Kuala lumpur (Malaysia): 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
RE:Foreign workers face campaign of brutality in Malaysia
by lablabia on Dec 12, 2007 12:06 AM Permalink
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 t
RE:RE:Foreign workers face campaign of brutality in Malaysia
by lablabia on Dec 12, 2007 12:07 AM Permalink
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 s
