Nyaung Chaung, Myanmar. The bamboo-and-thatch village of Nyaung Chaung in Myanmar’s Rakhine State is typical of the places from which Rohingya Muslims flee. The fields don’t provide a living, locals say. Jobs are scarce. Daily life is a series of humiliations from Myanmar’s government, which officially considers them intruders and denies them citizenship.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled Rakhine since the start of the year, joining perilous journeys on the boats of human traffickers through the Bay of Bengal.

But local officials say no one has been arrested for trafficking in the Myanmar state that supplies the vast majority of victims to this brutal trade.

“There have been no trafficking cases in Rakhine State so far [this year]. There is a police unit to track down human traffickers, so it’s very rare in this area,” Hla Thein, the Rakhine State Attorney General, told Reuters.

Local middlemen

Villagers give a very different account, linking local middlemen to a regional network that has been the subject of arrests abroad.

They say the link is a local man, Soe Naing  ̶  widely known as Anwar. His arrest in southern Thailand on April 28 led to the discovery of dozens of migrant graves along the Thailand-Malaysia border.

For years, Rohingya have fled poverty and persecution in Rakhine, boarding boats to Thailand, Malaysia and beyond to seek work and asylum. But clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012 saw an explosion in the exodus, amid violence that killed hundreds and displaced more than 140,000.

As more than 100,000 fled, traffickers began holding migrants for ransom in jungle camps in Thailand and Malaysia. Untold numbers died on the journey.

In early May, Thailand began a sweeping crackdown on the trade after discovering scores of graves in abandoned trafficking camps along the Thailand-Malaysia border.

‘Back and forth’

Since the crackdown, Anwar’s family home  ̶  a rambling structure of bamboo and corrugated iron, slathered in sky blue paint  ̶  has stood empty behind a metal fence.

Local police have not yet paid a visit.

Police Lieutenant San Min, the head of the anti-human trafficking unit in Maungdaw township, whose office is a 10-minute drive away.

“As far as I know, there hasn’t been action against any human traffickers here.”

The reason for that may be that police have not regarded Rohingya fleeing the country as being trafficked, said Police Lt. Col. Thet Naung, the national head of the police Anti-Human Trafficking Team.

They “were just going back and forth between regional countries, including Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar,” he told Reuters.

He said Thai police had requested assistance in taking DNA samples from Rohingya in Rakhine state, as part of their efforts to investigate alleged murders inside Thai camps, including those linked to Anwar.

Myanmar authorities are ready to cooperate with the request, Thet Naung said.

Reuters

The post In Myanmar, a Rising Exodus But No Trafficking Arrests appeared first on The Jakarta Globe.

Sittwe, Myanmar. The rickety Internet huts have fallen silent in the crowded camps of displaced Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar; no one comes anymore to bargain for the release of loved ones being held for ransom in Thailand and Malaysia.

“Before, every day at least 10 to 15 people would come here to negotiate with human traffickers,” said Tun Win, a young man who offers a video-calling service from one of the bamboo and thatch huts. “Now, it’s nothing.”

For now at least, the smugglers who preyed for years on the misery of Myanmar’s Rohingya appear to be going out of business, and Asia’s most acute migrant crisis since the “boatpeople” exodus at the end of the American war in Vietnam is ebbing.

Until last month, their grim trade ran like clockwork.

Rohingya and their neighbors in Bangladesh, dreaming of a life free of persecution and poverty, were lured onto primitive boats in their thousands, taking perilous voyages from the southeast corner of the Bay of Bengal that they hoped would end with safety and jobs in Malaysia.

For many, though, the journey ended with brutal captivity in secret camps dotted along the jungle-cloaked border between Thailand and Malaysia. From there, smugglers made demands for their prisoners’ return, often haggling with relatives in those now-empty Internet huts.

That chain was broken early last month when Thailand ordered a crackdown on trafficking after the discovery of 33 bodies in shallow graves near the border. Weeks later, Malaysia found 139 graves in abandoned jungle camps on its side.

“Everyone has run away,” said Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, a police major general investigating trafficking in Thailand.

Supply chain disrupted

The crackdown sparked a humanitarian crisis at sea.

Smugglers jumped ship and left thousands of migrants adrift rather than risk being caught in the widening net of Thai and Malaysian investigators.

More than 3,000 abandoned migrants have come ashore in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand in the past month, and hundreds have returned to Myanmar and Bangladesh, but the United Nations estimates that some 2,000 are still adrift at sea.

The disruption of the smuggling supply chain has led to a sharp drop in boat departures, said Chris Lewa, whose Arakan Project tracks boat movements from Myanmar’s Rakhine State and southern Bangladesh.

Just over 300 boarded boats in May, down from around 5,000 in April and an average of 7,000 to 8,000 per month in November-March, she estimated.

Most of the would-be migrants of the last two months never sailed in the end because of the crackdown, she said. They were kept offshore and many were subsequently taken back – for a fee.

Even if the Thai government has dealt a blow to the smuggling trade, many argue that only by tackling the root causes will Southeast Asia’s cycles of migration stop. US President Barack Obama called last week on Myanmar to end discrimination against its 1.1 million Rohingya minority.

Myanmar denies it discriminates against the Rohingya. Yet the government does not recognize them as an ethnic group and denies them citizenship. It classifies them as Bengalis, implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.

With the onset of the monsoon, which makes sailing even more risky, migrant departures normally slow around this time of year. So the real test of whether the business has been broken will come in several months.

Lying low

The Arakan Project’s Lewa is skeptical that the events of recent weeks have entirely wiped out the extortion business.

“I think smaller groups of people are still being kept. Maybe not in the jungle,” she said, adding that criminals may be holding migrants to ransom in safe houses.

At the Rohingya displacement camps near the town of Sittwe, locals said ransom demands had suddenly dried up.

Kyaw Hla, a well-to-do member of the community who worked for distraught relatives as a fixer, said the camps really did seem to have closed. “Two months ago a lot of people were coming to me and the other rich men to sell their land and their homes to release their relatives. Such activities have already stopped,” he said.

Many of the agents who lured, sometimes drugged and dragged, people onto boats were Rohingya themselves.

Kyaw Hla believes that only small-time traffickers have been arrested so far and the kingpins of the business have fled to Bangladesh or are lying low in their homes.

In the village of Pen Daw Pyin near the border with Bangladesh, 55-year-old Se Tara said a local broker told her about two months ago to prepare money for the release of her son and daughter, who had set out to sea in February.

Then came news of traffickers being arrested in Thailand and boats abandoned at sea, but no word of her children’s fate. Se Tara and another son, Rahamat Ullah, walked again to the broker’s home, but he had disappeared.

“The people in his village say they don’t know where he is,” Rahamat said. “I think they’re lying. He’s hiding somewhere.”

Reuters

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