Thai action kills off illegal migrant trade

The sudden crackdown on Bay of Bengal illegal migrants by Thai authorities 20 days ago stopped dead the people-smuggling boats leaving Bangladesh and Myanmar.

In the first three months of this year, people traffickers were moving 25,000 people through the Bay of Bengal towards Thailand and Malaysia, the UN’s refugee agency estimated.

“Since May 1, there’s no more boats leaving,” said a refugees relief agency official in Bangkok. “A $US250 million industry has been interrupted.”

The Thai Navy for a decade has been quietly pushing boatloads of Rohingya asylum-seekers away from the Andaman coast, often with acute brutality, but recently with additional fuel, food and water and a benign wave towards Malaysia.

The Thais call this “helping them on”.

Southern Thailand is also the hub of a cruel trade in illegal migrants, transiting illegal work-seekers and refugees from origin countries to Malaysia.

An integral part of this transition came to be jungle camps where additional payments were extorted from migrants, or their families at home, under threat of torture, murder or being sold into industrial slavery with fishing fleets and plantations.

The traffickers generally charge “full fare” of $US2000 to $US2500 from ports such as Myanmar’s Sittwe and Bangladesh’s Chittagong, by boat to Thailand, usually, then by land through peninsular Malaysia. From May 1, therefore, the Bangkok military government sent troops to clean out the traffickers’ onshore nests, raiding the jungle camps, arresting dozens of local “godfathers”, corrupt civilian, police and military officials and putting others to flight.

At the same time, the Malaysians made clear they would accept no more Rohingyas as asylum-seekers — more than 45,000 are registered as refugees and asylum-seekers. There is another 12,300 Myanmarese Muslims of other ethnicities.

So traffic has stopped at the originating ports and appears completely disrupted on land, for the time being, but there are still 6000 to 8000 Rohingyas and Bengalis trapped out in the Andaman Sea and Malacca Strait, off Thailand and Malaysia.

Many now have been at sea for two months or more in the decrepit boats — usually converted fishing boats or tramp traders — starving, sick, abandoned by crews and “agents” and increasingly dying.

More than 3000 have managed to get to shore mainly on the Andaman coast around Phuket, Malaysia’s Langkawi resort island and Indonesia’s east Aceh coast.

Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia until now have had relatively minor exposure to Rohingya forced migration, with a few hundred arriving annually in recent years. They are reluctant to show any chink of mercy to those they intercept still on boats.

That is why the three Southeast Asian governments are prepared to face the mounting international odium of towing distressed, even dying, people out of their coastal waters, towards their neighbours, whose navy will tow them back.

This appears to be the brutally simple lesson about stopping people-smuggling that Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, particularly, have learned from Australia, from Kevin Rudd in his last weeks as prime minister in mid-2013 and Tony Abbott ever since.

The lesson is: show no mercy at all on the question of allowing migrants to land or stay, do or say nothing that allows them to hope you might soften or compromise, give them no hope at all.

Break the traffickers’ business model by frightening their customers away.

But the Prime Minister and Scott Morrison could be confident that few if any of the people they pushed back to Java, or sent to Manus and Nauru, would die in the process. The governments, navies and immigration ministries of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia don’t have third country dumping grounds at their disposal.

They can only shove the migrants off to each other. They don’t have any way of ensuring the onward safety of those migrants they push away and it is virtually certain now that people will be dying in large numbers at sea.