By Ariel Lin
Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia
BANGKOK, Thailand – 121 Burmese migrant workers crammed inside a 20 feet long and 7 feet wide seafood container while being smuggled into Thailand as illegal laborers on Thursday. 37 women and 17 men suffocate to dead in the back of the truck. Another 67 people were still alive when Thai police officers opened the container. Some Survivors were hospitalized and the others were held for questioning, according to Col. Kraithong Chanthongbai, the local police commander in Ranong Province, on Myanmar’s border.
Survivors told police that they each paid 10,000 baht (US$314) to be smuggled into Thailand. One of the survivors, Saw Win, said that about 30 minutes into the trip workers pounded on the container, screamed for air and called the driver, who briefly turned on the air conditioning. The air conditioning later went off, and they called the driver again 30 minutes later but his phone was off. They shouted and banged on the sides of the sweltering container until he stopped the truck about an hour later, unlocked the container and fled when he saw the state of the victims.
“Television reports showed police lifting bodies out of the truck and images of the cargo-like container empty except for a few pieces of clothing,” AP reports. “The dead migrants—many wearing little more than T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops—were seen laid out on the floor at a storage facility of a local charity.”
The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said in a report in 2005 that workers from Myanmar “are routinely paid well below the Thai minimum wage, work long hours in unhealthy conditions and are at risk of arbitrary arrest and deportation.” These workers are typically brought into the country by large smuggling syndicates in difficult and often dangerous condition.
The deaths illustrated the increasing human trafficking activities across borders into countries as far apart in the world as the United States, Britain and Thailand. In 2001, 58 illegal Chinese migrants died when they were crammed into a sweltering tomato truck on the way to England. In a similar incident in 2003 in Texas, 19 Latin American migrants died from overheating and suffocation inside a trailer truck.
For more information, please see:
AFP – 54 Myanmar migrants die while being smuggled into Thailand – 10 April 2008
AP – 54 Myanmar Migrants Die in Thailand – 10 April 2008
New York Time – Migrants Perish in Truck to Thailand – 11 April 2008
Thai News Agency MCOT – Interior Minister calls for urgent probe of Myanmar migrant workers’ tragedy – 10 April 2008
USA Today – Thai police find 54 dead Burmese migrants in truck – 10 April 2008
