Yangon, Myanmar: Myanmar said Wednesday it was ‘ready to provide humanitarian assistance’ to boatpeople, in its most conciliatory comments yet as several Southeast Asian neighbours meet to discuss the boat crisis gripping the region.

A foreign ministry statement in state media said Myanmar ‘shares concerns’ of the international community and was ‘ready to provide humanitarian assistance to anyone who suffered in the sea’, after the UN warned thousands of migrants -- including from the stateless Rohingya minority -- were stranded off its coast.

Myanmar's treatment of the impoverished and marginalised Muslim Rohingya community is widely seen as one of the root causes of the surge in migrants making the perilous journey across the Bay of Bengal.

Nearly 3,000 Rohingya from Myanmar and Bangladeshi migrants have made it ashore in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia in recent days after being abandoned by smugglers in open waters.

Thousands more victims are believed to be stranded at sea with scant food or water.

On Tuesday the United Nations’ refugee agency the UNHCR warned that some 2,000 people, including women and children, have been trapped on boats off Myanmar’s western Rakhine state coast for more than 40 days, with reports of violence, hunger and dehydration.

The boats are believed to be packed with Rohingya and Bangladeshis who have yet to sail southwards through the Andaman Sea because of a crackdown on the lucrative people smuggling trade that has seen Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia refuse to accept the vessels.

The United Nations and United States have led international calls for Southeast Asian nations to open their ports to the boats rather than just giving food and water and pushing them back to sea.

'They are humans'

Myanmar rejects the use of the term ‘Rohingya’, preferring to describe the estimated 1.3 million-strong group living in the country as ‘Bengalis’ -- shorthand for foreigners.

Myanmar denies them citizenship, among a litany of restrictions on the group, curbs their movement and is mulling divisive population control laws that could impact on the Rohingya.

The government initially batted away suggestions that it carried some of the responsibility for the unfolding crisis.

It has also refused to confirm whether it will attend a regional summit called by Thailand for 29 May.

But Wednesday's softened rhetoric comes after pressure from its neighbours as well as from within.

A spokesman for the opposition National League for Democracy party on Monday said the minority Muslim group were ‘entitled to human rights’.

‘They are humans. I just see them as humans who are entitled to human rights,’ Nyan Win, spokesman for the National League for Democracy said in strikingly bold comments on an incendiary issue in the former junta-led nation.

Party leader Aung San Suu Kyi has previously faced criticism for not speaking strongly on the Rohingya's plight as doing so could alienate her more strident Buddhist voters ahead of crunch polls later this year.

More than 200 people were killed and tens of thousands -- the majority Rohingya -- left in displacement camps after communal violence in 2012 between the Muslim minority and local Buddhists in western Rakhine State.