BBC Online Report :
As the trade in human beings becomes more and more profitable, the BBC’s Jonathan Head discovers that entire communities in Thailand are helping the traffickers.
Earlier this month, I accompanied a group of Thai volunteers through the steamy mangrove forest of an island on the Andaman coast.
They were following up hazy reports of unmarked graves on the island; it was known to have been used by traffickers to hold large groups of migrants while they waited for transport south towards the Malaysian border.
They dug down deep into the waterlogged soil, before the first fragments of bone appeared. Then they pulled at a soggy wet cloth. It was a dress. Inside were the yellowing bones of a woman. Who she was, or how she died, we still do not know. But it is almost certain she was one of the migrants.
She must have endured a gruelling sea journey to
reach this desolate spot. Had she lived, the ordeal ahead of her, on her route to a better life in Malaysia, might have been even worse.
Last October, I was in almost exactly the same area. We had dashed down from Bangkok on news that a group of migrants had been rescued by officials in the district of Takua Pa. In the community hall we found 81 men in acute distress, weeping and praying. Rohingya Muslims have been fleeing here from mistreatment in Myanmar for several years – but this time the men were not Rohingyas. They were Bangladeshis. And some of them told us they had been forced on to the boats that transported them here.
District chief Manit Pianthong took us back to where he had found them, in the jungle not far from the site of the woman’s grave. They had been starved and beaten over a period of several days. Manit told us his district had long been used by human traffickers to transfer migrants from boats to trucks.
He wanted to stamp it out. But he was getting little help from the central government, or from local law enforcement.
Volunteers help exhume migrant graves, recovering bones from the forest ground
Over several days, I watched him dealing with angry phone calls from government officials and police, criticising him for talking to the media, and demanding that he send the Bangladeshis to immigration detention centres. It was an open secret that many of the migrants sent there were simply sold back to the traffickers.
Manit used volunteers from his own staff to go out searching for the holding camps. He put a 24-hour checkpoint on the main road route south to stop the truckloads of migrants. He put the word out among fishing communities to alert him if they spotted any boats coming in.
The arrival of growing numbers of Bangladeshis, together with the Rohingyas, showed that the trade in humans was expanding. And no wonder. It was immensely profitable.
As the trade in human beings becomes more and more profitable, the BBC’s Jonathan Head discovers that entire communities in Thailand are helping the traffickers.
Earlier this month, I accompanied a group of Thai volunteers through the steamy mangrove forest of an island on the Andaman coast.
They were following up hazy reports of unmarked graves on the island; it was known to have been used by traffickers to hold large groups of migrants while they waited for transport south towards the Malaysian border.
They dug down deep into the waterlogged soil, before the first fragments of bone appeared. Then they pulled at a soggy wet cloth. It was a dress. Inside were the yellowing bones of a woman. Who she was, or how she died, we still do not know. But it is almost certain she was one of the migrants.
She must have endured a gruelling sea journey to
reach this desolate spot. Had she lived, the ordeal ahead of her, on her route to a better life in Malaysia, might have been even worse.
Last October, I was in almost exactly the same area. We had dashed down from Bangkok on news that a group of migrants had been rescued by officials in the district of Takua Pa. In the community hall we found 81 men in acute distress, weeping and praying. Rohingya Muslims have been fleeing here from mistreatment in Myanmar for several years – but this time the men were not Rohingyas. They were Bangladeshis. And some of them told us they had been forced on to the boats that transported them here.
District chief Manit Pianthong took us back to where he had found them, in the jungle not far from the site of the woman’s grave. They had been starved and beaten over a period of several days. Manit told us his district had long been used by human traffickers to transfer migrants from boats to trucks.
He wanted to stamp it out. But he was getting little help from the central government, or from local law enforcement.
Volunteers help exhume migrant graves, recovering bones from the forest ground
Over several days, I watched him dealing with angry phone calls from government officials and police, criticising him for talking to the media, and demanding that he send the Bangladeshis to immigration detention centres. It was an open secret that many of the migrants sent there were simply sold back to the traffickers.
Manit used volunteers from his own staff to go out searching for the holding camps. He put a 24-hour checkpoint on the main road route south to stop the truckloads of migrants. He put the word out among fishing communities to alert him if they spotted any boats coming in.
The arrival of growing numbers of Bangladeshis, together with the Rohingyas, showed that the trade in humans was expanding. And no wonder. It was immensely profitable.
