Sheltering in the backroom of a provincial Thai police station is a 35-year-old street vendor who triggered a human trafficking investigation that has reverberated across Southeast Asia.
He is a Rohingya Muslim, a mostly stateless group from western Myanmar. He had scraped a living for the past decade selling fried bread, or roti, from a push cart in Nakhon Si Thammarat, a city in southern Thailand.
Then his nephew fell into the hands of murderous human traffickers.
The roti seller’s desperate bid to save him ultimately led to the discovery of scores of jungle graves on the Thai-Malaysia border in May and sparked a regional crisis over boatloads of unwanted Rohingya.
Now the roti seller fears traffickers could target him. His new home in the police station is a primitive form of witness protection.
Thailand’s investigation comes ahead of a new US report card on its anti-trafficking efforts, due out in mid-July. Police spearheading the campaign on the ground told Reuters they encountered official indifference about the evidence they had gathered on trafficking networks - even after the US State Department identified Thailand in June 2014 as one of the world’s worst trafficking offenders.
Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, who led early anti-trafficking efforts in southern Thailand was told his investigation was damaging Thailand’s image, though he declined to be more specific about who was telling him that. “No one cared.”
Deputy National Police Chief Aek Angsannanont, who is in charge of the anti-trafficking crackdown, said the military government took the issue seriously.
After last year’s coup, Thailand’s military junta promised what it called a “zero tolerance” policy to human trafficking. Yet Thailand convicted fewer perpetrators of human trafficking last year than in 2013.
The Thai crackdown has disrupted the region’s trafficking infrastructure for now but some experts question how lasting that will be.
The investigation has “made trafficking in Thailand a bit harder,” said Steve Galster, director of FREELAND Foundation, an anti-trafficking NGO that has given technical help to the Thai police. “The question remains, however, if anyone higher up the chain … will be investigated.”
The number of people leaving on boats from Myanmar and Bangladesh has nearly tripled in three years – from 21,000 in 2012 to 58,000 last year, according to The Arakan Project. Most of them came ashore in Thailand and were moved to trafficking camps.
The camps along the jungly border between Thailand and Malaysia had been exposed as early as 2013. But they became impossible to ignore in May after police from both countries found the graves of 175 suspected migrants at dozens of hastily vacated trafficking camps on both sides of the border.
The ensuing crackdown meant traffickers could no longer bring their human cargoes ashore so they simply abandoned them at sea. The boats eventually washed ashore in Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar, their passengers sick and thirsty. At least 1,200 remained stranded at sea, according to a June 16 United Nations report.
The roti seller, who Reuters interviewed at the police station, said his nephew fell into the hands of traffickers last year.
Last October, he said his family paid 95,000 baht ($2,800) in ransom money to free their 25-year-old nephew from a camp in southern Thailand. Traffickers typically hold boat people for ransom and often torture them until their relatives pay up. Those whose relatives couldn’t pay were left to die in the camps or sold into slavery on Thai fishing boats.
Despite getting the ransom payment, the roti seller said the alleged operator of the camp his nephew was in, a Myanmar man known as Anwar, refused to release his nephew.
So, two months later in December, the roti seller filed a complaint against Anwar with local police. “They didn’t take me seriously.”
Police Colonel Anuchon Chamat, deputy commander of Nakhon Si Thammarat Provincial Police, admitted they were “not that interested” in the complaint at the time.
That changed on Jan 11 when Anuchon’s men intercepted five trucks in Nakhon Si Thammarat. Hidden inside were 98 tired and malnourished Rohingya. One woman had suffocated to death, two later died in hospital.
Police interviews with the survivors confirmed what the roti seller had described: “That there was buying and selling of humans,” Anuchon said.
Anuchon mapped out a transportation network that led from Ranong, a port city on the Andaman Sea, to jungle camps on the Malaysian border, an overnight’s drive away. He concluded that the malnourished Rohingya and the roti seller’s nephew were in thrall to the same syndicate. Anuchon’s discovery, however, was too late to save the roti seller’s nephew.
On Jan 27, camp guards called the roti seller and placed a phone to his nephew’s face. The roti seller wept as he described what happened next. The traffickers, he said, had found out he had gone to the authorities. Anuchon confirmed the roti seller’s story.
“They’re going to kill me,” his nephew said. “What did you do?”
The roti seller heard the phone drop and his nephew screaming. Then a voice said: “He’s dead already,” and the line was cut.
After intercepting the truck convoy, Col. Anuchon enlisted the roti seller’s help in tracking down a Rohingya witness who had survived 10 months at the same camp as the nephew. At the request of police, Reuters has agreed not to reveal the survivor’s name for safety reasons.
The Rohingya survivor said Anwar, the alleged camp operator, had ordered the nephew killed. On April 28, police grabbed Anwar after staking out his house and took him to Nakhon Si Thammarat’s main police station.
Anwar, 40, also known as Soe Naing from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, is himself a Rohingya. During an hour-long interview at the police station, Anwar insisted he was not a human trafficker, but a rubber tapper – and a roti seller himself.
Three days after Anwar’s arrest, the Rohingya survivor led police to the camp a few hundred metres from the Malaysian border. Police believed it had been hurriedly evacuated just days before. They discovered shallow graves marked with bamboo sticks.
Police and rescue volunteers unearthed 26 corpses on May 1. Some were shrouded in cloth or simple bamboo mats. Others were little more than skeletons.
When asked if there were more graves yet to be discovered along Thailand’s border, Police Maj. Gen. Thatchai replied: “Absolutely.”
After Anwar came big-name arrests. Patchuban Angchotipan – a wealthy businessman from Satun province – gave himself up on May 18. Patchuban, the former chairman of Satun’s provincial administration, has been charged with a range of offences, including human trafficking, holding people for ransom and detention leading to bodily harm.
Fighting his case in court will be Wirat Kalayasiri, the chief legal advisor of Thailand’s Democrat Party, which has close links to the military and royalist establishment. Pakkapon Sirirat, another Democrat Party member, is representing Lieutenant General Manus Kongpan, who surrendered to police on June 2.
Manus previously headed an operation to intercept migrants in the Andaman Sea for the Internal Security Operations Command, Thailand’s powerful, military-run equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security.
The trials could be lengthy and convictions are far from certain, police said.
The United Nations estimates people-smuggling across the Bay of Bengal has generated about $250 million since 2012. Thailand has so far seized assets worth only $3.5 million.
The roti seller dares not leave his new home in the provincial police station. He recently stopped praying at a nearby mosque after he heard that some men had turned up to look for him there.
Many known traffickers remained at large, which was why he hoped to be relocated to another country after the trial. “Otherwise,” he said, “I will be killed.”
