Thailand’s death camps may be the most horrifying places in Southeast Asia
GlobalPost
May 15, 2015 · 10:30 AM UTC
By Patrick Winn
rohinyga-1.jpg
Rohingya migrants jump to collect food supplies dropped by a Thai army helicopter from a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea on May 14, 2015. Credit: Christophe Archambault
Editor's note: The names of the former captives of illegal prison camps featured in this story have been changed to protect them from retaliation from human trafficking syndicates.
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BANGKOK, Thailand — The horrors of the transatlantic slave trade are not resigned to history. They've been revived on creaky boats plying the Bay of Bengal.
In 2015, there is a trade in human cargo that evokes the barbaric middle passage to America in the 1700s. The chattel isn’t African captives but men and women called Rohingya, a Muslim ethnicity fleeing apartheid in Myanmar.
The Rohingya’s desperation makes them easy prey for traffickers who promise passage to Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation, for only $100. Instead, they’re crammed onto boats for a voyage to secret prisons in Thailand.
The trip can take weeks. Roasting under a tropical sun, the seafaring captives are often permitted only a handful of rice each morning. They may get a few swigs of water every other day. Those who starve to death are simply tossed into the surf.
For those who survive, more agony awaits. The Rohingya are smuggled onto Thailand’s beaches and forced into hidden jungle prison camps. Then the torture begins — daily beatings (and, for many women, rape) until relatives cough up more than $2,000 to spare their lives.
These death camps, and the boats that supply them, are perhaps the most dreadful places in all of Southeast Asia.
“We were beaten morning and night,” says Hanif, 23, a scrawny Rohingya man who was stuck in a camp just nine months ago. He is now living illegally in Bangkok’s outskirts.
“They’d beat us to convince our families to pay the ransom,” Hanif says. “They’d also beat us randomly just to keep us weak so we couldn’t escape.”
Hanif is one of half a dozen death camp survivors interviewed by GlobalPost in Thailand. Their accounts are universally gruesome. All endured beatings, starvation and disease in the hidden prisons. All witnessed deaths at sea as well as in camps, where bodies are dumped into mass graves.
“Women in the camps have it especially bad,” says Salima, 30, who wasted away in a camp for months with her two children. “Maybe the guards spared me because I have kids. But younger girls were often handpicked and led into the jungle. They would return in pain asking, ‘Why? Why did I come to this terrible place only to lose my dignity?’”
SIR ANWAR
Rohingya migrant women cry as they sit on a boat drifting in the sea off the coast of Thailand on May 14.
In the camps, the captive Rohingya sleep in mud, under plastic tarps, inside wooden cages. Their food supply is a trickle of soggy rice. Every twitch, every plea for food, can be grounds for overseers to lash captives with bamboo rods.
The violence is used to impose maximum fear. Traffickers want their captives to be genuinely terrified when they press mobile phones to their faces and force them to call their relatives. The overseers will initially request ransoms as high as $4,500 but often settle for about $2,000. These are incredible sums for families who are already struggling under state-sanctioned apartheid back home.
The indignities don’t stop there. According to Hanif and other former captives, they were groomed to treat the kingpin of the trafficking syndicate that enslaved them as a revered figure. The man’s name, they say, was Anwar.
“We were forced to call him ‘Sir Anwar,’” Hanif says. “We had to stand up straight and salute him. We were taught to show him honor.”
Equally shocking is the fact that Thai authorities have known about the camps for years.
As relatives back home in Myanmar scramble to raise cash — usually by selling off farmlands and resorting to loan sharks — the prisoners waste away. Their limbs become skinny as twigs. Purplish welts begin to cover their bodies.
“My children’s bodies started to shrink,” says Salima, whose kids were around 4 and 6 years old when she was imprisoned just one year ago. “At one point, the guards asked if I was ready to throw my kids away.”
The lives of Salima and her two children were spared for $2,200. But others succumb to torture and the elements before their families can fulfill traffickers’ demands. Just like on the boats, corpses accumulate in the camps, and bodies pile up in mass graves.
OVERDUE CRACKDOWN
Muslim Rohingya asylum seekers standing inside a cell at the immigration detention center in Phang Nga, southern Thailand.
Almost every detail emerging from Thailand’s death camps is shocking. But equally shocking is the fact that Thai authorities have known about the camps for years.
“There are actually camps still operational here in Thailand,” says Matthew Smith, founder of Fortify Rights, a nonprofit watchdog group that has specialized in documenting the plight of Rohingya Muslims. “We’ve even documented camps that held upwards of 2,000 people with captives moving in and out on a daily basis.”
“Authorities have known about these camps for a long time,” says Smith, who recently testified about the Rohingya trafficking crisis to the US Congress. “The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge. The problem is a lack of political will to stop this.”
Thailand — like most countries — treats the Rohingya as an unwanted nuisance. That is unlikely to change: The military government’s official policy upon spotting Rohingya at sea is to offer food and fuel so they can make it to Malaysia.
Unofficially, some Thai authorities have received kickbacks from traffickers for allowing camps to proliferate. As far back as two years ago, the military acknowledged soldiers’ direct involvement in Rohingya trafficking but claimed — as top brass often do — that the corrupt officers only amounted to a few “bad apples.”
Only now are authorities exposing these death camps with vigor.
“For years, we’ve warned the government so they can crack down. And they’ve been silent,” says Maung Kyaw Nu, chairman of the Burmese Rohingya Association in Thailand. “Why does the government only take action now? After we’ve lost so many lives? They could have done this years ago and prevented so much tragedy!”
Ongoing raids have turned up nearly 80 Rohingya prison camps along with dozens of corpses in mass graves. A purge of Thai officialdom connected to the trade has resulted in more than 60 arrest warrants so far. Panicked traffickers, fearful of getting arrested, have abandoned incoming boats and left an estimated 8,000 people adrift at sea. Boats packed with hundreds of Rohingya (as well as Bangladeshis) have already drifted onto the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia.
Police have also locked up at least one alleged trafficking kingpin. His name is Anwar. Former captives speaking to GlobalPost were shown his photo, which was taken in police custody. They say he’s the same Anwar who operated their jungle camps.
“That’s him,” says Sabir, a 24-year-old who was living in the camps less than a year ago. “He’s a blood sucker.”
MASS EXODUS
A boat crammed with scores of Rohingya migrants — including many young children — was found drifting in Thai waters on May 14.
By now, the ruthless nature of Rohingya trafficking syndicates is known to all — including Rohingya living on their native lands in Myanmar.
But their attempts to escape via the Bay of Bengal will likely continue. All of the Rohingya interviewed by GlobalPost were aware that the sea journey might kill them. Their decision to accept this risk is a testament to their bleak lives in Myanmar.
“We already live so close to death back home,” Salima says. “We’re mistreated by police. We’re unable to feed ourselves. Women get, you know, dishonored. We think, ‘Well, I might as well risk dying at sea.’”
In Myanmar, Rohingya have endured oppression for decades. Even Rohingya with long family histories in Myanmar are written off as Muslim invaders from neighboring Bangladesh. Their ability to marry, work and travel is restricted by authorities. More than 150,000 have been violently routed into refugee camps where food and medicine is scarce and death is routine.
Even those living outside these squalid camps are frequently preyed upon by soldiers and police. “We’re always forced to work for police, as porters, for zero pay,” says Hassam, 38, who was smuggled into Thailand within the last 12 months. “How can I feed my kids if I’m always working like a slave for someone else?”
The Rohingya mass exodus into the Bay of Bengal may be the largest refugee migration in Southeast Asia since the Vietnam War. And yet, according to Smith, the true number of Rohingya who’ve fled is “significantly higher than current estimates.”
Fortify Rights believes that a commonly cited United Nations figure of 130,000 Rohingya fleeing by sea since 2012 is far too low and doesn’t cover waves of departures from some of the most persecuted towns and cities in Myanmar. According to Smith, the number could be as high as 250,000.
As this nightmare has played out, the Rohingya crisis has gone from obscurity to a cause célèbre in the West. Last year, it also prodded the United States to plunge Thailand into its lowest human-trafficking ranking — a black mark shared by North Korea and Zimbabwe.
Pressure from the White House is at least partly responsible for Thailand’s ongoing raids on death camps and arrests of complicit officials, Smith says. “Thailand is realizing it needs to clean up its act,” he says. “But we’ve seen this in the past. A few arrests are made and there’s a failure to convict. Authorities should realize that the international community is watching and expects more.”
As for the fate of traffickers captured by authorities, the Rohingya interviewed by GlobalPost have a suggestion.
“Put them to death,” says Salima, as her fellow Rohingya nod along. “Then take all the money they made and give it to us.”
This story is presented by The GroundTruth Project.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-...southeast-asia
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Thailand convicts traffickers after 2015 mass graves discovery
Bodies were found in southern Songkhla province where authorities said hundreds of migrants had been held captive
This article is 1 month old Oliver Holmes in Bangkok
Wednesday 19 July 2017 11.10 BST Last modified on Wednesday 19 July 2017 23.35 BST
A Thai judge has found dozens of people guilty, including senior army general, in the country’s largest ever human trafficking trial following the discovery two years ago of mass graves in a squalid jungle camp where hundreds of migrants had been brutally exploited.
Cages, watchtower and 37 graves: inside an abandoned migrant camp in Malaysia
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Sentencing began on Wednesday morning for 102 people, including 21 government officials, and was still continuing 12 hours later. Most of the 62 found guilty so far were brought to trial on charges of forcible detention leading to death, trafficking, rape and belonging to organised transnational criminal networks.
Police opened the case after more than two dozen bodies were discovered in a shallow grave in southern Songkhla province in 2015. Authorities said the victims had been held captive by people-smugglers who kept migrants as hostages for ransom.
The case led to a crackdown on smuggling networks that brought people from Myanmar and Bangladesh to Thailand. But government action resulted in a secondary crisis in which smugglers, fearing arrest, abandoned boatloads of migrants. The UN refugee agency estimated hundreds died at sea, primarily as a result of starvation, dehydration and beatings by boat crews.
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The court heard on Wednesday how many Rohingya, a Muslim minority persecuted in Myanmar, and Bangladeshis paid people smugglers to reach Thailand. When they arrived, the court heard, they were detained in bamboo pens and had to beg their families to pay a ransom for their release.
The desperate calls were often made as the victims were being beaten to prove that the captors were serious in their demands for money – roughly 100,000 to 160,000 Thai baht (£2,280-£3,650). The migrants were told to tell their families that their throats would be sliced if the money did not arrive.
Dozens of victims, eating infrequent meals of rice, were given wristbands and regularly counted to make sure none had escaped. Several of the defendants at the trial were camp guards who were armed with guns and knives and paid less than £10 a day.
Rescue workers and forensic officials dig out skeletons from shallow graves following the discovery of an abandoned jungle camp in May 2015. Photograph: Madaree Tohlala/AFP/Getty Images
The mammoth, two-year trial – its verdict more than 500 pages long – included testimony from more than 200 witnesses, uncovering what appears to be a highly organised network of people-smuggling across Thailand and Malaysia. Much of the witness testimony was from former camp detainees.
The highest-profile defendant was Lt Gen Manus Kongpan, who was found guilty of multiple human trafficking charges, an extremely rare occurrence in a country controlled by a military elite.
Another senior figure to be handed a sentence was Patchuban Angchotipan, a wealthy businessperson and former provincial official known as Ko Tor or “Big Brother Tor”. The court referred to Patchuban as a “big boss” and found him guilty of trafficking children under 15, among other charges. Witnesses said that whenever there was a problem in transportation of the captives, Patchuban would be called.
Many of the 102 defendants were arrested by police following the discovery of the camps and eyewitness testimony. Several of the higher-ranking officers handed themselves in.
Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher on Thailand at Human Rights Watch, said the convictions are a “major step” in combat human trafficking in Thailand and should set the tone for other ongoing cases.
“This should send a strong message that regardless of their status and affiliation, no one is above the law. Impunity of trafficking gangs is now being stripped off.”
The court heard that at least two of the victims who survived the gruesome treatment were aged under 15 and the youngest was a 12-year-old boy.
The trial was plunged into disrepute in December 2015 when the most senior police investigator in the case fled the country to seek political asylum in Australia. He said he feared for his life after influential figures in the Thai government, military and police who were implicated in trafficking wanted him killed.
Maj Gen Paween Pongsirin was appointed to lead the investigation into the grim discovery but told Guardian Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that “from the beginning” he was under pressure not to pursue the perpetrators too enthusiastically.
Maj Gen Paween Pongsirin on the banks of the Yarra river in Melbourne. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea for the Guardian
Fortify Rights, a non-profit rights group based in south-east Asia, said that while the case “marks an unprecedented effort by Thai authorities to hold perpetrators of human trafficking accountable, the trial was beset by unchecked threats against witnesses, interpreters, and police investigators”.
The group said it had documented how Thai authorities detained ethnic-Rohingya witnesses and allegedly physically assaulted witnesses in the trial. Six assailants, who had identified themselves as police officers, abducted and threatened a witness in early 2016, Fortify Rights said, adding that interpreters involved in the investigation and trial had also received multiple threats.
Rights groups were also dismayed when Lt Gen Manas Kongpan, and three of his witnesses delivered their testimony in closed-door sessions, purportedly to preserve state secrets.
“Thailand has a long way to go to ensure justice for thousands who were exploited, tortured, and killed by human traffickers during the last several years,” said Amy Smith, the executive director of Fortify Rights.
“While these irregularities would not necessarily invalidate the verdict, they raise concerns about whether this trial was fair and in line with international standards.”
The US state department last month kept Thailand on a tier 2 watchlist, just above the lowest ranking, in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report, for a lacklustre effort to combat the trade.
Thailand’s government denies trafficking syndicates are still operating.
In the months after the corpses were discoveredin Thailand, Malaysian authorities said they had found close to 20 camps with more than 100 bodies in mass graves, pointing to a network of detention camps along the forested border area between the two countries.
Due to Thailand’s drawn-out legal procedures, the exact sentences for the defendants may not be disclosed until later this week.
Additional reporting by Phakarat Ryn Jirenuwat
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...aves-discovery