MUNAWIR, a Rohingya man in his 20s, was at home in Sittwe, a district in Rakhine state of Myanmar, when his neighbourhood was attacked and houses there burnt by assailants. Eighteen people were killed in the ensuing massacre, including his two brothers.
Seeing his desperation, an agent later persuaded him to board a ship to Malaysia, promising him a better life and assuring that he did not have to pay anything.
However, once Munawir was on the small vessel, a gang approached his mother in Sittwe to demand 600,000 Burmese kyat (RM2,000) for his journey, which she fearfully paid.
The ship never went to Malaysia and instead reached the shores of southern Thailand. He was forced to trudge on foot to a camp deep in the jungle where he spent the next 10 months with about 4,000 other victims of human trafficking.
There he saw agents beating to death 18 people. There were times that the agents insisted they did not get ransom money from the relatives of captives although the amounts had been banked in.
In due course, someone got six trucks to smuggle a number of Rohingyas from the camp into Malaysia. Once past the border, Munawir was caught by the police.
He was later released after a visit by an official from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), but remained in poverty for a long time, relying on odd-jobs and charity. He was also not in touch with his mother whom he thought of regularly.
When I met him I asked how he was coping and what his options were. “I depend on God,” was all he could say with a shrug.
Munawir (not his real name) was among a number of refugees I had interviewed six years ago at undisclosed locations for an article on the plight and ordeal of the Rohingya people in Malaysia.
For some inexplicable reason, the editor at the now defunct news website where I was working never ran the story.
When I broached this matter I was astonishingly told that the article was “not interesting enough”, and that it would attract readers if I gave it a “business angle” by citing how much in millions the human trafficking network was monetarily worth.
The truth is that even though the persecution of such people in their native countries may be widely reported, little is told about the harrowing experiences thousands of them undergo in seeking refuge in Malaysia.
Their journeys are fraught with torture, ransom and slavery, and most become victims of ruthless and deceptive human trafficking syndicates. Yet the human side of this huge tragedy is little heeded by the public and the media.
This was very much the case when some 250,000 Indochinese “boat people” mostly from Vietnam tried to escape from Communist-driven violence in their countries for nearly two decades since 1975.
Much of the personal tribulations of these victims who fled their countries on frail sea vessels were only reported by the foreign media and the UNHCR, a refugee agency.
Most of them were housed in makeshift huts on Pulau Bidong, off the coast of Terengganu, away from the reach of local media and humanitarian activists. Their stories, if at all aired, are now forgotten.
Incidentally, some months after my interviews with the Rohingyas, award-winning journalist S Arulldas exposed horrific mass graves in the hilly jungle of Wang Kelian along the Malaysian-Thai border in 2015.
A total of 139 bodies were reportedly exhumed from the site together with the ghastly remains of human trafficking camps where refugees had been kept under inhumane circumstances.
Like Munawir, all these victims had deeply painful experiences that were never told. They had loved ones whom they missed, homes that they lost, and dreams and hopes that they found shattered.
The refugee story is a profoundly tragic one not just because of its merciless and appalling human loss.
It is made doubly woeful by the indifferent manner in which our public at large overlooks the suffering and misery of these real individuals who remain faceless and statistical, with no memories passed and no lessons learnt.
Himanshu is a veteran journalist and theatre practitioner. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
Link :https://www.thesundaily.my/opinion/harrowing-stories-remain-unheeded-FB2939351
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