Malaysia: Refugees for Sale
Unreported World reveals shocking evidence that Burmese refugees fleeing the country’s brutal military regime are being detained and then allegedly sold by Malaysian immigration officials to Thai human traffickers.
Reporter Aidan Hartley and Director George Waldrum travel to Kuala Lumpur to highlight how the refugees are forced to exchange one hellish existence for another. Living in complete fear of the state, the refugees claim they are being rounded up and subjected to bloody whippings and indefinite imprisonment in overcrowded detention camps. As Unreported World reveals, for some this is just the beginning of a horrific journey into the trafficking network, where men, women and children disappear into a world of slavery and prostitution.
Malaysia pays no regard to Burmese refugees’ right of asylum, since the country refuses to sign up to international conventions. And it’s not just the state that acts harshly. Hartley and Waldrum join a night-time city raid by volunteers of the RELA militia to chase down and arrest construction site workers without valid papers. Millions of illegal migrants, many of whom are refugees, fill the building sites and factories, providing cheap labour and doing the jobs Malaysians don’t want to do. Despite this, RELA, which has 500,000 members, claims to be cleaning up what they see as an immigrant threat to law, order and health.
On the other side of the city, the team finds a Burmese refugee ghetto where the inhabitants are living in terror, crammed into squalid apartments with dozens of tenants to each floor. One family claims RELA had smashed their way into their home and arrested and beat them. A woman claims the police routinely prey on their vulnerable status, demanding bribes and their belongings, or they will be taken into detention.
