Arakan News Agency
The discovery of camps and mass graves in Thailand and Malaysia is the latest grim revelation to emerge about the brutal people smuggling trade across south-east Asia
Kidnapped from her family home by ten men in a village in western Burma, 16-year-old Hazara Bibi had no time to say goodbye to her parents or two older sisters before she found herself at sea with fourteen other women in the cramped lower quarters of a rickety wooden ship.
This was to be her home for two months: a boat carrying 95 men, women and children, who were given small daily rations of rice and less than 100 millilitres of water. She spent four days in terrifying uncertainty before her fellow passengers told her they were bound for Thailand, and then by land to Malaysia.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Hazara, a softly-spoken teenager wearing a bright dress and veil – her only possessions – said: “At first, I kept crying all the time. I had no idea where they were taking me.”
Hazara’s boat spent two months at sea before the crew – apparently fearing a recent crackdown by the Thai military – abandoned the passengers on a Thai island.
Now at a Thai holding camp, she said: “I just want to see my family.”
In recent weeks, it has become brutally clear what awaited Hazara: she would have been taken by the people smugglers to one of dozens of torture and detention camps hidden deep in the jungle along the Thai-Malaysian border.
These camps were places of unimaginable horror, used by sophisticated networks of people smugglers to hold up to 500 migrants in makeshift wooden cages, some surrounded by barbed wire. Several camps have been uncovered by Thai and Malaysian authorities alongside mass graves.
The Telegraph spoke to the survivor of a camp who recounted her 25 terrifying days late last year near the southern Thai town of Padang Besar, where she saw people die every two or three days.
Lifting the bottom of her dress, Rosida, a 25-year-old Burmese mother of two (she has no family name) revealed the scars from cigarette burns which she received as punishment after twice trying to escape from the 375-person camp.
On the third attempt, she told her Thai and Malaysian captors that she had a bad stomach one night and needed the lavatory. She ran into the jungle and encountered a two local rubber farmers who handed her to the Thai police.
“I saw people being beaten to death in the camp,” she said. “I saw corpses. I knew that I needed to try to escape.”
A Rohingya Muslim, she said she left her husband and children in Burma to try to make money after her home was destroyed by a local Buddhist mob. She thought she was being taken by people smugglers to work in another village but was instead put on a boat and taken to Thailand.
“The agent in the camp demanded I pay 600 Malaysian Ringgit (£107),” she said. “I didn’t have the money. I didn’t know what to do. Now I want to see my children. But I don’t want to go back to Burma.”
As Europe faces its own worsening crisis of sunken boats in the Mediterranean and rising numbers of asylum seekers, the discovery of numerous camps and mass graves in Thailand and Malaysia is the latest in a series of grim revelations to emerge about the brutal people smuggling trade across south-east Asia.
Source : telegraph
