Migrants Toil as ASEAN Ministers Talk Rights

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Agence France-Presse, 07/22/2009
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20090722-216677/Migrants-toil-as-Asean-ministers-talk-rights

PHUKET, Thailand—As Southeast Asian ministers endorsed a new human rights body at a luxury Phuket hotel, victims of the region's abuses were hard at work nearby at the island's fishing port.

Hundreds of migrant fishermen unloaded their overnight catch from brightly-colored boats, while workers in rubber boots sorted the seafood into baskets for others to pile into trucks bound for various Thai provinces.

Most laborers here came to seek a better life away from military-ruled Myanmar, which has been considered the problem child of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) since it joined in 1997.

While the bloc's new human rights body will require members to provide reports on their internal rights situations, critics say it will lack powers to punish Myanmar's junta for rights abuses that have driven many citizens away.

"It is a bit hard to live there. Than Shwe (the junta leader) has a black heart. He makes problems for people, he makes them poor," said An Ny Ny Thew, a worker at the port who left Myanmar 13 years ago with her fisherman husband.

Taking a break from her job packing fish into baskets with ice, the 30-year-old told AFP that she left a construction job in Myanmar to find better-paid work in Thailand.
She said she now earns 5,000 to 6,000 baht (147 to 176 dollars) per month—a big improvement on the 1,000 baht she was paid in Myanmar. But she has had to send her two children, aged seven and five, back home to live with her mother.

"I have no permit to send my children to school in Thailand. If the children stay here I can't work. I miss them but I have no money to go back to visit," she said.
Kyaw Win, a fisherman from Myanmar, said he would not go back to his homeland now even if he could afford it.

"I came here to make money. I like working here—they have democracy. If Burma does not get democracy I will not go back," he said, referring to Myanmar by its former name.The former policeman explained that he escaped the country after taking part in the pro-democracy uprisings of 1988, which saw thousands of protesters killed in a bloody crackdown by the army.

Myanmar migrants such as Kyaw Win make up about 80 percent of more than 500 workers at the port, according to Boonlert Sritularak, a Thai wholesaler there.
"Thais don't like to do this job because it's smelly and dirty," he said, describing it as "one of the hardest jobs in Phuket."

"In my opinion we have to treat them well and take care of them because we need the labor," he said, adding that many from Myanmar move to "more comfortable" jobs as cleaners or food vendors after a few months.

He said he thought only about half of migrants at the port were legal, and when officers came to make checks on the status of the workers, the migrants would dip into their meager wages to "give the police money to keep quiet."
The large numbers of illegal workers make figures hard to calculate, but Human Rights Watch estimates that more than two million Myanmar migrants are working in Thailand.

Even for those with work permits the situation seems precarious, and an Asean declaration on migrant worker rights, approved in 2007, appears to hold little sway.
"The Thai government is not helping workers. If someone is injured they send them back to Myanmar," claimed An Ny Ny Thew, adding she did not know what she would do next year when her work permit runs out.

Rights groups have called on Thailand to improve protection for migrants—especially after accusations of mistreatment caused international outrage earlier this year.
Nearly 650 Rohingya—a stateless ethnic group facing persecution from Myanmar's junta—were rescued off India and Indonesia, some claiming to have been beaten by Thai soldiers before being set adrift on the high seas to die

Soon afterwards, the Thai government "categorically denied" reports that it had mistreated any migrants. Premier Abhisit Vejjajiva, speaking in Phuket this week ahead of Asia's biggest security forum, appeared confident about the human rights situation in this "very open country."

But many are still concerned.
David Mathieson of Human Rights Watch said the region had a "climate of impunity over rights abuses," which Asean needed to tackle, because the issue of migrant workers "touches every single Asean member."