Human Rights Watch said the registration system left migrants open to abuse

BANGKOK — Around 850,000 migrant workers in Thailand have met a deadline to start a registration process, the labour ministry said Thursday, as rights groups made renewed calls for a halt to the policy.

Thailand had ordered 1.3 million eligible citizens from neighbouring Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos to begin the process of registering and verifying their nationality by Sunday or risk deportation.

To enter the process migrants must pay registration and medical fees of 3,800 baht (116 dollars) -- a large sum for people who mostly have low-paid jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and domestic sectors.

The full registration process takes two years to complete and will eventually entitle the migrants to claim temporary work permits.

"Some 850,000 migrant workers met the deadline" said Supat Gukun, a labour ministry official.

The 1.3 million are eligible because they registered for different one-year work permits last year.

Thai authorities estimate there are up to another 1.2 million unregistered migrants in the country who will not be eligible for the new process.

Human Rights Watch said the registration system left migrants open to abuse.

Unscrupulous officials and employers will now be able to threaten unregistered migrants with deportation in order to extort money, said the group's Thailand expert Phil Robertson.

"The abuses against migrant workers will more than likely increase as a result of more migrant workers becoming undocumented and therefore vulnerable," Robertson said.

The New York-based rights group released a report last week that documented a pattern of systemic abuse against migrant workers, from extrajudicial killings to torture, arbitrary arrest and extortion.

Myanmar citizens are particularly fearful, rights activists said, as a deal between Thailand and its military-ruled neighbour means they must return home to register, where the workers say they could face persecution.

Thailand's government said a task force would be dispatched to deport unregistered workers but has not yet announced any firm plans to do so.

"Immigration police and labour officials will check at every factory, and if they hire migrant workers without a permit then those people must be repatriated," said another labour ministry official, Thanich Numnoi.

Thailand's economy relies on migrant workers from its poorer neighbours, but in recent months the country has become tougher on immigration at its borders.

"This process doesn't acknowledge the benefit or importance of these people for the economy," said Andy Hall, a rights activist with the Bangkok-based Human Rights and Development Foundation.

"They need these people but they are not willing to give them their rights."

Thailand, which is seeking a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, has been heavily criticised in recent months for its crackdowns on migrants from neighbouring Laos and Myanmar.

In December Bangkok sparked outrage when it defied global criticism and used troops to repatriate about 4,500 ethnic Hmong from camps on the border with communist Laos, including 158 recognised as refugees by the United Nations.

Earlier last year hundreds of ethnic Rohingya migrants from Myanmar were rescued in Indian and Indonesian waters after being pushed out to sea in rickety boats by the Thai military.

Malaysian authorities have arrested a boatload of ethnic minorities fleeing Myanmar off the holiday island of Langkawi

Malaysia arrests minorities fleeing Myanmar.

The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency says the 93 Rohingya men, aged between 16 and 50 years old, are being detained by immigration authorities in Malaysia.

The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from western Myanmar who say they have been persecuted by that country's ruling military junta and have long sought refuge in other places.

A local Rohingya representative said that Thai authorities had towed the boat carrying the 93 boys and men out to sea and given them supplies, before cutting them adrift to float south into Malaysian waters.



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Thai authorities denied the claim.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Thani Thongpakdi confirmed the Thai Navy did find a boat of refugees in international waters on March 4. The men told the Navy they were from Rakhine state in western Myanmar.

Thongpakdi insisted the Thai Navy gave them food and water supplies and then "let them go on their way," because they'd told the Navy they were heading to another country.

A CNN investigation last year of the plight of the Rohingya found compelling evidence that the Thai Navy had been towing boatloads of Rohingya away from the Thai coast, far out to sea, before cutting them adrift. It's still not clear how many died as a result.

A Thai government spokesman recently claimed CNN's photographic evidence of the Rohingya boats being towed out to sea was faked.

But last year Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva admitted there were "some instances" when boats were pushed out to sea, and vowed to investigate who was responsible and bring them to account. No one in the Thai Navy has yet been charged or disciplined as a result of the probe.

Myanmar's regime does not recognize the 750,000 Rohingya as one of the national races. Many of them have fled persecution in Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh, where they face dire conditions.

A report that came out this month by Physicians for Human Rights noted acute levels of malnutrition among a surging camp population

Thousands of Burmese Muslim refugees at an unofficial refugee camp in Bangladesh are facing starvation and acute malnutrition as the government continues to block international humanitarian aid, according to Physicians for Human Rights, a humanitarian watchdog group

PHR said in a report this week that the Bangladesh government has stepped up a crackdown against the nearly 300,000 unregistered Rohingya refugees outside the camps over the past six weeks and is sending them back to their native Myanmar.

Some families in Kutupalong unregistered camp haven't eaten for days and are borrowing money, often at exorbitant interest rates, to survive, the report said.

"There is an immediate need for food ration for the Rohingya refugees," said Richard Sollom, the PHR researcher.

He said Bangladesh authorities are "going out of their way to arrest and expel the refugees" prior to elections this year in neighboring Myanmar, fearing they will provoke another exodus.

According to Refugees International, a long-established advocacy group in Washington, the plight of the Rohingya, Muslim minorities who fled western Myanmar, or Burma, over the past 20 years, is extremely serious.

"The Rohingya issue might well be the most desperate, immediate refugee situation in Asia right now," Joel Charny, the acting head of the organization, told McClatchy Newspapers.

Sheikh Mohammed Belal, the deputy chief of mission at Bangladesh Embassy in Washington, denied a crackdown was under way against the Rohingya, but acknowledged there might be "some arrests" because of infractions of the law, such as the illegal cutting of trees.

He said Rohingyas sometimes come into conflict with local people for access to overstretched resources but added there was "no animosity" toward the refugees.

"One has to appreciate the fact that despite acute resource strain, we are hosting these people for decades," he told McClatchy, but these are "marginal and peripheral issues."

Sollom said life outside the camps is equally tough for the refugees, however. There is a growing antagonism toward them, fueled by an "anti-Rohingya resistance" steered by the political elite and editorials in local newspapers.

The State Department wouldn't comment directly on the PHR report.

"The issue of Rohingya refugees is complex, with strong international dimensions," said Fred Lash, a State Department spokesman.

The U.S. last year gave $1 million to charities assisting the Rohingyas in Bangladesh, and $13.2 million to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for work in South and East Asia, a part of which goes to Bangladesh.

Charities that have worked with the Rohingyas in Bangladesh, however, painted a stark picture of their treatment.

Islamic Relief Worldwide, a British-based humanitarian organization, was forced to halt its relief efforts in the district of Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, last month when the government refused to extend permission to stay.

"Islamic Relief has been managing the camp amidst tensions between the refugees, local community and local authorities," said Ruqaya Izzidien, a spokeswoman. "Our staff have also come under attack, which has made it difficult for us to continue managing the site."

The PHR study, based on interviews with 100 families in the Kutupalong makeshift camp, found that the children in the camp have a malnutrition rate of 18 percent, a level the World Health Organization calls "critical." Somalia has the world's worst malnutrition rate at 20 percent.

The makeshift camp has grown up around the UNHCR camp, where 17,000 unregistered refugees live. More are pouring into the squalid camp.

UNHCR runs another camp housing 11,000 at Nayapara in Cox Bazaar district.

Open sewers and lack of proper sanitation are turning the place into a disaster zone as more people crowd into the camp, PHR said.

The area's only clinic, operated by Doctors Without Borders, treats patients with wounds and starvation as well as rape victims.

It too is stretching its resources as it caters to the unregistered refugees in addition to the registered refugees and the local population.

Sollom said the crackdown on Rohingya refugees living outside the camps is forcing them into the unofficial camp. The Society for Threatened Peoples, a German humanitarian watchdog group, said about 1,160 Rohingya refugees were arrested since January and most of them were deported to their homelands. Dhaka is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which prohibits forced repatriation of refugees.

The lack of basic needs is turning the camp into a "looming crisis waiting to explode," Sollom said.

The 800,000 strong Rohingya are believed to have descended from seventh century Arab settlers whose state along what is now the Bangladesh-Myanmar border was conquered by the Burmese in 1784.

Myanmar refugees face grim future in Bangladesh

KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh — Dildar Begum has no country, no job, no food and is fast running out of hope.

Her husband is imprisoned in a Bangladeshi jail while she lives in a slum with her five children, reduced to begging for rice from her impoverished neighbors. Her family is starving, she said.

"I can't live this way. It's better if my kids and I die suddenly," the 25-year-old woman said.

Begum is one of the hundreds of thousands of members of the Rohingya ethnic group who have fled to Bangladesh to escape persecution in neighboring Myanmar — only to find themselves languishing in filthy slums or open-air camps where food and water are scarce and medical care nonexistent.

As Muslims, they were unwanted in Buddhist Myanmar. As foreigners, they are unwanted in Muslim Bangladesh.

In recent months, Bangladesh has cracked down on the group, arresting and repatriating many and stepping up security along the porous border to prevent more from arriving. At the same time, the government discouraged aid groups from giving most of those here food, fearing it would attract a huge new influx of refugees, a government official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

International rights groups have decried their fate and Bangladesh's refusal to grant the vast majority of them refugee status, which would give them access to nearby camps where they could receive a full aid package of food, shelter and education provided by international agencies.

Without that aid, the Rohingya face widespread starvation, activists said.

"A grave humanitarian crisis is looming," Chris Lewa of the Rohingya advocacy group The Arakan Project said last month.

Bangladesh has also been accused of carrying out arbitrary arrests of the Rohingya and forcing many back into Myanmar.

In Kutupalong, 185 miles (296 kilometers) south of the capital, Dhaka, the undocumented Rohingya live in a squalid shantytown, where malnourished, barefoot children defecate outside.

With no right to work, many survive by bribing forestry officials to turn the other way as they illegally cut down trees to sell as firewood, men in the village said.

"The forest is being destroyed by them," said A.F.M. Fazle Rabbi, a government official in charge of the area. "I am sure over next few years, you will find no trees here."

The 800,000 strong Rohingya are believed to have descended from seventh century Arab settlers whose state along what is now the Bangladesh-Myanmar border was conquered by the Burmese in 1784.

The Myanmar junta refuses to recognize them as citizens, and the group faces extortion, land confiscation, forced evictions, and restricted access to medical care and food, according to Human Rights Watch.

Thousands have fled to Malaysia and Thailand, which depend on migrant labor, or braved the sea to go as far as the Middle East for work.

Last year, the Thai navy intercepted boats carrying 1,000 Rohingya, detained and beat them and then forced them back to sea in vessels with no engines and little food or water, according to reports from human rights groups.

On Friday, Malaysian authorities said they picked up 93 Rohingya who said they had been at sea for 30 days in a crowded wooden boat after apparently being chased out of Thai waters.

"They said they were sailing aimlessly in the hope of finding a country that will accept them," said Zainuddin Mohamad Suki, an officer with the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency. The passengers were likely to be sent to a detention center, he said.

Most of the refugees, however, have fled on foot and by boat over the border to the nearby Cox's Bazar area in Bangladesh, where 28,000 are registered as refugees and restricted to official camps in Kutupalong and Naya Para.

The Kutupalong refugee camp is well-equipped with medical facilities, a computer learning center, volleyball courts and generators.

However, at least 200,000 other Rohingya here have not been given refugee status by Bangladesh and live under constant threat of being arrested or sent back home. Some work as day laborers or rickshaw pullers at Cox's Bazar.

Authorities fear that if they grant full rights to everyone, it will encourage even more Rohingya to come to Bangladesh, which is already overwhelmed with its own impoverished and malnourished population.

"We are a poor country, we cannot afford this for long," said Gias Uddin Ahmed, the chief administrator of the district.

Begum and her family fled with about 2,500 others seven months ago amid unrelenting attacks by their Buddhist neighbors, who eventually took their land in Myanmar's northwestern Rakhine state. They left at night and bribed Bangladeshi border guards to let them enter and travel to the shantytown near the refugee camp in Kutupalong.

Her husband, 35-year-old Jamir Hossain, found work as a day laborer in the shantytowns that have sprung up near the Kutupalong camp, but police arrested him last month in a roundup of undocumented Rohingya.

With no money, Begum begs for rice from nearby villages to feed her four sons and a daughter.

"It's now afternoon, but I haven't been able to give any food to my kids," she said.

M. Sakhawat Hossain, the police chief in Cox's Bazar, said Bangladeshi villagers have accused the Rohingya of a wave of robberies across the coastal region and pressured the government to take action.

In the ensuing crackdown, 136 undocumented Rohingya were in custody on charges of illegally entering Bangladesh or engaging in criminal activities, he said.

"What we did is for maintaining law and order over reported crimes," he said. "Should not we do that?"