Author: Seth Mydans
Publication: The International Herald Tribune
Date: December 9, 2007
URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/09/news/malay.php
When his turn comes to stand watch, Kang Long
posts himself at a window, peering into the dark streets outside the tiny
apartment where his fellow migrant workers sleep 10 to a room.
"We always fear, especially at night,"
he said. "Maybe there will be a raid. Where will we run? I worry for
my wife and children. I've been thinking of moving to the jungle."
Kang Long, 43, is an ethnic Chin refugee from
Myanmar, one of as many as three million foreign workers whose labor on farms,
factories and construction sites and in service industries supports the economy
of this bustling Southeast Asian nation. About half are estimated to be here
illegally.
Like foreign workers elsewhere, they are resented
by many local people and demonized by politicians. Here in Malaysia they have
become the targets of an expanding campaign of harassment, arrest, whippings,
imprisonment and deportation.
To lead this campaign, the government in 2005
transformed a volunteer self-defense corps, created in the 1960s to guard
against communists, into a strike force deputized to hunt down illegal immigrants.
This force, called Rela, now numbers nearly
half a million mostly untrained volunteers - more than the total number of
Malaysia's military and police in this nation of 27 million.
Its leaders are armed and have the right to
enter a home or search a person on the street without a warrant. By an official
count, its uniformed volunteers carry out 30 to 40 raids a night.
As it takes over more of the duties of the
police and prison officials, Rela is drawing the condemnation of local and
foreign human rights groups, which accuse the volunteers, some as young as
16, of violence, extortion, theft and illegal detention.
"They break into migrant lodgings in
the middle of the night without warrants, brutalize inhabitants, extort money
and confiscate cellphones, clothing, jewelry and household goods, before handcuffing
migrants and transporting them to detention camps for illegal immigrants,"
Human Rights Watch said in a report in May.
They often fail to honor legitimate documentation
and sometimes destroy documents in order to justify their actions, the human
rights group said.
In an interview, Rela's director general,
Zaidon Asmuni, dismissed the concerns of human rights groups, saying that
the nation's security is at stake and demands an aggressive defense.
"We have no more communists at the moment,
but we are now facing illegal immigrants," he said. "As you know,
in Malaysia illegal immigrants are enemy No. 2." Enemy No. 1, he said,
is drugs.
Once undocumented migrants are detained, they
face a jail term of up to five years and a whipping of up to six strokes.
Some of the migrants, like Kang Long from
Myanmar, are refugees registered with the United Nations, but they are caught
up in the sweeps as well. Malaysia is not a signatory of the UN refugee convention.
According to the accounts of a dozen migrants
in the cramped apartments where they hide, things can get even worse once
they are deported.
After serving time in a detention center,
they say, many are taken to a no man's land near the border with Thailand
where human traffickers await their arrival.
If they can pay 1,500 ringgit, or about $450,
the migrants say, the traffickers will smuggle them back to Kuala Lumpur where
the cycle of harassment, potential detention and deportation begins again.
If they cannot pay, the migrants say, they
may be sold as laborers to fishing boats or forced into the sex trade. Some
return years later, the migrants say. Others simply disappear.
Irene Fernandez, a Malaysian who heads a local
migrants' rights group called Tenaganita, said victims sometimes call from
the border begging for money to pay the traffickers.
"It's a conflict for us because we cannot
support any form of trafficking," she said. "At the same time, protection
of life is equally important."
The best she can honorably do, she said, is
to notify the immigrant communities in Kuala Lumpur, where people barely have
enough money to feed themselves, and hope they can find the means to save
their friends.
Terrorized by Rela, many of the migrants have
left their apartments in the city and built shacks of leaves and branches
in the surrounding jungle.
But Rela pursues them here as well, the migrants
say.
"Some jungle sites are periodically cleared
by local authorities, the inhabitants are displaced, valuables taken away
and at times shelters are burned to the ground," the medical aid group
Doctors Without Borders said in a recent report.
Despite the criticisms, Rela - an acronym
for the Malay words for People's Volunteer Corps - has been expanding in numbers
and in law enforcement powers over the past two years. As of November, it
had screened 156,070 people this year and had detained 30,332 for not having
travel documents, according to Home Affairs Minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad.
In a further extension of its powers, the
minister announced in November that Rela would take control of the country's
14 immigration detention centers and that the centers themselves would be
expanded.
Zaidon, the director general of Rela, said
his organization is expanding so fast that it is impossible to train most
of the volunteers or to carry out background checks before deputizing them
to make arrests.
"We cannot train half a million just
like that," he said. "It's an ongoing process. It will take time,
5 or 10 years."
If Rela members were overly scrupulous about
human rights, Zaidon said, they could not do their job.
"To stop a person by the roadside, that
is also against human rights," he said. "But if you talk about human
rights you cannot talk about security."
And so, the Rela volunteers cast a wide net
as they stop and search people who look like Asian foreigners. Most migrant
workers come from Indonesia, while others come from Bangladesh, India, Nepal
and Vietnam as well as from Myanmar.
In October, the Indonesian government protested
when Rela detained an Indonesian student and the wife of an Indonesian diplomat.
In both cases, the Indonesian government said, the victims produced documents
that were ignored by Rela.
Most of Rela's targets, though, are people
like Ndawng Lu, 59, an ethnic Kachin refugee from Myanmar who shares an apartment
with 20 other people.
Her neighbors fled and she remained alone
when Rela made a daytime raid this year, she said.
"They shouted at me, 'Where's the money?'
" she said. "I got down on my knees and begged them. 'I don't have
any money.' But they wanted money. They pulled stuff from under the bed. They
looked here, they looked there. They opened all our bags."
Her documents were in order, she said, and
the search party left her alone.
But when it departed, she said, "Everything
was a mess."
7 arrested at rights rally
Malaysian police detained seven people Sunday
for holding an illegal human rights rally, lawyers said, criticizing the arrests
as an assault on the right to assemble peacefully, The Associated Press reported
from Kuala Lumpur.
The Bar Council, which represents some 12,000
lawyers, had planned a march of 2.5 kilometers, or 1.5 miles, in downtown
Kuala Lumpur as part of a program to mark International Human Rights Day on
Monday but called off the event after refusing to seek a police permit. Any
gathering of more than four people in Malaysia requires police approval.
