Human trafficking or modern day slavery!

AS REPORTED in the New Nation, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Friday observed that around 25,000 job-seekers, mostly Rohingyas and Bangladeshis, boarded smugglers’ boats from the Bay of Bengal between January and March this year, almost doubling the number over the same period in 2014. The report adds that around 300 people have died at sea this year and 320 others in the last three months of last year as a result of starvation, dehydration and beating by boat crew while being trafficked. This modern day slavery is being committed virtually, uninterruptedly, before the eyes of the law enforcers. Critics say, even members of BGB and Coast Guard are allegedly involved, in many cases, with the second most profitable international crime — human trafficking.
Bangladesh is one of the source countries to the human traffickers who lure vulnerable people, including female and youth, promising job in Malaysia. As legal channels of labour migration from Bangladesh have shrunk due to malpractices in the arrangements by both private agencies and the government, desperate job-seekers take dangerous sea route to Malaysia. Dreaming of high-paid jobs, they easily fall prey to a third party — transnational gangs pledging a secure sea voyage — and end up in a vicious web of abuses including torture and captivity en route, forced labour or humiliating deportation. Manpower export from Bangladesh to Malaysia has always been fraught with anomalies since it formally began in 1992. The repeated closure or opening of Malaysian labour market was never the case for Nepal or Indonesia. But Bangladesh faced it mostly because of corruption.
The fortune seekers died due to starvation and beating in the concentration camps run at Thai jungle alongside Malaysian border. Recently, Thai police have recovered 31 corpses from a jungle and arrested 36 people, including a mayor of local sub-district. The bodies are believed to belong to Rohingya and Bangladeshi boatpeople who died of hunger or disease or were hacked to death by the traffickers. On Friday, Thai Police recovered 100 suspected wandering migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh in southern Thailand. In Bangladesh the police is reported to have killed three alleged human slave traders in Cox’s Bazar on Friday.
It is easy to kill and that is why we want to insist on arresting them alive so that we can know about the persons who are part of the network of human trafficking.
The human trafficking is an international business and we must not allow our hapless people to be easy victims and take seriously the responsibility of looking after our jobless ones.