of them seeking the supposed safe haven of Muslim Malaysia, often via Thailand.

But with Thailand officially denying its so-called "push-back" policy and Myanmar's junta refusing to acknowledge that they even exist, rights groups say there is little immediate hope for the Rohingyas themselves.

Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said that Jakarta would try to bring up the Rohingya problem on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit.

"We'll try to find the time to discuss the Rohingya issues... the most possible time to go over the issue is during the minister-level meeting. But it all depends on the discretion of the leaders," he said.

Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, a rights group that documented cases of alleged Thai abuse of the Rohingya, said it was "frustrating" that the issue was not part of the official ASEAN summit agenda.

"The whole issue has been tackled on different fronts but there is no easy solution to this problem," Lewa told AFP.

She said that the "root cause is in Burma," using Myanmar's former name, but added that ASEAN's notorious policy of non-interference in members affairs made it questionable whether its members would actually discuss it.

The issue of the Rohingyas should be used as a way for ASEAN members to bring up the broader issues of Myanmar's human rights abuses, a perennial headache for the grouping, said Benjamin Zawacki of Amnesty International.

"Even if the discussion stops at the Rohingyas, this sort of persecution is not new and it is quite right that the root cause of this crisis is on Myanmar soil," he told AFP.

But he added that the focus generally was too closely on people-smuggling and not on why people were refugees in the first place.

Thai Premier Abhisit Vejjajiva said last week that the Rohingyas issue would be brought up at a meeting of the so-called "Bali Process" regional forum against people-smuggling in March.

"It is our fear that this discussion will focus too much on what happens when they are on the boats. The largest issue concerns persecution," he said.