Announcement of record seizure comes as junta leader Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha prepares to speak at United Nations general assembly in New York

BANGKOK -- Thailand's Anti-Money Laundering Office (AMLO) says it seized a record 60 million baht ($1.6 million) in assets from a trafficking network in September as it sought to clamp down on the smuggling of Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar.

In smaller townships, Eid al-Adha celebrations are understated

Five Muslim pilgrims from Myanmar have been confirmed dead and seven remain missing following last week’s stampede disaster near the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia that claimed over 700 lives, according to a local Muslim organisation.

U Ko Ko Latt, a central executive member of the Myanmar Muslim National Federation, said 3850 local pilgrims travelled to Mecca for the Hajj, including 280 people supported by the Saudi government under a bilateral agreement, as well as those who travelled privately through 41 travel agencies. Three men and two women from Myanmar were confirmed dead, he said.

The Myanmar embassy in the Saudi capital Riyadh said it was unable to confirm the figures because it did not keep track of Hajj pilgrims arriving in the country.

The confirmed death toll from the September 24 stampede at a crossroads in Mina has risen to 769, Saudi authorities said on September 26. More than 900 were injured in the crush as two vast columns of pilgrims came together near the site of a ritual known as “stoning the devil”, which has frequently been the most dangerous part of the ritual.

More than 130 Iranians were among the dead and many are still listed as missing. More than a dozen countries have reported the deaths of their nationals. Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of mismanagement and demanded that it take responsibility for the deaths.

U Ko Ko Latt said he hoped that the Saudi government would take responsibility for those killed or missing as a result of the stampede.

“We will meet and ask the Saudi embassy in Myanmar on September 28 about what actions they plan to take as a result of this incident,” he said.

According to the Myanmar Muslim National Federation, two Myanmar pilgrims were killed during a similar stampede at the Hajj in 1990.

The Myanmar embassy in Saudi Arabia told The Myanmar Times that it had no records for pilgrims doing the Hajj.

“None of the travel agencies contact and report to the embassy when they bring pilgrims to the country,” a spokesperson said by email.

Muslims officially comprise 4 percent of Myanmar’s population, but the real proportion is thought to be twice as high. Demand for Hajj pilgrimage packages is very high each year, but Saudi Arabia limits the number of visas it issues to under 4000 a year for security reasons, U Ko Ko Latt said.

He listed the names of the five who had been confirmed to have died as Daw Nwe Aye, 57, and Daw Moe Moe Aung, 34, who traveled with Multi Point Travel and Tours Company; U Kyaw Than, 47, who was on the government-to-government program; Moharmad Shar, 55, and U San Win from Dawei.

People are on the move across Southeast Asia, fleeing misery and violence. Just as Europe has become a favored destination for the hundreds of thousands fleeing war-torn Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, so Muslim minorities from the eastern and western fringes of Southeast Asia are finding their way to the region's more prosperous countries in search of security and often, third-country asylum.

In the past two years, according to United Nations reports, as many as 100,000 people from Myanmar's Rakhine State have left in search of safety and security, about half of them ending up in Malaysia. 25,000 of them left in the first three months of 2015. They mostly endured perilous sea journeys in rickety boats across the Bay of Bengal; they were often smuggled into Malaysia by human traffickers, whose methods of abuse have been exposed in recent months by the discovery of abandoned camps with cages and mass graves on either side of the Thai-Malaysian border.

Over the same period, thousands of Turkic Muslim Uighurs from the western province of Xinjiang in China have found their way across Chinese borders with Vietnam and Laos, mostly with the aid of established smuggling rings. Once across the border, they head overland through Cambodia into Thailand and try to reach Malaysia, from where the vast majority of some 4,000 Uighurs, according to UN sources, have been quietly given asylum in Turkey.

Both groups are persecuted Muslim minorities, who in recent years have experienced prejudice and communal violence in areas they have inhabited for centuries. Neither Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar nor Uighur Muslims can join or integrate with existing indigenous minorities in the region. Unlike the Karen, Shan, or Kachin and other ethnic minorities from conflict- -affected Myanmar, they stand out and are more often the victim of human trafficking and exploitation for low wages.

The scourge of human trafficking has been highlighted by the revelations earlier this year of camps where Rohingya, and possibly Uighur migrants, were kept while in transit to Malaysia. Conditions were appalling, and many graves were found with evidence that migrants were poorly fed and beaten. Last year almost 300 Uighurs were found shivering with cold on a jungly hilltop in southern Thailand. They said only that they were Turkish and were trying to get to Turkey.

Action and inaction

The scenes of human misery revealed along the Thai-Malaysian border have goaded governments in Southeast Asia to take action. As a surge in boat arrivals from Myanmar earlier this year generated pictures of desperate, hungry Rohingya in filthy conditions waiting to disembark, there were promises to take them in from Malaysia, and a ripple of diplomatic activity within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations aimed at crafting a regional action plan. When the boats stopped coming with the onset of the monsoon, the problem seemed to go away -- and so did efforts to tackle the problem.

Then something altogether more chilling happened. On a balmy, rush-hour evening in September in central Bangkok, a bomb packed with ball bearings ripped through a popular Hindu shrine, , killing more than 20 people, most of them ethnic Chinese. The investigation soon revealed a link to Uighurs and a possible human smuggling operation, part of a pipeline that enables Uighurs to travel from China all the way to Turkey.

Although ongoing, the police investigation has tentatively established a link between the suspected bombers, some of whom have been identified as either Turkish or Chinese citizens, and a decision by the Thai government earlier this year to forcibly deport 109 Uighurs to China. Human rights activists fear that those deported almost certainly have faced violence at the hands of the Chinese authorities. There was a swift and angry response in Turkey where the Chinese embassy and a Thai consulate were attacked by protestors. Other countries in Southeast Asia have also deported Uighurs, but in smaller numbers, after China exerted pressure on governments to return them.

What this tells us is that migrants and the people who move them, normally for money, can potentially become instruments of terror and violence. This poses a mighty dilemma, both for the states through which they pass, and the international agencies and local non governmental organizations that seek to protect them. How then to protect people fleeing persecution as refugees, yet who potentially could turn radical and resort to violence in the countries they seek safety in?

In the name of humanity there can certainly be no dilution of already weak and poorly applied standards of protection in Southeast Asia. If anything, the lessons from the surge in boat arrivals from Myanmar and now, what appears to be an influx of Uighurs, speak to the need for escalating efforts to find regional solutions to the movement of people in distress. Steps taken by ASEAN earlier this year to tackle the problem need to be revived and invigorated. The goal should be an approach that adequately protects refugees and allows international agencies to process them to speed up safe and secure resettlement.

There is no indication that the flow of migrants is slowing down, or that the distressed areas from which they come are becoming any safer. In fact, some international agencies predict that elections scheduled in Myanmar in the first week of November could exacerbate already tense relations between Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine State.

Both the boat crisis earlier this year and the violence possibly prompted by the deportation of Uighurs from Thailand should serve as a wake-up call, especially since the 10 ASEAN member states are due to declare the region as a common economic community at the end of the year.

Michael Vatikiotis is Asia regional director of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a private diplomacy organization.

The plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar should be enough reason to galvanise an organisation comprising 57 member states to spring into action

Some global organisations have come under increasing fire for the inability to solve problems that their charter was supposed to address. The United Nations is one of them with its failure to get Israel to adhere to its many resolutions, some submitted by the UN Security Council.

For the Muslim world, an organisation was created way back in 1969 with a membership of 57 states and was called the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). It is the second largest global organisation after the UN and its members span four continents. The majority of member states come from Africa, closely followed by countries in Asia.

According to its charter, OIC is ‘the collective voice of the Muslim world to safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony among various people of the world’. The organisation’s headquarters are based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, headed by a secretary general.

In recent times, however, the OIC has come under fire for its lack of firm and resolute actions on the fate of Muslims everywhere. The dispossessed people around the world, among them the Kashmiris and the Rohingya Muslims, find no comfort under the umbrella of this bureaucratic institution.

A week ago, an appeal was raised to the OIC by the Myanmarese Rohingya Union, asking for its intervention and assistance against the misery faced by the Rohingya people of Myanmar. In their letter, they claimed that the present government has stepped up hate-filled rhetoric against the Rohingya in various townships across Myanmar. The state has also been reshuffling sympathetic officials and drafting more anti-Muslim legislation, including the religious conversion law that denies a Myanmarese national the right to convert to Islam and denies any Muslim the right to marry a Buddhist.

In their appeal to the OIC, the Rohingya Union has also complained that the government of Myanmar has disenfranchised Myanmarese Muslims from the national election that is scheduled for November 8, 2015. This is the first time in the history of Myanmar that the Rohingya and Kamen Muslims have been denied voting rights in a national election. Further, the registration applications by Muslim candidates to contest in the national election have been rejected. A total of 42 candidates who had initially submitted their names for the voting process were denied on the grounds that ‘they are not citizens of Myanmar’.

Beginning in the mid 1960s and gathering pace in recent times, the military junta that has ruled Myanmar has been revoking the nationality certificate of Muslims and branding them as Bengalis despite their status of as an ethnic minority group with full citizenship.

Along with the rejection of their voting rights, the Muslims in Myanmar are subjected to rising racial and ethnic terrorism by the hardline Buddhist majority, whose mobs have descended and slaughtered countless defenceless Rohingya people. The letter to OIC highlights this alarming indication of “pre-planning of violence against Rohingya by Buddhist Rakhine, following the same pattern of violence against Rohingya and other Muslims in 2012 and 2013”.

The alarming signs are all there. Buddhist Rakhine communities have intensified hate speech, there is extensive movement of Buddhist Rakhine armed groups along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, increased harassment of Rohingya by Rakhine mobs and Rakhine police, the elected officials of Rakhine state have also been making provocative statements.

Inflammatory speeches

In an incendiary rhetoric against the hapless Rohingya, U Mra Aumg, the new Chief Minister of Rakhine stated that “The ‘Bengali’ Muslims [implying Rohingya] in Northern Rakhine state are planning to commit violence against Rakhine because they are barred from the upcoming election and the Bengali Muslim terrorist groups have also infiltrated Arakan; therefore, you [the Buddhist Rakhine community] must be prepared to defend yourselves as you did in the past”. The Rohingya have a reason to be concerned. The chief minister has been travelling to various townships in Arakan state and making similar statements. There are major concerns in the Rohingya community in Arakan over the inflammatory speeches of government officials and Buddhist Rakhine leaders that are likely to set off new waves of violence against Rohingya by the Buddhist Rakhine mobs on the pretext of barring Rohingya from the upcoming election.

In their letter to the OIC, the Rohingya Union has urged that pressure be applied on the government of Myanmar to allow all the Rohingya previously holding nationality documentations to vote in the national election. They also want Rohingya, Kamen and Myanmar Muslim political parties to contest in the November 8 election. Other demands include an investigation into the hate speech by the chief minister of Rakhine state and monks and appropriate actions to prevent a volatile situation leading to further violence. They want to abolish the religious conversion and marriage laws and other legislations targeting Muslims and Christian minorities and to reinstate all their basic rights, including the right to travel, right to marry, right to education, freedom to worship and other rights.

If indeed the OIC is more than a toothless tiger, then the critical situation in Myanmar is a good ground for it to prove its mettle. A body made up of 57 nations is no joke. It is time for the organisation’s bureaucrats to sit up and take note. This recent appeal must be addressed more solidly than with a press release of little or no consequence.

Tariq A. Al Maeena is a Saudi socio-political commentator. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@talmaeena