By Justine Drennan
Just as it took a deadly shipwreck to finally put the spotlight on the dire migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, it’s taken the stranding of some 6,000 migrants — and perhaps several times that number — at sea in Southeast Asia to raise the alarm about another migrant crisis stemming from what some observers describe as a genocide playing out in Myanmar.
Like Europe’s, Southeast Asia’s migrant crisis isn’t new. Every year, between late fall and the start of Southeast Asia’s monsoon season in April or May, thousands of Rohingyas, a Muslim minority in Myanmar that faces intense persecution at the hands of the government and other factions, board rickety fishing boats in hope of escaping their country. Extremist Buddhist mobs have carried out pogroms against the group, and the government of Myanmar denies the Rohingya basic rights of citizenship. This systematic campaign of persecution, violence, and exclusion, have led many activists to argue that Rohingya are the victims of genocide and a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
This campaign has forced the Rohingya into the arms of smugglers, in the hope of leaving Myanmar, also known as Burma, and migrating elsewhere in the region in Asia’s biggest mass exodus by boat since the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It’s a journey of immense risk: The people smugglers who arrange the journeys often mislead, exploit, extort, enslave, or sell their charges. This month, migrants have faced the worst possible consequences, finding themselves stranded at sea with nowhere to go. Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia have all refused to let migrant boats land on their shores, and thousands of Rohingya — the exact number isn’t known — now find themselves on what are effectively floating prisons.
“Six people on our boat died due to illness and hunger, and the captain ordered that their bodies be thrown to the sea,” Muhammad Shorif, a 16-year-old Rohingya, told AFP after becoming one of the relatively lucky migrants to wash up near Aceh, Indonesia, without being turned back. Shorif said he had hoped to quickly find a good job in the relatively wealthy Malaysia. Instead, he spent a month on a ship crammed with hundreds of other hopeful migrants, facing beatings and living on minuscule rations until their ship washed up in Aceh.
While Southeast Asian countries’ current refusal to admit Rohingya migrants seems particularly cold-hearted, it’s part of a long-running refugee crisis. Before the latest wave, countries such as Malaysia and Bangladesh had already taken in large numbers of migrants, leading in some cases to serious clashes in those countries between Rohingyas, other ethnic groups, and state forces — a sad echo of what’s happening in Myanmar, the country they fled.
Rohingyas are far from the only ethnic groups migrating from Myanmar, but they are leaving in the largest numbers, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
For Rohingya migrants, the choice of if and where to immigrate involves balancing the desire to flee persecution and for economic opportunity against serious risks to their lives. Many travel first to Bangladesh, reachable by land from Myanmar, dominated by fellow Muslims, and itself the source of many migrants. Some Rohingya, as well as Bangladeshis, choose to make the more dangerous sea voyage to the wealthier countries of Malaysia or Thailand — a trip during which migrants run a greater risk of trafficking or death by starvation, drowning, and disease.
The differences between Myanmar’s GDP per capita — the region’s lowest — and other Southeast Asian countries’ shows one reason why migrants embark on the sea journey.
Malaysia and Indonesia feel especially besieged in part because in recent years other countries have closed off other options for migration. Under Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s conservative government, Australia in September 2013 began a program called Operation Sovereign Borders to stop migrants from reaching the Australian mainland. The program has been quite effective in “stopping the boats” — if not at figuring out what to do with the migrants on those boats.
Southeast Asian countries now seem to be adopting a similar approach. Thai authorities have launched a broad crackdown on migrant trafficking after police earlier this month found several mass graves of Myanmar migrants whom smugglers had imprisoned in Thailand while extorting their families for money. Thai policing efforts have made it more difficult to transport migrants on overland routes, pushing more to make dangerous ocean journeys. The Thai crackdown has also made it harder for migrant boats to land there, causing boats to head back out to sea.
With no country willing to take them, the thousands of migrants bobbing in rickety fishing vessels and other boats along the lengthy coastlines of Southeast Asia are being kept in what are prisons if they’re lucky, and coffins if they’re not.
Source: Foreign Policy
Rare Photographs Document the Rescue of Hundreds of Migrants
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early every day, it seems, a new report arrives of hundreds of migrants being pulled out of the sea or drowning in anonymity. Both in the Mediterranean Sea and the waters of South East Asia, desperate migrants are being packed into rickety boats and transported across dangerous waterways toward the hope of a new life, free of persecution of full of opportunity. It’s often a false promise, but because of political instability, repression, and unemployment, the migrants keep making these journeys.
For the media, it can be a difficult story to cover. Drownings in remote ocean locales are not places that reporters and photographers can reach easily or rapidly. All too often, the boats they seek to find are lost to the depths before anyone can arrive. So the images the world sees of the migrant crisis are usually those of survivors being led ashore from rescue vessels. Rarely do we see the moment rescuers reach migrants in open waters.
That’s what makes these images so remarkable. In the absence of a robust European rescue mission, a group of activists has banded together to launch an effort to prevent mass drownings in the Mediterranean. Known as the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, the group cruises off the Libyan coast in a 40-meter yacht, the Phoenix, equipped with drones and rescue vessels to pick up endangered migrants. On one such recent mission, the group’s photographer documented conditions aboard a vessel carrying mostly Eritreans seeking to make their way north from Libya. These images document the rescue of 561 people packed onto an 18-meter boat.
When carrying out rescues, MOAS distributes lifejackets among the migrants and then ferries them to their yacht using a smaller craft.
Accounts of migrant crossings on the Mediterranean often include references to the tight conditions aboard the vessels. Just how tightly traffickers pack their charges aboard such crafts, however, is difficult to comprehend without images such as these.
The smugglers operating the boat had modified its hold to expand the number of people it could carry, according to MOAS spokesman Christian Peregin. Packing migrants into such spaces pose extraordinary risks for vessels of this nature. The extra weight can compromise the vessel’s stability, and if the boat capsizes, migrants often have no way of escaping.
A view into the hold of this migrant vessel reveals the awful conditions migrants are forced to travel in. “On the boat it was very difficult. There is no space and no captain that knows how to drive the boat,” Mohammed, a 23-year-old from Somalia who was traveling on the vessel, told MOAS. “People get really scared, especially when the waves are big. We are not even sure of the direction we need to take. The smugglers point in a direction and tell us to keep going that way.”
Migrant vessels are often repurposed fishing boats, and their design has little or no consideration for passenger safety. Escaping a hold such as this in the event of an emergency would be a sheer nightmare.
Vessels such as these are used to transfer migrants from their boats to the Phoenix.
MOAS is patrolling an area that was once covered by the Italian Navy’s rescue effort, Mare Nostrum. But that effort has since been shut down and been replaced by an EU mission that patrols European coastal waters, far from where most migrant sinkings occur. If you wish to support MOAS’s effort, go their website. They accept donations. So far, they have rescued more than 4,500 migrants.
Photos courtesy of MOAS: MOAS.EU/Jason Florio
Source: Foreign Policy