Staff Reporter :As many as 8,000 Bangladeshi migrants and ethnic Rohingyas from Myanmar are believed to be stuck on boats at sea close to Thailand, said an international migration agency. According to International Organisation for Migration (IOM) on Monday, many human traffickers are now reluctant to unload the illegal people as the Thai authorities have launched crackdown on their recent arrivals. The authorities warned that still more desperate migrants could be in peril at sea.Activists and refugee groups fear the Thai crackdown may be imperiling migrants already in the pipeline, leaving them stuck in appalling conditions with little or no food on overcrowded ships, or at risk of being dumped at sea by nervous human traffickers.Meanwhile, Malaysian police detained 1,018 Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugees after they arrived in three boats on Monday, a day after Indonesian authorities rescued 600 stranded off the coast of Aceh. Of them, 555 Bangladeshis and 463 Rohingyas, including 99 women and 54 children, landed illegally in Malaysia. They would be handed to the Immigration Department, police said. In the past two days, more 2,000 victims of human trafficking from Bangladesh and Myanmar have been rescued in Malaysia and Indonesia, added the Bangkok Post and agency reports. Police said more than 1,000 migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar landed in Malaysia after being dumped by human traffickers in shallow waters off the resort island of Langkawi. At least 92 of them were children.In the northwest Malaysian island of Langkawi, three boats arrived in the middle of the night to unload the refugees, but only one boat was discovered after it got stuck on a breakwater, Langkawi police chief Harrith Kam Abdullah told the newsmen. Thousands of impoverished Muslim Rohingyas — a minority unwanted by Myanmar’s government — and Bangladeshis have been braving a perilous sea and land trafficking route through Thailand and into Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond every year.Malaysian police said people-traffickers had dumped more than 1,000 hungry migrants in shallow waters off the coast of the resort island of Langkawi since Sunday.”We think there were three boats that ferried 1,018 migrants,” said Langkawi deputy police chief Jamil Ahmed. He added that one boat was confiscated but the others are believed to have fled to sea.In Indonesia, a boat was found off the west coast early Monday with more than 400 people aboard, a day after 573 people rescued by the authorities to the offshore off Aceh, said an official, describing this as “sad, tired and distressed.””We are on standby and ready to rescue them when we receive an alert,” said Mr Budiawan. “Thailand has tried to prevent traffickers from continuing their business… so that has forced them to go somewhere else,” said Chris Lewa from The Arakan Project, a Rohingya rights group, who believes thousands may be at sea.Migrants are “just trying to disembark before they die”, she added.Buddhist-majority Myanmar views its population of roughly 800,000 Rohingya as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, and they have been targeted in outbreaks of sectarian violence there in recent years, prompting many to flee.Boatloads of Rohingya have arrived off Aceh in the past, typically after becoming lost or running out of fuel.One passenger who straggled ashore in Aceh on Sunday told local journalists their vessel had set out from Thailand for Malaysia.Indonesian officials said the passengers were tricked and told to swim to land.”One of the migrants who could speak Malay told me that their agent had told them they were in Malaysia, and to swim to shore,” Darsa, a local disaster management agency official, told the journalists. Darsa said the passengers included 83 women and 41 children. One woman was pregnant and some of the children were aged under 10. “Some of them were not doing too well and needed medical attention,” he said. An Indonesian policeman distributed used clothes to migrants believed to be Rohingya inside a shelter in Lhoksukon in Indonesia’s Aceh Province May 11. There were 463 Rohingya, including 101 women and 52 children. All appeared to be in decent health, he said.Both Malaysia and Indonesia were feeding and providing medical care to the migrants until their legal or refugee status can be determined. The UN considers the Rohingya to be one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.Thai authorities have been at pains to show they are serious about tackling people-smuggling after years of accusations that they turn a blind eye to — or are even complicit in — the trade.Since last weekend four secret jungle camps have now been found in southern Songkhla province, as well as 33 bodies in various states of decay, Thai police have said, with many pulled from shallow graves.The discovery has raised fears that similar camps could exist in Malaysia along its Thai border.But Home Ministry Secretary-General Alwi Ibrahim on Sunday said that there were no such camps on Malaysian soil, a view supported by Rohingya activists in the country.
