*
When I travel for work, it is neither a president nor a queen but the Secretary-General of the United Nations who requests free passage for the bearer of my passport, officially called a laissez-passer, French for ‘let pass’. Its sky-blue cover is embossed not with the seal or flag of any one nation but with an outline of the world, all the inhabited continents as seen from the North Pole, swaddled in olive branches. I have presented it to dozens of immigration checkpoints nearly every month for four years now, but I still feel charmed every time I do. I possess no other document that gives as true and full a picture of my identity, shaped as it has been across several of the continents emblazoned on my laissez-passer.
My grandparents fled interregnum China nearly a century ago to colonial Hong Kong and Indonesia, where my parents grew up before studying and then settling in Australia in the 1960s. I was born an Australian citizen and a British subject in 1983, left for Taiwan when my parents’ careers took them there in 1986 and never went back. I ended up growing up mostly in both British and Chinese Hong Kong before going to university and law school in the United States.
After working for some time as a New York corporate lawyer in Hong Kong, I found a job in Thailand with the South-East Asia office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. A week after I arrived in Bangkok, I came to the office to find my new work passport sitting half open on my desk, the visa pages trying to flutter out like the thrill I was trying to contain in front of my grizzled UN colleagues. When no-one was watching, I took a photo of my laissez-passer and messaged it to my closest friends and family.
It was 2013, not long after Barack Obama’s second inauguration. I had stood for six subzero hours on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during his first inauguration, waiting for the new dawn, for a multicultural child of immigrants to become the most powerful person in the world, a man whose childhood in Indonesia included tying string to dragonfly tails and eating soto bakso from a street stall, just as my mother’s did. And when Americans re-elected Obama in an actual Electoral College landslide, confirming that it had been no fluke the first time, that this was not an aberration but the full forward march of history; and again later that year, when the immigration officer at Suvarnabhumi Airport stamped my laissez-passer and admitted me into the Kingdom of Thailand as an official of these United Nations, I could not help but feel like I was being certified on a cutting-edge assembly line, like I was a prototype for our new globalist age, friend of all nations, citizen of the world.
*
My job is to follow the movements of refugees across South-East Asia so that we know where and how they might seek asylum, and what kind of needs they will have when they do. For the last few years, by far the largest group of refugees moving across South-East Asia has been the Rohingya, an ethnic minority from Myanmar. The Rohingya are Muslims who have lived for generations in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine, but are considered by virtually all other Myanmarese – most of whom are Buddhists – to be interlopers from neighbouring Bangladesh.
By law, the more than one million Rohingya in Myanmar are almost all excluded from Myanmar citizenship, making them the largest stateless group in the world. They are cut off from livelihoods, medical care and schools. Systematic discrimination, punctuated by occasional eruptions of violent conflict, has pushed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to seek refuge across a vast expanse stretching from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to Bangladesh and Malaysia. There are anywhere from two to three million Rohingya in the world, and the large majority of them do not exist on paper.
When I first started talking to Rohingya refugees in 2014, most of them were fleeing Myanmar by boat because they were generally prohibited by local authorities from crossing by road into even the next town. Every month, thousands of Rohingya were committing US$2000 a head to a multinational network of Myanmarese, Bangladeshi, Thai and Malaysian people smugglers whom they entrusted to bring them across the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea to Malaysia. My team and I interviewed hundreds of Rohingya who made this journey, and their testimonies were remarkably consistent and consistently terrifying. The only more inhumane crossing I have ever heard or read about is the Middle Passage, the part of the slave journey across the Atlantic that killed millions of Africans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
To be clear, the Rohingya were not enslaved on ships – most at least started the journey voluntarily – but the conditions were so brutally coercive that they were arguably all victims of human trafficking. Seven or eight hundred and sometimes over a thousand Rohingya and poor Bangladeshis hoping to find work in Malaysia would be packed into the hold of a fifteen- to thirty-metre-long fishing trawler, modified to fit the maximum number of human beings that could possibly crouch shoulder to shoulder on multiple levels below deck, none high enough to stand in. The 12 per cent who were women or girls were usually kept above deck, near the crew quarters.
Each passenger was given one cup of water and one scoop of rice per day. The toilet was a couple of wooden planks resting on iron bars welded to the side of the boat – the outside – and you could only use it once or twice a day in turn, following everyone else in your row. If you tried to go out of turn, or asked for more food or water, the crew would pistol-whip you or belt you with a plastic pipe. The business model was to get as many passengers to Malaysia alive as possible, but crews were not shy about shooting or beating people dead to maintain order. The murdered would be thrown overboard, along with the handful on each ship who perished from starvation or sickness. Based on our interviews, we think about twelve of every thousand passengers died at sea, almost all from abuse or deprivation. There could be over 1800 Rohingya and Bangladeshi bodies on the floor of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.
Crossing by sea from Myanmar to Malaysia should only take one week, but most Rohingya I spoke to were in the hands of their smugglers for months. Boats would drift for weeks while waiting to fill to capacity or, at the destination, for a moment to disembark without being detected by authorities. This usually took place off the coast of southern Thailand, where it was easier for smugglers to land than on the Malaysian coast, which is heavily patrolled.
In Thailand, smugglers hauled their human cargo by truck to jungle encampments near the Malaysian border. There they would sequester the Rohingya and Bangladeshis in wooden cages until their families could pay off their debts. To extract payment, the smugglers called the family members of their captives as they beat them, forcing their screams into the phone. Only after payment was received were the prisoners released to Malaysia.
One sixteen-year-old Rohingya girl travelling on her own told us she was repeatedly raped in the jungle for fifteen days. Hundreds of bodies have been found haphazardly buried near these camps along the Thai–Malaysian border. Survivors have told me there may be hundreds more, killed while trying to escape or simply left for dead because they were too ill to transport when smugglers moved camp to evade authorities. I have met dozens of Rohingya in various states of paralysis, a symptom of the beri-beri they developed from being so severely malnourished.
One long weekend in 2014, I went sailing with my brother in the waters just up the coast from where these mass graves would eventually be discovered. It is paradise. From Phuket to the north and Langkawi to the south, the towering karst outcroppings that dot this seascape and the snow white sands that line them are unreal in their beauty, unmatched by any natural scenery in the region, maybe the world. Tourists from Europe and Russia and China and Australia live out their fantasies here in plush beach resorts, watching the sky turn brilliant shades of magenta and indigo as the sun sets over the same seas where refugees and migrants have languished near death for months.
*
Walking through a village in Maungdaw, a mainly Rohingya district in the westernmost point of Myanmar up against the border with Bangladesh, is akin to navigating a maze. The walkways between homes are like hiking trails: unpaved, narrow clearings with irregular d
ips and rises. Some are covered overhead by arches of brush, making it dark even during the day, and the woven bamboo fences express a kind of bounce and flow, as if the whole village bends in the wind. The taste of the sea is never far.
It is not hard to imagine Kamal (names have been changed to protect those involved), a twelve-year-old Rohingya boy, walking through his village one autumn night, suddenly being encircled by a group of young men. Some have guns. They grab his hair and make him walk towards a riverbank, where dozens of people are being herded onto a large canoe of sorts. There are a few other children like him, alone and confused. After several hours out to sea, they sail up to a fishing trawler. Everyone boards, and Kamal is forced underneath deck, into the hold. He does not know where he is going.
Six weeks later, in November 2014, I spoke to Kamal and his friend Ismail in a featureless mosque in Ampang, a modest suburb of Kuala Lumpur home to a sizeable Rohingya community. The two boys told similar stories of being abducted in Maungdaw, loaded onto a boat against their will and shipped to Malaysia via the jungle camps in Thailand, which is where they met. Their parents only found out where they were when smugglers – or, more properly in this case, kidnappers – called them from Thailand, demanding and eventually securing $2000 ransoms to release Kamal and Ismail to relatives in Malaysia.
Kamal was sullen and withdrawn when I spoke to him, and my colleague who was helping interpret could not hear him well over the evening call to prayer. We did not press him for details, and we did not need to. He was obviously vulnerable, and Ismail in any case happily recounted their journey for the both of them. There was adrenaline in Ismail’s voice, almost excitement about what had happened to them, as if it had been an adventure. He had re-established contact with his parents, and their plan was for him to work in Malaysia for a number of years until Ismail could afford to join a brother in Saudi Arabia. Ismail was also twelve.
Kamal and Ismail’s circumstances were not common, but they were also not unique. In late 2014, my colleagues and I began to notice a few worrying trends in our interviews with Rohingya who had just arrived in Malaysia. One was the abductions of children like Kamal and Ismail. Ten thousand Rohingya and Bangladeshis were being loaded onto boats every month. Smugglers in Bangladesh and Myanmar, paid per passenger they loaded, had apparently promised to deliver full boats to their counterparts in Thailand, who leased each boat against the income they expected from maximum capacity. The profit margins were so robust that the smugglers seemed to grow overconfident, leasing more boats than could be filled. To artificially bring demand in line with supply, they started abducting children and stuffing them into the unfilled boats. It was riskless kidnapping: you could get caught for holding someone for ransom in your own country, but not if you shipped the victim overseas and could still bank on the ransom being paid.
Another worrying development was the increasing number of women and girls on these boats. At first they only carried men, but by early 2015, about 18 per cent of passengers were female, often teenage brides sent off to marry Rohingya men in Malaysia. With so many young Rohingya men having left Myanmar, finding a husband locally had become difficult and incurred a more expensive dowry. Marrying a man making a relatively good income in Malaysia, and willing to pay for his bride’s journey, became an attractive option. For brides under eighteen, it was also, unambiguously, a form of human trafficking.
Hasina was one of them; she was fifteen when I met her. In January 2015, Hasina’s nikah, or wedding, took place at the home of the groom’s parents in Maungdaw. Hasina had come to stay with them two days earlier, and on the wedding day her own parents arrived, along with a mullah who would officiate the ceremony. As the afternoon heat gave way to a cool winter evening, a full moon rose above the north Rakhine sky.
Shortly after the Isha night prayer, they gathered and sat down on a mat, and the groom’s voice sprung from the speakers of a mobile phone; he lived in Penang, Malaysia. Months before, he had called his parents looking for a wife, and they had approached Hasina’s parents, who were struggling to marry off their daughter because they could not afford a dowry. Not only were the groom’s parents not asking for a dowry, but their son was also willing to pay for Hasina to join him in Malaysia. Hasina’s parents agreed.
During the nikah, over the phone, the mullah asked both Hasina and the groom if they agreed to marry each other, which they did. Food was served: they had chicken, Hasina remembers. The next day, she saw her husband for the first time when a cousin lent a smart phone that allowed them to video chat with one another. They talked for two hours, about what they had eaten and their health, and he told her about the arrangements he was making for her boat journey.
As she recalls the conversation to me and my colleague, Hasina smiles shyly and chuckles, saying she has not thought about any of this since getting on the boat. ‘It’s like a lesson I’m learning from you,’ she says, surprised to be asked about her wedding.
After leaving their homes in Myanmar, Hasina and two other girls, also hoping to join husbands in Malaysia they had never met, were cloistered in the same pre-departure hideout on the Bangladesh side of the Naf River, the natural boundary between Myanmar and Bangladesh. It was the home of a dalal, or smuggler, named Jahangir, whom Hasina later heard, and news reports seem to verify, was shot dead by Bangladeshi police in May 2015. ‘He was a good man,’ said Hasina, echoing the grudging respect, even gratitude, often shown to people smugglers all over the world, from these dalals in the Bay of Bengal to the snakeheads of southern China and the coyotes along the Rio Grande.
The three girls were taken together to a green and white wooden fishing trawler not more than fifteen metres long, with distinctive dragon insignias painted on either side of the bow. They waited sixteen days for smugglers to fill the ship’s three decks with the target load of 500 passengers, which could potentially bring in as much as one million dollars in income before ship and crew costs.
Hasina’s own costs, to be paid by her husband, amounted to $1400, plus a $120 upfront ‘boat fare’ to board. The ship sailed for six days, then hardly moved for weeks once it reached Thai waters. Hasina was allowed to speak to her husband over the phone on several occasions, but mainly so that he could be threatened by the captain into delivering payment. The captain, a portly polyglot with short hair fronted by a fringe, was called the Kachin – after the ethnic minority still engaged in armed conflict in northern Myanmar. On his orders, the crew routinely beat passengers with rubber gear belts.
Sometime in late March or early April 2015, Hasina and 200 others on the main deck were transferred to an empty red and white boat for four days, then again to a red and green boat already carrying around one hundred passengers. Word spread that these were people with no means and no sponsor to pay, and that this boat was a kind of floating market of bad debt, where new smugglers could assume the passengers’ payment obligations at a lower price, in the hopes that they would eventually be able to extract the funds. Fearing this would only reduce their chances of disembarkation, Hasina and others pleaded to the Kachin to keep them. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not selling you,’ he said. ‘We’ll take you back.’ It turned out to be true; they had been moved between boats because of a shortage of rations, and while waiting for new rations to arrive, the Kachin had paid the crews of the other boats to temporarily feed his passengers. Five days later, they were all returned to the original ship.
Hasina thinks she spent another month at sea. She would know more clearly had she not lost consciousness several times, so deeply once that the crew was planning to throw her overboard until other women convinced them she would live. They went days without food, and still, ‘I vomited a lot,’ said Hasina. ‘Sometimes ten times in a day.’
This was the other worrying trend my colleagues and I noticed in late 2014 and early 2015: smugglers were diverting from their usual practice of disembarking and holding people ransom in jungle camps in Thailand. Instead, Thailand was being bypassed altogether, and demands for ransom
s were being made on board, meaning boats full of malnourished refugees and migrants were just drifting in the Andaman Sea for months. Upon payment, smugglers were disembarking groups of sixty to eighty Rohingya and Bangladeshis directly to Malaysia, either to the resort island of Langkawi or to the mainland.
Around the same time, according to a Reuters report, Thai authorities had opened an investigation into a Rohingya smuggler named Anwar, based on a complaint filed by a Rohingya roti seller whose nephew was being held by Anwar’s subordinates, even though the roti seller had already paid the ransom. Reuters reported that the nephew was killed in retaliation, and that Anwar was arrested on 28 April 2015, three days before authorities in Songkhla, in southern Thailand, discovered the first batch of bodies hastily buried near jungle camps.
The triad-style hierarchy of the smuggling networks makes it difficult to know for certain, but many Rohingya my team and I spoke to believed that their boats were under Anwar’s control, and that his arrest was what led smugglers to convene an on-water meeting in early May among their various crews in the vicinity of the Thai–Malaysian maritime border. The Kachin was one of the attendees. There were rumours that the Thai navy was out in force looking for smugglers’ boats, so the smugglers conspired to cut their losses and abandon ship en masse, leaving thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshis stranded.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 7