| Home > South-East Asia >> Thailand | |
Thailand probes boat people 'horror'
Melbourne Age - January 20, 2009
Bangkok – Thailand is at the centre of an international outcry over accusations its navy towed hundreds of boat people out to sea and left them to die in boats without engines.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva met human rights officials yesterday to discuss the allegations, and the Foreign Ministry is investigating amid mounting photographic evidence and harrowing accounts from survivors describing weeks adrift with no food or water.
But Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban said he doubted the allegations. "I believe the officers did not do such a thing because Thai people have generosity," he said.
After allegedly being left to their fate by the Thai military, hundreds of the boat people trying to escape Burma drifted as far as India's Andaman Islands. The Indian authorities say they have rescued 446 refugees since the end of December, but fear hundreds have died at sea.
In one incident on December 18, Thai security forces allegedly took 412 captured boat people out to sea and forced them onto an open-topped barge that had no engine. "Those who resisted were thrown into the sea by the Thai soldiers, at least four of them, their hands and legs tied," a 22-year-old survivor, who gave his name as Mohammed, told the BBC.
"We were left with only 10 kilos of rice and some water in that huge boat in the middle of a very choppy sea. Our food and water ran out on the second day." When the barge reached the Andamans 15 days later, only 107 people were still alive.
Almost all the boat people are from the Rohingya ethnic group, a Muslim minority from north-western Burma. (Telegraph, AFP)
See also:
 |