After a peaceful three years since a government crackdown on traffickers, the trade of human smuggling has once again resumed with Rohingyas as the main victims.
Several batches of refugees have already reached Malaysia through Thailand, sources say.
The refugees, who fled persecution in their homeland in Myanmar, are sheltered at several camps in the coastal district of Cox’s Bazar.
Police recovered 15 Rohingyas from the Shamlapur coast in Teknaf as they were preparing to take off on a boat heading to Malaysia. Among the 15 were seven females and eight males, most of them teenagers or youths. They told police they had family members in Thailand and Malaysia. All of them are from refugee camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf.
Over the last month, several other boats full of Rohingya refugees, have been stopped heading out to sea. Several traffickers have been arrested.
As before, the traffickers often do not deliver on their promises and desert their victims halfway through. In November last year, a Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) patrol found 14 refugees on the coast of Shahparir Dwip (Shapuree Island). The traffickers, who had taken Tk10,000 from each of them for a passage to Malaysia, wandered around at sea for two days and then dropped them off there, saying: “This is the coast of Thailand.”
These refugees had also promised to pay another Tk1,90,000 per head.
On November 7, Coast Guard members detained 33 Rohingya men, women, and children, and six traffickers, as they were headed to Malaysia. In July, the Thai army and border police recovered 24 Rohingyas from the hills of Ranong province in Thailand, who said they had been abandoned by traffickers nine days ago. They told Thai police they had come from the Ukhiya refugee camp.
Local citizens are also migrating illegally to Malaysia now. This correspondent has identified three men, Syed Noor, 25, Shah Kamal, 22, and Rabiul Alam, 25, from Ukhiya’s Shonarpara village, who have reached Malaysia by boat. Their families say they went through a trafficker named Mostak Ahmed from Teknaf.
Ukhiya Kutupalong Rohingya Camp’s Community Leader Md Muhib Ullah claimed more than 300 refugees had taken to the seas to head to Malaysia.
“This is a growing trend. I have heard that within the next few days, around 700 people from the camps might leave,” he said.
Ukhiya Human Smuggling Prevention Committee General Secretary Abdul Hamid said: “We have heard that human trafficking to Malaysia has resumed. Several people have gone to the country by sea. A powerful gang used to smuggle people by the same route in the past. It will be very alarming if that trade resumes in full force.”
The Bay of Bengal human trafficking began in 2010, and thousands were smuggled out to Malaysia before the matter came to the notice of law enforcement in 2012, who began carrying out some operations against the criminals.
In 2015, the discovery of graves of smuggling victims, 70 of them in Thailand, and 139 in Malaysia, in 28 trafficking camps inside jungles, caused a global outcry. The government went for a full-on crackdown on traffickers, pursuing a list of over 300 criminals including 11 kingpins, 230 smuggling agents, and 26 Hundi brokers.
In Cox’s Bazar, six major traffickers, including the notorious Dholu Hossain, were killed in gunfights with the police. Around 150 were arrested. The majority of people working in the human smuggling trade went into hiding and the smuggling came down to near zero.
Cox’s Bazar Additional Superintendent of Police Md Tofail Ahmed said police were on alert since the recovery of several groups of Rohingyas who were being smuggled out.
“It is true that the trafficking is low, but some gangs are still there. Police, RAB, BGB, and Coast Guard are on alert. We have heightened intelligence gathering. The traffickers will not be able to reestablish themselves here,” he said.
Around 700,000 Rohingya Muslims, fleeing a violent crackdown in Myanmar in August 2017, poured into southeast Bangladesh and overwhelmed existing refugee camps. Altogether there are now over one million refugees in the area.
