Rights Tragedy on Phuket's Doorstep
ALMOST 100 Rohingya boat people arrived on the mainland to the north of Phuket on Sunday, alarming local villagers who called the police immediately.
The Rohingya, all males, were quickly arrested. But they told police that more boatloads are on the way.
Their arrival accentuates the scale of the wave of illegal immigrants coming by sea and poses an urgent security issue for the new Democrat coalition government in Bangkok.
In the case of the men who landed on a single boat on Sunday near the township of Kuraburi, they were quickly rounded up and trucked north to the Burma-Thailand border city of Ranong.
The Thai Army Internal Security Operations Command 4 usually conducts intensive interrogation of the boat people there before placing them in detention.
Phuketwan has yet to learn what has happened to more than 600 men who have been placed in detention so far this high season, since December 1.
Thousands of others arrived and were detained between December and April last high season. It is also not clear what happened to them, either.
Royal Thai Navy vessels are on patrol off Phang Nga and Ranong to apprehend the boat people if they venture into Thai waters.
But this group slipped through. If last high season is any guide, others will slip through, too.
Some officials in the Royal Thai Navy have been concerned by the numbers of boat people coming south and called for United Nations intervention.
The mystery is this: why are the Rohingya coming, with only men on board the boats?
Some people believe the voyage south from the horrors of camps in Bangladesh, where children are reported to be dying of starvation, is an endurance test that only reasonably fit young men can survive.
Others speculate that the men are coming with the intention of linking up with Muslims in Thailand's deep south, where an insurrections claims lives with bombs and assassinations almost every day.
The Rohingya, driven in hundreds of thousands from their own lands in Burma by Burma's military junta, which refuses to grant them citizenship, are in desperate straits in rough shanty camps in neighboring Bangladesh.
A voyage south to seek a new start in Thailand or Malaysia can take a fortnight and conditions on the rough boats are primitive, often with little food and water and no medicine.
Deaths have been reported by the voyagers. Other boats probably simply disappear without trace.
A previous Thai government earlier this year proposed impounding the Rohingya on an island off the Andaman coast as an example to others of the futility of making the voyage.
Although the Navy has been looking at suitable islands, the prospect of tourists on dive trips sailing past a prison isle where detainees are kept in a gulag has alarmed rights activists and humanitarians.
It is an important issue for the Governors of the Andaman coast provinces. Incoming Foreign Minister Kasit Pirom and Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva will be keen to prove they can resolve the dilemma.
But how? It's now a matter of urgency.
People are dying at sea through desperation and probably also from action by the Burmese military.
The prospect of a violent incident remains, although the boat people so far have been peaceful and unarmed.
In 2008, almost 5000 Rohingya have been apprehended. More are almost certain to come this year.
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