Thailand offered yesterday to host a regional conference to prevent the mass migration — and resulting suffering — of refugees, after the Thai navy was accused of brutally mistreating boat people from Bangladesh.
Thai Foreign Ministry officials met envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Myanmar to discuss the exodus of refugees from camps in Bangladesh, ministry spokesman Thani Thongpakdee said.
“We are also in talks with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees both in Thailand and in Geneva to help alleviate what these people are facing right now,” he said.
Thousands of Bangladeshis and Rohingyas — members of a stateless, Muslim ethnic group that fled to Bangladesh to escape persecution in Myanmar — leave Bangladesh aboard rickety boats each year in hopes of finding work elsewhere. One of the most popular migration routes in recent years has been by boat to Thailand, then overland to Malaysia.
Thailand has recently come under fire for allegedly mistreating those migrants.
Two migrants told a refugees’ advocacy group they were among hundreds detained and beaten by Thai authorities on a remote island and abandoned in the Indian Ocean in boats with no engines and only a few bags of rice.
The Bangkok-based Arakan Project provided transcripts of the migrants’ accounts on Friday. It was the second time the group has released testimony from Bangladeshi and Rohingya illegal migrants who allege the Thai navy has left hundreds of them at sea twice since last month. About 300 are believed to have drowned in one of the incidents.
Thai military officials have repeatedly denied they forced migrants out to sea, insisting they only detain and then repatriate them.
The survivors who spoke to Arakan are jailed on India’s remote Andaman islands, where they were taken after an Indian helicopter spotted them on an island.
According to their accounts, they were headed from Bangladesh to Thailand when their boats were intercepted around Dec. 27 by Thai naval ships. They were detained with hundreds of other migrants for several days on a deserted Thai island in the Andaman Sea.
The migrants said they survived on banana leaves and handfuls of rice and were beaten by guards whom they identified as Thai security forces.
The Thai government initially denied the abuse charges, but Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said they would be probed.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema