Hundreds Dead, But Nobody to Blame
PRIME Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has promised ''no repeats'' of the military policy of towing Rohingya boat people out to sea and abandoning them.
But he also said in an interview with the Sunday Morning Post newspaper in Hong Kong that internal investigations had cleared the officials involved.
He added that the military unit at the heart of the policy would continue to handle refugee arrivals.
''[The Internal Security Operations Command] will have to handle it but they will have operating procedures that will not repeat this situation where all these allegations happen,'' he told Greg Torode of the Sunday Morning Post.
"We've gone to great lengths to get the facts . . . we established that there had been cases where boats were made to drift to other shores, but I've also been informed in all such cases there was food and water supplied.
''We don't find evidence of the kind of abuses that are alleged, tying people, throwing them into the water.''
Asked if future arrivals would be towed out to sea, Mr Abhisit said: ''No repeats, no repeats, we don't want to see it.
''I think there is now a good understanding among the people responsible that they will have to be very responsible.''
The island where boat people were being held in secret off Ranong province, north of Phuket and Phang Nga, was first revealed by Phuketwan on January 9.
In articles that followed in the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, the secret army policy of towing them to sea in unpowered boats was exposed.
At least 1190 were abandoned and hundreds died, the newspaper discovered. Survivors rescued in Indian and Indonesian waters told horrific tales of starvation and thirst.
In February, the Post submitted a dossier of evidence to Thai authorities in Hong Kong, including photographs of the regional head of ISOC overseeing the secret processing of Rohingya detainees.
The evidence was resubmitted to Mr Abhisit's staff on Friday at his request, Torode wrote. The PM said Thailand was determined to find a regional solution to the issue.
Nothing has been said publicly by Government officials about the Department of Special Investigations probe that was supposed to target the people-traffickers behind the mistreatment of the boat people and others brought down from Burma and Bangladesh.
An expert with an NGO in Kuala Lumpur recently told Phuketwan that boat people are constantly abused and frequently sold across Malaysia's border with Thailand as indentured laborers or, in some cases, as sex slaves.
The relevance of the trade to the holiday island of Phuket became apparent in April last year when 54 illegal Burmese laborers were found suffocated in a container truck bound for the island.
Ironically, revelations of the Thai military push backs of boat people by Phuketwan and the Post appear to have ended the quest by Rohingya to reach Thailand and proceed to Malaysia on foot.
While there are rumors that Thailand now intercepts boat people in international waters, provides additional food and drink, and urges them on to other destinations, Phuketwan has not been able to confirm this as fact.
There have been several occasions on which senior-level politicians from countries affected by the issue of the boat people have met and talked, but no long-term solutions to their plight have been proposed.
With the arrival of the annual monsoons, the so-called sailing season has now ended and will not resume until November.
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