Malaysia: Refugees for Sale

by www.channel4.com

Unreported World reveals shocking evidence that Burmese refugees fleeing the country's brutal military regime are being detained and then allegedly sold by Malaysian immigration officials to Thai human traffickers.

Reporter Aidan Hartley and Director George Waldrum travel to Kuala Lumpur to highlight how the refugees are forced to exchange one hellish existence for another. Living in complete fear of the state, the refugees claim they are being rounded up and subjected to bloody whippings and indefinite imprisonment in overcrowded detention camps. As Unreported World reveals, for some this is just the beginning of a horrific journey into the trafficking network, where men, women and children disappear into a world of slavery and prostitution.

Malaysia pays no regard to Burmese refugees' right of asylum, since the country refuses to sign up to international conventions. And it's not just the state that acts harshly. Hartley and Waldrum join a night-time city raid by volunteers of the RELA militia to chase down and arrest construction site workers without valid papers. Millions of illegal migrants, many of whom are refugees, fill the building sites and factories, providing cheap labour and doing the jobs Malaysians don't want to do. Despite this, RELA, which has 500,000 members, claims to be cleaning up what they see as an immigrant threat to law, order and health.

On the other side of the city, the team finds a Burmese refugee ghetto where the inhabitants are living in terror, crammed into squalid apartments with dozens of tenants to each floor. One family claims RELA had smashed their way into their home and arrested and beat them. A woman claims the police routinely prey on their vulnerable status, demanding bribes and their belongings, or they will be taken into detention.

A human rights lawyer helping illegal immigrants and refugees tells Hartley how there is little popular opposition to the government's harsh treatment of illegal foreigners. Reunka describes how 'illegals' who carry no papers on them might be sentenced to a maximum of six strokes of the rotan, a thick cane that can leave victims with scars for life.

So afraid are the refugees that some of them try to live beyond the reach of the authorities. In the jungle on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, the team finds one shanty camp where refugee workers are hiding out. Too scared to live downtown, they are part of an estimated two million illegal workers. One of them claims that he was passed into the hands of Thai human traffickers. However, he was one of the lucky ones as he had friends who could pay a ransom. He claims those who can't pay disappear into slavery.

The finds some who've managed to escape a life of slavery. In a secret location, Rahima, together with her small children, tells the story of how they were sold by Malaysian immigration officials to gangsters on the Thailand frontier. Rahima breaks down when she recounts how the Thai gangsters suffocated one of her children to death after he wouldn't stop crying. She says both she and her children were sold into slavery and worked in a fish factory for six months before they were able to escape.

In another location, Abu Bashar and his teenage son Syedul describe how the mother of the family together with two toddler children were arrested by Malaysia's immigration, sold to gangsters in Thailand and then ransomed. Two months ago, Abu got a phone call from his wife in which she said that unless he paid the ransom it would be her last call; since then there has been silence and he doesn't know the whereabouts of his family.

The response of Malaysia's Immigration Director General is to dismiss the allegations of Burmese refugees, but he does admit that one immigration official has been charged in connection with trafficking claims. He says there are no plans for an inquiry into the immigration department's methods, or allegations of systematic corruption, trafficking and slavery.