Thousands in peril at sea 1,500 more Bangladeshis, Rohingyas rescued off Indonesia, Malaysia

Nearly 1,500 more illegal migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority were rescued off the coasts of Indonesia and Malaysia since Sunday, a day after a boat carrying about 500 Bangladeshis and Rohingyas arrived off the northwest province of Aceh.Over 550 Bangladeshis were among the illegal migrants believed to have been abandoned by human traffickers in four boats in the sea and later rescued on Malaysian and Indonesian coasts, according to Reuters.New Age Cox’s Bazar correspondent reported that the police on Monday arrested three wanted human traffickers in Baharchara, a coastal union in the bordering Teknaf upazila in Cox’s Bazar, around 2:00am on Monday, said Teknaf police officer-in-charge Ataur Rahman.

Cox’s Bazar’s additional superintendent of police Tofail Ahmed told New Age that law enforcers were hunting for 325 human traffickers as per the list prepared by the home ministry.
The latest spate of arrivals of illegal migrants following the rescue of over 100 Rohingyas and Bangladeshis and the discovery of mass graves in jungles in Thailand have forced Indonesian and Malaysian authorities to warn that still more migrants desperate to flee persecution in Myanmar and poverty in Bangladesh could be in peril at sea.
Over 100 suspected Rohingya migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh were rescued in Thailand’s southern Songkhla province on Friday and about 70 ‘mass graves’ of illegal migrants were discovered in Thailand’s jungles in the last week.There has been a huge increase in refugees from 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 the trafficking, Reuters reported.
Agence France-Presse reported quoting Malaysian police that people-smugglers 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.Jamil said more of the castaways were expected to emerge from the island.In Indonesia, a boat was found off the far west coast early Monday with more than 400 people aboard, authorities said, a day after 573 people described by one official as ‘sad, tired and distressed’ came to shore off the northwest province of Aceh.At least 92 children were among those brought ashore in the two countries.Aceh provincial search and rescue chief Budiawan, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, told AFP that authorities were bracing for further arrivals and have recruited fishermen to assist in patrolling coastal areas.‘We are on standby and ready to rescue them when we receive an alert,’ Budiawan said.Reuters quoted police on the northwest Malaysian island of Langkawi, close to the border with Thailand, to have 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. There was no immediate word on the crew.‘They came from their respective countries, moved towards Thailand and into Malaysia by Langkawi,’ local police chief Harrith Kam Abdullah told Reuters. He did not elaborate.

The boats contained 555 Bangladeshis and 463 Rohingyas, who would be handed over to the immigration department, he added.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, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.Most travel in rickety traffickers’ boats to Thailand, where they are held in squalid jungle camps until a ransom is paid.Bangladesh authorities claimed it had clamped down on human traffickers to check illegal migration after at least four human traffickers were killed in ‘gunfight’ with police on Bangladesh coast in Cox’s Bazar in the last couple of days when they were attempting to dispatch people through fishing boats into the sea.Besides, Thai police have downplayed a probe into more than 50 officers transferred over suspected links to human trafficking networks, saying the transfers were ‘standard operating procedure’ and that most of the officers were suspected only of negligence.Southeast Asia is being hit by a wave of migrants arriving in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, part of a regional human trafficking crisis driven by conflict, persecution and poverty.Dhaka-based Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unity on Monday expressed grave concerns over the ‘inaction’ of the authorities concerned despite a High Court order to take immediate measures to check human trafficking from Bangladesh.‘Following a writ of the RMMRU, a High Court bench on March 5, 2015 ordered authorities concerned, including the ministries of home, foreign, labour and expatriate welfare, to stop human trafficking in the name of sending workers abroad, but the authorities took no action,’ said the organisation in a statement signed by its chair Tasnim Siddiqui.And that is why, it added, mass graves of Bangladeshis were being found in Thailand’s jungles while many others were being rescued in detention camps there.

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