Reuters :In Bangladesh’s southernmost tip, families cling to scraps of paper with Malaysian and Thai hand phone numbers scribbled on them as their only links to loved ones missing after boarding fishing boats, lured by hopes of a brighter future overseas.Some of the families have received calls from those numbers, from people claiming to be holding their husbands or sons and asking for ransom to get them home.Sometimes the captives have phoned themselves in all-too-brief calls, pleading for their families to heed the demands. The families call back but either nobody answers or, if they do, the phone goes dead.In recent weeks, as reports of mass graves of migrants emerged from Malaysia and Thailand and images of hundreds of starving people abandoned at sea spread around the world, the calls to families in Teknaf have become more persistent. Khaleda Banu, from a dirt-poor fishing settlement, said a man phoned her four days ago saying her 19-year-old son, missing since November, was alive. She could have him back if she handed over 30,000 taka ($385) as part payment.But she had already paid that amount months ago when the first call came and nothing had happened. The man hung up and wouldn’t answer her calls and now the mother, surrounded by neighbors, is sick with worry.”My son just slipped away. I was sleeping when he left,” she said. She found out later a man claiming to be a recruiter had persuaded him that his carpentry skills would earn him 10 times more money in Malaysia than at home.She filed a case against the agent who has since been arrested. But the agent can’t help her find her son.Thousands of people, mostly Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, but also Bangladeshis have been trying to slip into Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia for years through people-smuggling networks.More than 4,000 migrants have landed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh in recent weeks since Thailand launched a crackdown on people-smuggling gangs. Around 2,000 may still be adrift in boats on the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal, the United Nations said.The journey for a large number begins in the coastal town of Teknaf bounded on one side by Myanmar from where the Rohingya cross over, and the Bay of Bengal on the other. A hub of the narcotics and smuggling trade from Myanmar, Teknaf is the shortest route to Thailand and Malaysia.The traffickers use a route along the edges of Bangladeshi and Myanmar’s waters, darting across the border back and forth to dodge security forces of the two countries, taking advantage of the lack of joint patrolling, officials say.Some 3,000 fishing boats, most of them long-bowed, ply the waters that are used by traffickers to move their people cargoes. There are 60 jump-off points along a 100-km (60-mile)stretch of powder-white sand, reputed to be the world’s longest unbroken beach. Locals refer to the departure jetties as “Malaysia airports”.Some families said that the traffickers had lured their loved ones by not asking for money at the beginning of the voyage to Southeast Asia.To many in Bangladesh, which exports tens of thousands of workers each year across the world, that seemed too good an offer to turn down, having seen friends and relatives had over huge amounts in previous years to go abroad.
