Malaysia swamped after crackdown
Many children among those from Bangladesh and Myanmar held
MALAYSIA had detained more than a thousand Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugees, including dozens of children, police said, a day after authorities rescued hundreds stranded off the coast of Indonesia’s western tip.
There has been a huge increase in refugees from impoverished Bangladesh and Myanmar drifting on boats to Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days after Thailand, usually the initial destination in the region’s people-smuggling network, announced a crackdown on the trafficking.
More than 100 refugees from these countries were found wandering around in southern Thailand last week after they were abandoned by the smugglers.
An estimated 25 000 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis boarded people smugglers’ boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many in the same period of 2014, the UN refugee agency UN High Commissioner for Refugees has said. Most travel in rickety traffickers’ boats to Thailand, where they are held in squalid jungle camps until a ransom is paid.
Police on the north-western Malaysian island of Langkawi, close to the border with Thailand, said three boats arrived in the middle of the night to unload the refugees, who were taken into custody as they came ashore. One boat was discovered after it got stuck on a breakwater, but the other two vessels escaped. There was no immediate word on the crew.
“They came from their respective countries, moved towards Thailand and into Malaysia by Langkawi,” local police chief Harrith Kam Abdullah said. He did not elaborate.
The boats contained 555 Bang- ladeshis and 463 Rohingya, who would be handed over to the immigration department, he added.
Malaysia, one of South-east Asia’s wealthier economies, has long been a magnet for illegal immigrants from poorer countries in the region.
Nearly 600 migrants thought to be Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshis were rescued from at least two wooden boats stranded off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province on Sunday, authorities said.
The overcrowded boats carry- ing nearly 100 women and dozens of children among the refugees, were towed to shore by fishermen after running out of fuel.
Thai police spokesman Lieutenant-General Prawut Thawornsiri said the crackdown in people smuggling had prompted the rush of arrivals elsewhere.
“Yes, our crackdown is affecting the boats,” he said in Bangkok. “They are going to Indonesia. Why else would they go to Indonesia? It is so far.
“Our job is to block the boats and not let them land on our shores.”
Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha ordered a clean-up of suspected human-trafficking camps after 33 bodies, believed to be of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, were found in shallow graves in the south of the country.
First Admiral Maritime Zulkifli bin Abu Bakar, the head of criminal investigations, said the arrivals in Malaysia were a surprise and couldn’t say if they were linked to the Thai crackdown.