Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May 27, 2014

"The traffickers left us for dead" – a stateless Rohingya boy’s quest for a better life

A Rohingya Muslim prays at a detention centre in Kanchanaburi province, Thailand July 10, 2013. The stateless people arrived in Thailand in January after fleeing conflict in Myanmar's Rakhine state. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - By the time Muslim rubber tappers came across the boy in a jungle in southern Thailand, he was so weak he couldn’t even wave away the flies an d mosquitoes that covered his body.  The teenager, a stateless Rohingya Muslim from Myanmar, had become paralysed from the waist down after 10 weeks in a traffickers’ camp overseen by brutal guards, where he was forced to squat during the day and sleep in a foetal position at night.   The rubber tappers rescued the boy, whose name has been withheld to protect his identity, along with 30 others who had also lost the use of their legs, and took them to a nearby mosque where they were given food and shelter and slowly recovered. He had left his home in western Myanmar