Camp inmates suffer due to Thai policy

Thailand's policy of keeping refugees from Burma in nine camps along the border has caused untold suffering and shows that the government does not know how to handle refugees.

This was particularly the case for 60,000 refugees "not registered" by Thai officials, said Veerawit Tianchainan, executive director of Thai Committee for Refugees (TRC).

Most Thais were not aware that 140,000 refugees had been kept in camps along the border for 26 years, he said.

Veerawit, who spoke during the global launch of Amnesty International's annual Human Rights Report 2011, alleged that the Thai Army had "recently stop distributing food" to the unregistered refugees. 

"The government has stopped screening them [for registration] since 2006," said Veerawit, and "had tried to force them back to their home country".

In Tak province, the governor wanted to conduct a head count of refugees in the camps, in order to evict unregistered refugees, Veerawit said. "This is not a good trend."

He urged Thais to be more sympathetic to refugees: "When the Thai media talks about refugees, they talk about 'problems' and not about ways to treat refugees better.

"The Thai media produces news based on information provided by the Thai government and they have their own agenda," he said, adding that refugee camps had become a sort of "Bermuda Triangle" where reporters could not enter. "What happens inside the camp, you don't know."

Veerawit admitted that Thai attitudes towards people from Burma were shaped by school education, which still treats Burma as "the national enemy". Many Thais also failed to make a distinction between migrant workers and refugees.

However, there was a glimmer of hope, he said, as the Thai government had been more receptive over the past six months and agreed to get high-level officials to meet with leaders of NGOs to discuss the issue.

Mohamad Nasim, chairman of Thailand's Rohingya Human Rights Association, was among the audience at the Foreign Correspondents Club on Friday and spoke about hardships faced by people detained at the Immigration Detention Centre at Bangkok's Soi Suan Plu.

He said 44 Rohingyas were now held there, and one had died in detention.

"I want to know how much longer they will be detained," said Mohamad, who himself is a stateless refugee living in Thailand for the past 23 years. He said two more Rohingyas have died elsewhere in Thailand while being detained.

"We have nowhere to go."

According to the just released AI annual global report, some refugees were "forced to return [to Burma] or prevented from crossing the border into Thailand" last November when clashes broke out.

"This was also true throughout the rest of the year in relation to smaller groups of refugees escaping sporadic fighting across the border," the report stated. "In Waw Lay village in Phop Phra district in Tak province, Thai authorities forcibly returned 166 Burmese refuges on 25 December, at least 360 on 8 December, roughly 650 on 17 November, and approximately 2,500 on 10 November."

The report also said that unregistered migrant workers are "forcibly removed" to Burma, and were "subject to trafficking and extortion by both Thai officials and a [Burma] government-backed ethnic minority militia", putting them "at risk of serious human rights abuses".