PHUKET: Fresh raids overnight on people traffickers' camps near the
Thai-Malaysia border scattered hundreds of captives into the jungle as
the push to clean up Thailand's flesh trade continued.
Only 151 people - mostly Rohingya - were taken into custody by the Thai
Army. Others fled. One raided traffickers' camp, largest in the region,
was expected to contain 800 people.
Captives are held in secret in Thailand and beaten until relatives or
friends provide the price for smuggling them into Malaysia. If the fee
is not paid, the men and boys are sold to fishing trawlers.
The scale of the nightmare trade has been exposed in a series of raids
this week that have netted close to 1000 men, women and childen and at
least eight alleged traffickers.
The number of women and children involved as innocent victims should
alarm policymakers in Thailand, as well as UN and US officials and NGOs.
It could even disturb the Asean governments that have pandered to
Burma's racist policies and allowed this iniquitous trade in human flesh
to grow and flourish, to the benefit of the region's slavers.
Several local border politicians have already been implicated in the
series of raids around the Pedang Besar region of Thailand's Songkhla
province.
Long-standing allegations that local Thai police and Immigration
officials take their cut from the people smugglers are now likely to be
properly investigated for the first time.
It's believed that this week's raids have been triggered after months of
planning by the Army on information provided by people who have seen
and in some cases experienced the smuggling and the slavery at first
hand.
The exposure of the shocking nature of the trade in Thailand comes as
the UN noted the increasing number of Rohingya being forced to flee by
sea from persecution and deprivation in Burma's Rakhine state.
According to UNHCR officials in Geneva, about 2000 Rohingya fled by boat in the first week of January.
Other organisations have noted the huge increase in Rohingya catching
boats south because of the hopelessness of being torched from their
homes since June and their uncertain future in displaced persons' camps.
Many of the boatpeople pay people smugglers for their passage then pay traffickers again on landing in Thailand or Malaysia.
With 366 Rohingya ''rescued'' in the first raid and 307 in the second,
scores of women and children are now being housed in a refuge in
Songkhla, with the men crowding cells at the local Immigration centre
and surrounding police stations.
Exposure of the evil racket may even force Thailand to recognise the
part officials are playing in the covert flesh trade and do something to
end it.
A real solution, however, lies within Burma where the government's
racist policies remain in place and where ethnic cleansing of the
stateless Rohingya continues to shame Asean and individual governments
throughout the entire region.
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