KUALA LUMPUR // About 1,600 Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees have landed in Malaysia and Indonesia in the past day, apparently after human traffickers abandoned their virtual floating prison ships and left the passengers to fend for themselves, officials said Monday.
One group of about 600 people arrived in the Indonesian coastal province of Aceh on four boats on Sunday. The same day, a total of 1,018 landed in three boats on Malyasia’s northern resort island of Langkawi and were detained by Malaysian authorities.
There has been a huge increase in refugees from impoverished Bangladesh and Myanmar drifting on boats to Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days after Thailand, usually the initial destination in the region’s people smuggling network, announced a crackdown on human trafficking.
Over 100 refugees from these countries were found wandering around in southern Thailand last week, apparently after they were abandoned by the smugglers.
An estimated 25,000 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis boarded people smugglers’ boats in the first three months of this year – twice as many in the same period of 2014, the UN refugee agency UNHCR has said.
Most travel in rickety traffickers’ boats to Thailand, where they are held in squalid jungle camps until a ransom is paid.
Police on the northwest Malaysian island of Langkawi, close to the border with Thailand, said three boats arrived in the middle of the night to unload the refugees, who were taken into custody as they came ashore. One boat was discovered after it got stuck on a breakwater, but the other two vessels escaped.“They came from their respective countries, moved towards Thailand and into Malaysia by Langkawi,” local police chief Harrith Kam Abdullah said.
The boats carried 555 Bangladeshis and 463 Rohingya, who would be handed over to the immigration department, he said.
Malaysia has long been a magnet for illegal immigrants from poorer countries in the region.
Nearly 600 migrants thought to be Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshis were rescued from at least two wooden boats stranded off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province on Sunday.
The overcrowded boats, which were carrying nearly 100 women and dozens of children, were towed to shore by fishermen after running out of fuel.
Thai police spokesman Lieutenant General Prawut Thawornsiri said the crackdown in people smuggling had prompted the rush of arrivals elsewhere.
“Yes, our crackdown is affecting the boats,” he said in Bangkok. “They are going to Indonesia ... Our job is to block the boats and not let them land on our shores.”
Thai prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha ordered a clean up of suspected human trafficking camps around the country after 33 bodies, believed to be of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, were found in shallow graves in the south of the country, near Malaysia.
First Admiral Maritime Zulkifli bin Abu Bakar, the head of criminal investigations in the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, said the arrivals in Malaysia were a surprise but could not say if they were linked to the Thai crackdown.
Of those rescued off Indonesia, around 50 were taken to hospital. “In general, they were suffering from starvation and many were very thin,” said North Aceh police chief Achmadi.
Some of the migrants had initially believed they had arrived in Malaysia. Mohammad Kasim, a Bangladeshi migrant on one of the boats, said that each passenger paid 4,400 Malaysian ringgit (Dh4,490) for the journey to what they thought would be Malaysia. Three people died on the journey and were dumped in the sea, he said.
An agency official estimated that around 300 people had died at sea in the first quarter of this year as a result of starvation, dehydration and abuse by boat crews.* Associated Press and Reuters