Migrants toil as ASEAN Ministers talk rights

THAILAND: As Southeast Asian Ministers endorsed a new human rights body at a luxury Phuket hotel, victims of the region’s abuses were hard at work nearby at the island’s fishing port.

Hundreds of migrant fishermen unloaded their overnight catch from brightly-coloured boats, while workers in rubber boots sorted the seafood into baskets for others to pile into trucks bound for various Thai provinces.

Most labourers here came to seek a better life away from military-ruled Myanmar, which has been considered the problem child of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) since it joined in 1997.

While the bloc’s new human rights body will require members to provide reports on their internal rights situations, critics say it will lack powers to punish Myanmar’s junta for rights abuses that have driven many citizens away. “It is a bit hard to live there. Than Shwe (the junta leader) has a black heart. He makes problems for people, he makes them poor,” said An Ny Ny Thew, a worker at the port who left Myanmar 13 years ago with her fisherman husband.

Taking a break from her job packing fish into baskets with ice, the 30-year-old told AFP that she left a construction job in Myanmar to find better-paid work in Thailand.

She said she now earns 5,000 - 6,000 baht (147 - 176 dollars) per month — a big improvement on the 1,000 baht she was paid in Myanmar. But she has had to send her two children, aged seven and five, back home to live with her mother.

“I have no permit to send my children to school in Thailand. If the children stay here I can’t work. I miss them but I have no money to go back to visit,” she said. Phuket, Wednesday, AFP