False promises lure them into risky sea journeys

Promise of overseas job without advance payment, poverty, unemployment and shrinking labour markets in the Middle East were forcing many fortune seekers into risky sea journey for destinations in Southeast Asia.According to experts, fortune seekers, sector-insiders and government officials, a trans-national racket of people-smugglers were luring poor villagers from different districts into their traps offering them good jobs abroad at ‘minimum costs’ and taking the human cargoes to the shores of Southeast Asian countries through the Andaman Sea.Brokers convince local fortune seekers to get on their rickety boats for the dangerous sea journey citing the large scale migration of Myanmar‘s persecuted Rohingya community, including women and children, they added.At least 35 Bangladeshi migrants were rescued last week from the Bay of Bengal while they were returning from Myanmar after their boatmen abandoned them at sea.At least two of the victims and Border Guard Bangladesh personnel said that local brokers had promised the fortune
seekers migration free of cost.Foreign secretary Shahidul Haque had earlier said Bangladesh was struggling to contain illegal migration through the Bay of Bengal route because of the Rohingya crisis.‘The phenomenon in the Bay of Bengal is not new. There are certain complexities. We will not be able to resolve the humanitarian crisis in the Bay of Bengal unless the Rohingya crisis is resolved,’ Shahidul Haque had told a workshop.Tasneem Siddique, founding chair of Refugee Migratory Movement Research Unit at Dhaka University, said the Rohingya people who had failed to take shelter in Bangladesh seemed desperate to migrate anywhere through the risky sea routes. She said the local people migrating to Malaysia, were particularly from poverty-stricken districts and areas affected by climate change where unemployment was high.

The country’s traditional labour markets, including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Malaysia, shrank significantly over the last few years as the countries reduced import of workforce from Bangladesh despite Bangladesh government’s efforts to reopen the markets.Compared with the 2012 figures, labour migration from Bangladesh declined 32 per cent in 2014.Two top level Bangladesh teams, led by prime minister Sheikh Hasina, visited UAE in October and Malaysia in December last year but the visits made no significant progress over employment of several lakh Bangladeshi male workers who were waiting for jobs in the two countries.According to data provided by Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training, about 4,20,000 workers secured overseas jobs between January 1 and December 30 in 2014 while 4,09,253 workers went abroad in 2013. More than six lakh Bangladeshi workers went abroad with jobs in 2012, the BMET data showed.Abul Basher, president of Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agency, said that 99 per cent of the people who were going abroad through risky sea routes were poor and illiterate.Shakirul Islam, chairman of Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Programme, a local NGO working on migrant workers, said brokers were trapping poor and illiterate people to migrate on offers of payment on arrival.Zillur Rahman, director (programmes) of Shikkha Shasthya Unnayan Karjakram, said that brokers convinced the fortune seekers to get on the boats with ‘assurances’ that they would not have to make advance payment’ for jobs
abroad.Zaid Bakht, research director at Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, said that it was social factors rather than economic factors which were forcing illegal migrants to undertake perilous sea journeys.‘It is true unemployment is a reason, but misperception about wage in abroad and offers of middlemen with better wage and job in abroad also reason behind desperation of taking risky journey,’ he added.Expatriates welfare and overseas employment minister Khandker Mosharraf Hossain on Sunday ruled out the assumption that people were migrating illegally due to limited scope in legal channel, saying that the incumbent government had been able to export double the number of workers sent overseas during the rule of past governments despite global economic recession.Tens of thousands of migrants from Bangladesh and the persecuted Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar, make dangerous sea crossing to southern Thailand, a trafficking route often on the way to south of Malaysia and beyond.Several thousand Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants were feared adrift on boats in the Andaman Sea as traffickers abandoned them after a Thai crackdown threw the human trafficking route into chaos. Many of the migrants are hungry, thirsty and sick. Nearly 2,500 migrants arrived in Indonesia and northwest of Malaysia over the past week, according to international media reports.On May 2, at least 32 ‘mass graves’ of illegal migrants, most of them reportedly from Bangladesh and Myanmar, were discovered on remote and rugged mountainous areas in Thailand’s Songkhla province bordering Malaysia.

An international racket in collusion with its local agents usually hold the victims of trafficking captives in remote bordering areas of Thailand for ransoms from their relatives. About 87,000 people migrated to Malaysia by sea in July 2014, which was 61 per cent higher than that of the year before, according to a report of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit, a non-government organisation in Bangladesh, found that more than 540 Bangladeshis had died at sea in 2014.

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