Trafficking victims rot in jail, wait since two years to go home
Lengthy verification by Bangladesh dashes hopes of traumatised men
- By Umarah Jamali, Correspondent
- Published: July 19, 2011
- Myanmar and Bangladeshi men are seen in a boat without an engine minutes before being rescued by an Indian Coast Guard patrol in 2009.
- Kolkata: "It has been more than two years that I have been waiting to go home. My wife, my children and my old parents are all anxiously waiting for me in Bangladesh. Please help me return to my home as soon as possible," 40-year-old Kabir Ahmad appealed to a group of rights activists who met him in a Port Blair jail recently. Harbouring dreams of illegally entering Malaysia to seek work, Ahmad and scores of other men from Bangladesh and Myanmar took a ferry operated by human traffickers from Bangladesh in December 2008.
The ferry set sail for Thailand, where the traffickers were set to lead them across a secret land route to Malaysia. However, the men were apprehended by Thai security forces before this could happen.
For about two weeks, Ahmad and his boatmates were secretly detained in Thailand. After that, Thai soldiers forced them onto a boats without an engines and abandoned them at sea.
The Burmese Rohingya and Bangladeshi Muslim men drifted under the hot sun for weeks. Many died as their meagre supplies of food and water ran out within two days of being left at sea. At least 350 men of the 1,100 men set adrift by Thai soldiers died of hunger and dehydration.
The boats drifted in different directions — one to Indonesia and the other to India. Ahmad was among the lucky ones who survived the nightmarish voyage, before being rescued by the Indian Coast Guard off the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
India did not charge any of the 451 survivors with any offence. Instead, they were detained at a jail in Port Blair as authorities initiated a process to send them back home.
The survivors in the other boat which drifted to Indonesia were picked up by Indonesian authorities and managed to make it to Malaysia. But for the ones who drifted to India, their ordeal was far from over.
In 2009, weeks after the men were rescued, New Delhi forwarded to Dhaka a list with the names of 400 men who claimed to be citizens or residents of Bangladesh and said they wanted to return to their home.
Dhaka verified the details of 223 Bangladeshis and ethnic Rohingyas with Bangladeshi residency and allowed them to return home. However, 228 others, including Ahmad, are still waiting to go home, after having been detained in Port Blair for more than two years.
Immediately after being rescued, 38 of the rescued boatpeople — all ethnic Rohingyas — told Indian authorities in Port Blair that they were from Myanmar's Arakan state.
They said they had entered Bangladesh just to make the illegal journey to Thailand, from where they would then enter Malaysia. But the men later changed their story and claimed that they all were from Bangladesh.
Asked when Ahmad and the other survivors will be repatriated, Indian officials said the ball was in Bangladesh's court.
"We have been very sympathetic to these poor men. We have not counted them as criminals and have tried to help them in all ways possible. We feel bad to see them lying in jail for such a long time," said Port Blair police superintendent S.B.S. Tyagi.
"But it depends only on Bangladeshi government now; how soon it can arrange their repatriation... We don't know if it will take two weeks, two months or two more years."
Further verification
Bangladeshi High Commission officials recently said further verification had revealed that 18 more survivors among the 228 detained men were eligible to return to the country.
However, sources in Port Blair claim that Ahmad is not among them.
A Bangladeshi foreign ministry official said police had established that Ahmad crossed over to Bangladesh from Myanmar some years ago and had settled on Saint Martin's Island with his wife and children illegally.
Some Bangladeshi officials privately revealed that the process of verifying pending claims of Bangladeshi citizenship and residency was taking an unusually long time because most of the claims were not genuine ones.
"As many as 75 per cent of those boatpeople who are lying detained in India and are seeking to return to Bangladesh could be Burmese Rohingyas," said another India-based Bangladeshi foreign ministry official.
"Some of the detained Rohingya men have their relatives living illegally in Bangladesh. Many others have never lived in Bangladesh at all, our police have [established]. In Bangladesh we are facing many troubles [owing to] the influx of illegal Rohingyas." - Link:http://gulfnews.com/news/world/india/trafficking-victims-rot-in-jail-wait-since-two-years-to-go-home-1.840015
