Members of a police forensic team carry a body bag with human remains dug from the grave near the abandoned human trafficking camp in the jungle close the Thailand border. (Reuters Photo/Damir Sagolj)

Wang Kelian, Malaysia. Hassan Ismail wasn’t surprised when authorities found abandoned jungle camps near his village in northern Malaysia last week where 139 suspected human trafficking victims could be buried.

For the past three years, he said, small groups of sickly, rake-thin men regularly turned up to beg for food at his mosque in Wang Kelian, a village that is about 3 kilometers from the nearest camp.

The men told villagers they were Rohingya, a mostly stateless Muslim people fleeing persecution and poverty in western Myanmar for jobs in Malaysia.

“They were very hungry,” said Ismail, 66, the mosque’s imam or prayer leader. “The villagers gave them food and then called the police.”

Afterwards, he said, the drill was the same: police took the Rohingya away, and the villagers never found out what happened to them.

The testimony of four Wang Kelian villagers, including prominent locals such as Ismail, raises questions about what the Malaysian authorities knew, and when, about the extensive and long-running human-smuggling operation along the rugged border with Thailand.

For years, tens of thousands of boat people have sailed from Myanmar and Bangladesh, before making the overland journey through Thailand to Malaysia.

Malaysia’s Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar admitted his country’s border with Thailand was “porous” but said that human smuggling was not Malaysia’s problem alone.

“This is an international problem. The migrants hail from both Myanmar and Bangladesh,” he said at a news conference in Wang Kelian on Thursday.

An armed Royal Malaysian Police stands guard at an abandoned migrant camp used by people-smugglers in a jungle at Bukit Wang Burma in the Malaysian northern state of Perlis, which borders Thailand. (AFP Photo/Mohd Rasfan)

No patrolling of hilltop

Malaysian police announced on Monday they had found 139 graves around 28 abandoned trafficking camps scattered along a 50-kilometer stretch of the border in the northern state of Perlis.

The graves were discovered by commandos as they combed the area after Thai authorities found 36 bodies in trafficking camps on its side of the border in early May, the police said.

Asked why it took so long to find the camps that had apparently been there for years, Wan Junaidi said police patrols in the area were aimed at catching smugglers of contraband, not people, and didn’t discover the camps because they stuck to lower ground.

“Our patrols don’t normally go on the top of the hill,” he said. “We skim on the sides.”

Wan Junaidi dismissed the villagers’ reports provided to Reuters of seeing migrants years earlier in Wang Kelian “Nobody can prove if they were illegal migrants or [legal] foreign workers,” he said.

However, he added two policemen posted along the border were being investigated for collusion with the traffickers and had been arrested. He said the two, who were not named, were suspected of involvement in transporting the migrants, but he did not elaborate.

Noor Rashid Ibrahim, a deputy inspector-general of police, said: “We focused on smuggling routes. Normally, smuggling routes are in areas which are accessible. That is why we didn’t go to the top of the hill.”

Call to prayer 

Police have exhumed the remains of four people from a trafficking camp at Bukit Wang Burma, a hill near Wang Kelian village.

There is a police checkpoint and barracks only a few hundred meters from the jungle path that leads up to the Bukit Wang Burma camp.

The camps are located in a remote but sensitive border area that many state agencies are tasked with monitoring.

Wang Bukit Burma is also part of Perlis State Park, a magical but unforgiving landscape of limestone towers and misty forests. Park rangers forbid locals from entering to stop them cutting down trees or poaching animals, said Ismail.

Desperate Rohingya migrants were regular visitors to Wang Kelian, said Adi Zunaidi, the village chief.

At the end of December, said Zunaidi, “hundreds” of Rohingya men, women and children appeared in the village. They were thin with sunken eyes, and wore dirty, tattered clothes. Many were barefoot.

“I asked them how long they had been in the jungle,” said Zunaidi, who said he spoke to the migrants in broken English. “They said one or two months. They were hungry. We gave them food and clothes.”

Afterwards, the police again took the Rohingya away, Zunaidi said.

Reuters has asked police and the home ministry in the capital Kuala Lumpur about what happened to the people taken away, but has not got a reply.

Neither Ismail nor Zunaidi knew of the camps. Zunaidi said he learned of the camps after a steady build-up of police personnel in the area from early April, and conversations with locals at coffee-shops frequented by the officers.

Ismail said he had assumed the hungry migrants hailed from nearby rubber plantations. “We never thought there were camps or graves in the hills,” he said.

Another villager, Mohamad Ardi, 29, a construction worker, said he often saw small groups of barefoot migrants walk past his house at night.

“They were thin and wore old clothes,” he said.

Reuters

The post Malaysians Near Border Say Illegal Migrants Seen in Area for Years appeared first on The Jakarta Globe.

Norbanu, a 60-year-old Rohingya, speaks with her daughter’s boyfriend, who is now in Indonesia, from an internet hut in Thae Chaung village, home to thousands of displaced Rohingya Muslims (Reuters Photo/Minzayar)

Thae Chaung, Myanmar. In this teeming camp for displaced Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar, it’s easy to overlook the internet huts. The raw emotion they generate is much harder to ignore.

The huts have bamboo walls, thatched roofs and — most importantly — dusty laptop computers that allow Rohingya to reestablish contact with relatives who have left on boats for Thailand and Malaysia. The internet connection comes via cellphones jammed into the cobweb-strewn rafters.

Smoke from the camp’s cooking fires seeps in through the flimsy walls. Sound drifts out just as easily, obliging callers to share their personal dramas with everyone nearby.

What emerges is an intimate portrait of the Rohingya, a mostly stateless people living in often grim conditions in Myanmar, where many consider them illegal immigrants. The huts also provide an insight into the human traffickers who profit from the boat-people and the families they leave behind.

Today, there is joy: Fatima, 56, is blessing her son’s choice of bride. Connected via a Skype-like app, he sits in an internet cafe in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, where he works as a cleaner.

“Of course you must marry her, if her skin is fair,” Fatima tells him. Her son promises to introduce his sweetheart in a later call.

Other exchanges are tragic or sinister.

Many people arrive with scraps of paper with a cellphone number with a Malaysian country code. These belong to the traffickers who each year ferry thousands of Rohingya to Thailand, where they are routinely held for ransom in remote camps near the border with Malaysia.

Freedom costs $1,200 to $1,800 — a fortune for most Rohingya living on a dollar or two a day.

A trafficker is demanding $1,400 to release Rahana’s 12-year-old son. Rahana, who like many Rohingya women goes by a single name, has already sent $1,100, but the trafficker wants the balance.

At least she is allowed to talk briefly with her son. Usually, after an initial “proof of life” call, traffickers do not let relatives speak until paid in full.

A man answers the Malaysian number Rahana calls. “Let me speak to my son,” she tells him. A few seconds pass. Then a small voice says, “Mum?”

Rahana’s eyes fills with tears and her jaw trembles. She quickly composes herself.

“I will send the money,” she tells the boy. “Then they will let you go.” After the call, Rahana is dazed and fretful. “My son told me he was sick,” she says. “Whenever he eats, he vomits.”

People gather in and around an internet hut in Thae Chaung village to speak with family and human traffickers. (Reuters PHoto/Minzayar)

‘They trust me’

Thae Chaung was a fishing village until 2012, when ethnic Rakhine Buddhists drove thousands of Rohingya from the nearby city of Sittwe. Religious violence in Rakhine State that year killed at least 200 people and left 140,000 homeless.

Today, Thae Chaung is a grimy, overcrowded camp. For most residents, a boat to Thailand is the only way out.

All those arrivals and departures presented Rohingya merchant Kyaw Thein, 29, with an opportunity.

Until 2012, he sold ice and gasoline to village fishermen. Now he runs a busy internet hut, charging 100 Myanmar kyat (10 cents) per minute for an overseas call on one of three battered laptops that are in almost constant use.

He provides other services too.

Rohingya working overseas routinely send money to relatives back home. This can be wired to the Sittwe bank account of a Rakhine middleman, who brings the cash to Kyaw Thein. He then gives it to the relatives — minus his 1.5 percent commission.

His windowless shack is also the conduit for thousands of dollars in ransom money.

Relatives entrust Kyaw Thein with bricks of kyat that he delivers to a Rohingya middleman in a nearby village. He says he does not charge for this service or deal directly with the traffickers. “They trust me,” he says, “but I don’t trust them.”

In the past, Kyaw Thein says, Rohingya had to pay hundreds of dollars to board Malaysia-bound boats. Now, they pay only a few dollars to be ferried to large ships moored far offshore.

Their onward voyage is free — because traffickers know they can extort much higher sums by detaining these boat people once they arrive in Thailand or Malaysia.

Brokers roam the Rohingya camps dotted along the Rakhine coastline, says Kyaw Thein, and get a “finder’s fee” from traffickers for each passenger they deliver.

Abdul Kadar blames these brokers for luring away his 14-year-old daughter. She left home one morning to visit a neighbour and never came back.

She is now in a camp in Thailand or Malaysia. The traffickers want $1,500 that Abdul Kadar, a whippet-thin rickshaw driver, cannot pay.

“They told me they would kick her off the top of a mountain,” he says.

Abdul Kadar told them to find a man who wants to marry her, then ask him to pay the ransom. He knows he is effectively giving them permission to sell his daughter.

“All I have are worries,” he says. “I can’t do anything.”

Reuters

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