In late July the United States State Department released its annualTrafficking in Persons (TIP) report, an influential diplomatic tool that threatens sanctions against countries that fail to crack down on the human trafficking trade. Thailand — a notorious trafficking hub — kept its spot in “Tier 3,” the lowest possible rank. Human rights activists welcomed the decision as “a powerful incentive” for Thailand to take further steps to combat trafficking. But this may not be entirely true.

In many ways the TIP report is a microcosm for the myriad problems in the U.S.-led anti-trafficking agenda, which despite bold rhetoric and millions of dollars in funding has failed or even hurt migrants and refugees. It has fed a chaotic global obsession with policing and prosecutions, but resulted in few concrete policies to address the underlying causes of trafficking or to assist its victims. This has been acutely felt in Thailand, a politically volatile country seesawing between military coups and failed democratic governments. In recent months the ruling junta has led an aggressive anti-trafficking campaign to satisfy its Western critics. But instead of reducing trafficking and forced labor, these efforts appear to have marginalized human rights and trampled on the most vulnerable.

The human cost of Thailand’s anti-trafficking efforts was thrust into the limelight in May, when the government escalated a crackdown on smuggling camps in its southern provinces. This followed the discovery of dozens of unmarked graves belonging to Bangladeshi migrants and Rohingya Muslims, a minority fleeing persecution in Burma, and triggered one of Southeast Asia’s worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent years when smugglers cast thousands of famished boat people adrift in the Andaman Sea. But while dozens of traffickers, including a senior army officer, have since been arrested, Thailand steadfastly refused to offer sanctuary to any of their victims. In a remarkable display of unconcern, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha urged anyone who felt sorry for the arrivals to “migrate” to sea and swap places with them.

The emergency unleashed a flurry of media interest and elicited outrage across the world. Many decried Thailand’s refusal to accept the desperate migrants and refugees, while others focused their criticisms on Burma’s treatment of the Rohingya, who, denied citizenship in their homeland, are regularly attacked by Buddhist nationalists. But the recent crisis also raises questions about the efficacy of global anti-trafficking policy, spearheaded by the United States. In fact, Thailand has openly declared that its ongoing crackdown on trafficking is largely a response to being downgraded in the U.S. report last year.

“There is clear evidence that the Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report has played a critical role over its 15-year history in elevating trafficking in persons on the agenda of the international community and in countries around the world,” said Mai Shiozaki, Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Office. “We consistently hear from civil society groups, international organizations, and governments that our report is the ‘gold standard’ in anti-trafficking assessments.”

But while the TIP report is often trumpeted as the global paradigm in anti-trafficking advocacy, it has produced poor results. According to a 2011 study, overall country rankings have not improved since the report’s launch in 2000, reflecting a failure to reduce human trafficking in Southeast Asia.

Some activists have blamed this on the growing politicization of the report, which rarely designates U.S. allies lower than “Tier 2” status. Malaysia earned a controversial upgrade this year despite an counter-trafficking record no better than Thailand’s — a move that has been linked to the Obama administration’s desire to clench a lucrative trade deal. Burma kept its place on the Tier-2 watch list for the fourth year running despite fueling Southeast Asia’s worst boat people exodus since the Vietnam War. A recent Reuters investigation revealed that the State Department watered down over a dozen rankings due to pressure from American diplomats, effectively reducing the report to a fickle foreign policy device.

However, this analysis — accompanied by calls for stricter enforcement of the report — glosses over more profound deficiencies in U.S. anti-trafficking policy. One notable example is the State Department’s disproportionate focus on sex trafficking and prohibitionist approach towards sex work. The U.S. government continues to deny anti-trafficking funding to any countries that have decriminalized prostitution, and fails to clearly distinguish between voluntary sex workers and victims of trafficking. This policy has encouraged politically unstable countries to violate the rights of sex workers and pursue clumsy counter-trafficking measures designed to inflate statistics. In 2013, Thailand prosecuted 374 people for involvement in sex trafficking but only 53 involved in other forms of labor exploitation. This is despite mounting evidence that bonded labor, especially in the fishing and seafood industries, accounts for the vast majority of trafficking cases in Thailand. It is not uncommon for the police to raid brothels in the weeks before their TIP reporting deadlines, often falsely identifying undocumented migrants as trafficking victims in order to boost their figures.

But perhaps the biggest problem in the global anti-trafficking agenda is its preoccupation with border policing and law enforcement. According to a 2014 report by the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW), international efforts to combat trafficking are failing or even harming victims despite pumping more than $120 million dollars a year into dismantling criminal networks and boosting prosecutions. There is very little scrutiny over how anti-trafficking funding is spent and who actually benefits. Some have attributed this to a naive perception that anti-trafficking work is intrinsically “good” — a bias that is reflected in the TIP report’s failure to assess trends in research and funding.

“In recent years governments have rushed to spend money on a range of poorly designed initiatives in the hope of avoiding or moving out of a low ranking in the U.S. government’s yearly Trafficking in Persons Report,” warns the GAATW publication.

Shiozaki insists that the blame lies with the implementing countries and not the United States, yet the State Department has steadfastly ignored calls to conduct human rights impact assessments of its anti-trafficking work. In 2013 Thailand spent $6.1 million on anti-trafficking activities, yet only $143,000 — or just over two percent — was allocated to victims. Over the past few months, the Thai government has pursued increasingly punitive criminal measures, including imposing the death penalty for human trafficking offenses, in order to appease the United States. These efforts have been energized by the Thai junta’s desire to regain international legitimacy after last year’s coup. However, Thailand routinely deports trafficking survivors — including Rohingya asylum seekers from Burma — and has resisted calls to sign the U.N. Refugee Convention.

The U.N. Trafficking in Persons Protocol, signed by Thailand in 2013, is equally problematic, again mostly characterizing trafficking as a question of transnational crime. The framework fails to adequately address the root causes of such abuses, including a lack of free movement and a global economic system that relies on the exploitation of migrant and labor rights. Instead the U.N. protocol has often been used an excuse to impose draconian border controls, which only serves to drive undocumented migrants and asylum seekers into the arms of traffickers. This is particularly troubling in countries that lack adequate protection and labor rights mechanisms, such as Thailand.

“States are afforded great leeway and discretion in the way they implement their protection obligations, with the predictable result that trafficked persons have so far seen little concrete benefit,” writes Jacqueline Bhaba, guest editor of the Global Anti-Trafficking Review released in April. 

In this context, it is hardly surprising that Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi migrants were discarded at sea while Southeast Asian nations squabbled over how to combat “illegal smuggling.” Other affected countries similarly invoked criminal rather than humanitarian terminology to frame the boat crisis. Burma — where Rohingya are treated as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and heavily persecuted — has stepped up navy patrols in the Bay of Bengal “to deter any illegal trespassing” but refused to acknowledge its role in the exodus. This language reflects Burma’s official position that Rohingya are interlopers from Bangladesh, and part of the reason that this myth is so effective is that it feeds into a global narrative that demonizes economic migrants.

Other Asian governments hostile to “trespassers” did not have to look far for international support. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot became the first Western leader to defend Southeast Asia’s initial pushbacks of boat people, describing it as “absolutely necessary if the scourge of people smuggling is to be beaten.” The Director of the Burmese President’s Office, Zaw Htay, pursued a similar line by drawing a snide comparison between the Southeast Asian crisis and the European Union’s plans to destroy migrant shipping vessels in the Mediterranean.

Indeed, the issue of slavery and human trafficking cannot be viewed outside the prism of migrant and labor rights. Unfortunately, however, the global focus has come to prioritize the criminal aspect of the trade, allowing governments to deflect attention from victim protection and human rights. Up to a million undocumented migrants are employed under abusive or slave-like conditions in Thailand. Asia harbors two-thirds of the world’s estimated 36 million trafficking victims — a number that has failed to drop despite the widespread adoption of the U.N. anti-trafficking protocol and 15 years on from the first TIP report. In other words, the system is failing — and it is high time we changed tack.

In the photo, a Rohingya woman from Bangladesh holds a photograph of her son, who disappeared after being trafficked to Malaysia even though she paid the ransom his traffickers demanded. She has not heard from him since.

Photo credit: Shazia Rahman/Getty Images

Refugees are not always met with open arms, but when some 1,800 Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants came ashore in the Indonesian province of Aceh three months ago, villagers brought them food and clean clothes. The popular singer Rafly even held a welcoming concert.

In fact, Rafly, who is also a lawmaker, has been lobbying colleagues in Jakarta to let them stay.

“We have a lot of land, our people care, we have enough natural resources,” he says. “There is no reason to send our brothers and sisters back.”

The migrants captured the world’s attention in May when local governments adopted a “push back” policy, giving them fuel and provisions but rebuffing their efforts to come ashore. Eventually, fishermen from Aceh province rescued hundreds of them from cramped and filthy boats. Some were treated for starvation.

The Indonesian government has agreed to host the migrants for just one year, as long as the international community helps foot the bill and resettles them elsewhere. The Bangladeshis were mostly economic migrants. Some have already been sent home. But the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar, are fleeing persecution. Myanmar won’t take them back and it’s unclear where they will go.

“On the first day, they were traumatized. We tried to get close to communicate, but they moved further away,” says Fardan Rezeki, a villager in Bayeun — a sleepy Acehnese town of rice paddies and stray cats. About 400 refugees are housed in an abandoned paper factory here.

Fardan swiped through selfies on his mobile phone — pictures of friends he’s made inside the camp.

“I feel solidarity with them because as fellow Muslims they create a desire to be generous towards them in our own heart,” he says. Indonesia has a large Muslim majority and Aceh has embraced a version of sharia law.

Others point to the disastrous 2004 tsunami as a factor in Aceh’s warm response to the refugees. Aceh’s capital took a direct hit. So many lives were lost the tsunami has become a bookmark in time.

“The tsunami was one moment when we saw all humans cared,” says Rafly, the lawmaker, of the international aid that flowed in. Now, he says, it’s the Acehnese who are in a position to help.

Lilianne Fan, international director of the Geutanyoe Foundation for Aceh, which operates in all four of the province’s refugee camps, says it was unlikely humanitarian groups would be able to find new homes for the Rohingya within the one-year time limit.

“In the current context, there are enormous numbers of refugees, more than we’ve seen since the end of World War II,” she says. “There is political sentiment in many countries as well that they don’t want to see enormous numbers of migrants and refugees coming to their countries, so it’s not an easy time.”

Even if the Indonesian government decides to let the Rohingya stay, that may not be what all the Rohingya want.

One of the refugees, Sahi Dulleh, was a shopkeeper back in Myanmar. His six children are still there. He says the Acehnese have been generous, but he’s desperate to continue on to his original destination, Malaysia, where even menial jobs pay much more than in Aceh.

In fact, some of the Rohingya already have family in Malaysia. A handful of refugees have snuck out of the camp, presumably to try their luck once again at the hands of human smugglers. 

That’s heartbreaking news for people like Taufik Arrahman, one of the fishermen who helped rescue the Rohingya. He visited the camp recently to celebrate the end of Ramadan.

“I love them. They are not my blood relatives, but they are all inside my heart,” he says. “They and I, we are one soul.”

As he spoke, the evening call to prayer came over a scratchy speaker system. Taufik joined the men at a portable water tank where they washed their hands and face and feet.

Then they filed into a room on wooden stilts to pray.

Ruth Morris and Carey Wagner reported from Indonesia on fellowships from the International Reporting Project.

As it moves towards democracy, the country is facing questions over who belongs to the national community, and which groups it is willing to include

The ongoing democratic transition in Myanmar has had devastating consequences for the Muslim Rohingya of western Myanmar. They have suffered communal violence, exclusion and disenfranchisement. This process is not unique to Myanmar. Political transition in ethnically diverse societies can often involve communal violence.

During the period of parliamentary democracy in Myanmar from independence in 1948 to the military coup of 1962, the Rohingya were generally treated well. The national government recognised the minority as an ethnic group of the country, and committed itself to an autonomous Rohingya area, the Mayu Frontier. Under military rule, the status of the Rohingya deteriorated. They were no longer recognised as a legitimate “national race” of Myanmar. The government refused even to recognise the term “Rohingya”, instead referring to the group as Bengalis. The Mayu Frontier was taken off the table, and replaced by violent military incursions which sent hundreds of thousands of refugees over the border. Military propaganda emphasised Buddhism. The government encouraged the idea that the country’s ethnic and religious minorities were loyal to outside powers. Muslim communities in particular were scapegoated to divert discontent with governance.

Fast-forward to the current democratic transition, beginning in 2011, when communal violence between Rohingya and Rakhine Buddhists broke out. The first instances occurred a year after the inauguration of President Thein Sein’s government, and just nine weeks after the transition’s first free and fair by-elections, in which Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to parliament. IDP camps housed about 140,000 desperate Rohingyas, while an estimated 100,000 persons fled by boat. After pressure from increasingly vocal nationalistic Buddhist organisations, Naypyidaw revoked voting rights for the Rohingya in early 2015.

In a departure from past instances of conflict in Rakhine state, the military in 2012 was praised for its role in quelling the conflict. While the police were implicated in facilitating and even committing abuses against the Rohingya, Human Rights Watch noted the positive role played by the military. The European Union praised the President’s “measured response”. The military has also been appreciated for ensuring the violence did not spread on an even larger scale, although its methods of segregation and its failure to resettle the displaced have been questioned.

Whatever the other failings of autocratic governments, it is commonly believed that democratic transition can “lift the lid” on communal tensions, with devastating violence as a result. This phenomenon is explained as elites manipulating identities for electoral gains, or as the result of increased freedom of communication and expression degenerating into hate speech, and incitement to violence. In Myanmar, the root of this issue goes beyond the inherent tension in democracy between majority rule and minority rights. The country is facing questions over who belongs to the national community, and which groups it is willing to include. The oft-proposed solution is more democracy—in the form of elections, minority rights, and deeper civil society. Yet democracy is no magic bullet for communal violence.

Indeed, it is the early processes of democracy under transition that are often said to have contributed to this problem. There is little appetite across Myanmar for minority rights for the stateless Rohingya, and even less in Rakhine state. As Aung San Suu Kyi has made clear through her silence on the issue, there are few votes to be won by standing up for the Rohingya. Decentralisation of power from Naypyidaw to Rakhine may well compound problems for the disenfranchised group. A more powerful state government would inevitably be dominated by Rakhine Buddhists. Democracy alone cannot solve this problem. Deadly communal pogroms have taken place in the context of an institutionalised democracy and civil society as well as a vibrant media, the best instance being India.

This is not to say that minority rights are better protected under an authoritarian government. Naypyidaw’s relations with the Rohingya and other minorities were characterised by civil war and repression under military rule. The future of the Rohingya in Myanmar will be one of the many complex issues the government formed after the elections in November this year will face. Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy are yet to outline their policy on the issue. Leadership will be required to bring the Rohingya into an inclusive Myanmar. All stakeholders must remember that democracy does not just end at casting a ballot—the treatment of religious and cultural minorities is an essential attribute. While it is for Myanmar to decide what sort of democracy it wants, it would do well to realise that religious schisms will come in the way of the country’s growth.

James T. Davies is a PhD Candidate in International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.

Tridivesh Singh Maini is a Senior Research Associate with The Jindal School of International Affairs, Sonepat.

Yangon -- Farmers in flood-hit Myanmar face a scramble to replant damaged paddy fields in the next two weeks to avoid food shortages, and aid efforts in some of the country's hardest hit areas remain a challenge, the United Nations said on Saturday. 

More than 1.3 million people have been critically affected and at least 106 people have died since heavy monsoon rains coupled with a cyclone last month caused floods across the country, according to the government. 

Water has receded in many areas, allowing farmers to assess the damage to their crops and also to seed stocks as the end of planting season nears.

"If farmers aren't able to get rice seeds and plant in the next two weeks the window for the next season is pretty much over," said Pierre Peron, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs(OCHA) in Myanmar. 

"If they are not able to replant they will miss out completely on this season and the impact on food security will be much larger than if we can provide them with support to replant." 

Myanmar is a rice exporter, but has halted exports to stabilize prices. 

The U.N. and NGOs have supplied emergency food assistance to 386,000 people impacted by the floods, OCHA said in its latest situation report on the flooding.

Over 1.4 million acres of paddy was flooded, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation. The crops in over 500,000 acres have been destroyed in what has been the worst natural disaster in Myanmar since Cyclone Nargis killed nearly 140,000 people in May 2008.

The government has provided $1.2 million for paddy seeds in Rakhine State, one of the hardest hit areas, but, "further support will be needed to help farmers and rural communities rebuild", OCHA said.

In Chin State, a mountainous region bordering Bangladesh and India, where heavy rains caused major landslides, aid workers were still struggling to access some of the state's more remote regions. 

"Access to areas in Chin State has been difficult and continues to be difficult," Peron said on Saturday. 

In the capital of Hakh five out of six townships experienced landslides that damaged hundreds of homes. 

Zung Hlei Thang, an MP representing Chin State, said the prices of rice and other commodities had risen sharply since the landslides made many state roads largely impassable, stemming imports. 

"The living conditions are difficult," he said.