Thousands of helpless Burmese migrants may have died of hunger, thirst and drowning after human traffickers abandoned them at sea, according to a new report which warns of an imminent repeat of last May’s humanitarian catastrophe.
According to Amnesty International, dozens of boats packed with migrants, most of them persecuted Rohingya Muslims from Burma, are unaccounted for after a crackdown on human trafficking. Those refugees who survived have described brutal beatings at the hands of their captors, and murders by shooting and drowning.
“The daily physical abuse faced by Rohingya who were trapped on boats in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea is almost too horrific to put into words,” says Anna Shea of Amnesty. “They had escaped Burma but had only traded one nightmare for another. With the monsoon over and a new ‘sailing season’ already underway, thousands more could be taking to boats.”
The migrants, who include women and children, were Bangladeshis and members of the stateless Rohingya people who were fleeing oppression and deprivation in Burma for the promise of employment in Malaysia and Thailand. Following the discovery of migrant death camps containing dozens of bodies, the Thai authorities were shamed into cracking down on people-smuggling, forcing the traffickers to abandon overburdened boats.
The United Nations estimates that 370 people died, but according to Amnesty, the figure could be much higher. “Eyewitnesses … saw dozens of large boats full of refugees and migrants in similar circumstances, but only five boats landed in Indonesia and Malaysia,” says the report, based on more than 100 interviews with refugees who were rescued and taken to Indonesia.
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“The shocking truth is that those we spoke to are the ‘lucky’ ones who made it to shore – countless others perished at sea or were trafficked into forced labour situations,” says Ms Shea. “Hundreds – if not thousands – of people remain unaccounted for, and may have died during their journeys or have been sold for forced labour.”
The report recounts brutal treatment suffered by the refugees, some of whom spent up to six months on huge boats containing as many as 1,500 people. Many of them passed the time in cramped, airless covered decks where they were forced to sit cross-legged in filthy conditions. One boat had two toilets for 600 people.
“If people are sick or if they cannot pay [a ransom], they are killed,” one 22-year old man said. “Sometimes they are shot first, sometimes they are just thrown overboard.”
One 15-year-old Rohingya girl said that her captors telephoned her father in Bangladesh and forced him to listen to her screams while they beat her, to force him to send them the equivalent of £1,000. Some people were beaten with metal or plastic sticks for asking for food or to use the toilet.
“Virtually every Rohingya woman, man and child said they had either been beaten themselves, or had seen others suffer serious physical abuse,” the report says. A 15-year old Rohingya boy told the researchers: “In the morning you were hit three times. In the afternoon you were hit three times. At night you were hit nine times.”
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Since 2012 Rohingya have been the victims of widespread violence on the part of the Burmese Buddhist majority which has driven 140,000 of them into wretched refugee camps.