BANGKOK (Reuters) - At least 600 Rohingya Muslims believed to be
illegal migrants from Myanmar have been detained in Thailand after two
raids by the authorities near the border with Malaysia, police said on
Friday.
More than 300 Rohingya were discovered on Tuesday in a
building in the town of Sadao, while a second raid on Thursday at a
rubber plantation near the border town of Pedang Besar uncovered 393
more, including 14 children and 8 women.
"These illegal migrants
have been handed over to immigration authorities and will be deported
back to Myanmar," Police Colonel Krissakorn Paleetunyawong, deputy
commander of police in the area, told Reuters.
An estimated
800,000 Rohingyas live in Myanmar but are officially stateless. The
Myanmar government denies them citizenship, regarding them as illegal
Bangladeshi immigrants, but Bangladesh does not recognise them as
citizens either.
Hundreds make their way abroad each year by
boat, especially to Malaysia, in search of a better life, an exodus
given added impetus after recent sectarian violence between minority
Rohingyas and majority Buddhist in Myanmar's western state of Rakhine.
The raids in southern Thailand were led by the army and police as part of what they call anti-human-trafficking operations.
"The
Rohingyas were en route to Malaysia and the camp we found was used as a
holding facility by middlemen paid to facilitate their journey," said
Lieutenant Colonel Katika Jitbanjong of Padang Besar police station.
Last week, Thai authorities found 73 Rohingya boat people adrift near the holiday island of Phuket.
They
sent the asylum seekers, who arrived in rickety and overcrowded boats,
back to sea in Thai fishing boats, New York-based rights group Human
Rights Watch said.
Various rights groups called then for the Thai
government to scrap its policy of summarily deporting Rohingyas who
land up in Thailand. In two separate incidents in 2008, the military
pushed 992 Rohingya boat people back to sea without food and water and
hundreds may have died, activists have said.
The United Nations
estimates about 13,000 boat people, including many Rohingya, fled
Myanmar and neighbouring Bangladesh in 2012, a sharp increase from the
previous year.
Thailand and Singapore refuse to provide asylum to
members of the Muslim minority group while Bangladesh has closed its
border to them.
"Thailand should scrap its inhumane policy of
summarily deporting the Rohingya, who have been brutally persecuted in
Burma, and honour their right to seek asylum," said Sunai Phasuk of
Human Rights Watch.
(Editing by Alan Raybould and Robert Birsel)
Source: here
No comments:
Post a Comment