Murba ﻤﻮﺮﺑﺎ

Kyaw Kyaw, 27 and Naing Aung, 28

We are refugees. We ran away from Burma in October 2007 in a crackdown after the "Golden Revolution", which were a demonstration organized by monks against fuel hikes.

We arrived here in Malaysia on the 15th October 2008. Since then, we have been working as construction workers in Nilai, Negeri Sembilan.

On the 12th February 2008, we were arrested in our "Rumah Kongsi" at the construction site at about 9.30pm, this operation was carried out by the joint forces of RELA, the Immigration Dept. and the police. We were brought to Nilai Police Station where we were held in the lock up for one night. The next afternoon we were sent to Lenggeng Detention Camp, Negeri Sembilan.

Inside the Lenggeng Detention Camp

All new detainees in the camp are brought into one room asked to strip naked. The wardens will then laugh and ridicule the detainees. It is during these sessions that money, hand phones, wristwatches, jewelry and valuables are taken by the wardens, we never got our belongings back.

In the mornings, detainees are given teh O and one piece of bread. Lunch consists of rice with a small piece of salted fish and a little vegetable soup.

There is a lack of water in the camp. Drinking water is taken from the tap, and it is never boiled.

Sick detainees will be sent to different room and isolated from the others.

We were made to parade in an identification line four times a day. Lights out was at 11pm.

Deportation

We were deported from Lenggeng Detention Camp on 22nd March 2008 to Sg. Golok, Kelantan, the Malaysia-Thailand border. We were then put into the hands of 5 human traffickers. We were given orders by the human traffickers to sit down, heads facing the ground and warned not to look into their faces, they told us that if we failed to comply, they would hit us with sticks. We did as we were told. We believe that they possessed guns.

We were then brought into a jungle in the vicinity of the Thai border. The agents asked us, "Anybody can pay for you to go back to Malaysia or Myanmar? Do you have any friends in Malaysia who can pay? If you have any friends give us their contact number". There were about 45 of us. We were divided into two groups based on whether we could or could not afford to pay for the passage back into Malaysia.

We were in the category of those "who can afford to pay". We were going to go back as we have many friends in Malaysia. There were 12 people in our group. The rest were in the other group because they wanted to go back to Burma and they have friends there to support them. We don't know what happened to the detainees that could not afford to pay. We were asked for RM1800 per head. We chose not to go back to Burma because we are afraid to get arrested and sent to prison by the junta, even worse, to get killed. The money was banked-in to the agent's bank account.

We spent two days in the jungle. On the last night, we were brought into a car and sent to the Malaysian border. After that we changed cars, there were 9 of us including the driver. We were brought to Kuala Lumpur.

Kyaw Kyaw and Naing Aung are two of the thousands of "refugees for sale" human-trafficking involving authority and agents in Malaysia.

(Both names and photos are not real)