81 The house was built with bricks, and then we moved to another older house. [The traffickers] were two Rohingya men from Maungdaw [Township in Myanmar]. I don’t know their names. We couldn’t move inside the house, and we couldn’t go outside. They forced us to call our relatives to ask for 7,000 Malaysian Ringgit (US$2,000). If we didn’t call, they beat us. We were forced to call once at 12 p.m. in the daytime and once at 1 a.m. in the nighttime. We called every day. There were 350 people in the house.266 After being held captive by human traffickers for eight days in a house in Thailand, Thai [state agency redacted] raided the house and took Ula Mya into custody. He said: “First, the [state agency redacted] arrested us and then sent us to the detention center. The dallals escaped. The [state agency redacted] broke the door down and came inside and then lined us up and put us in trucks. I felt happy when I saw the [state agency redacted].”267 The Thai authorities then detained him and 185 other survivors in an overcrowded cell for almost a year. He described the conditions of detention to Fortify Rights, saying: It was very congested. We couldn’t sleep flat. We only had a small space to sleep. There was no space to walk around. We had to crawl over each other. I couldn’t see the floor, only piles of human flesh. We got one small package of rice and a little vegetables and beans. There was no sunlight, no windows. There were only metal bars.268 After nearly nine months in detention, Ula Mya and the other detainees went on a hunger strike. In response, Thai authorities handed Ula Mya and others over to human traffickers: The [state agency redacted] took us at 12 a.m. to [their] bus. At 8 a.m., we arrived in Ranong [in southern Thailand]. The [state agency redacted] provided us food and took photos of both sides of our face. Then we took another car. They took us to the river. There was a bridge. We sat on the bridge for a while, and they provided some instant food there, and then they took us to a boat. There were three medium-sized boats. The operators looked Burmese or Shan. They didn’t talk, and the [authorities] also had a boat. There were three members of [state agency redacted]. They stayed with us until [we got to] the middle of the river. Then the [authorities] took a picture and turned around and left us.269 The traffickers then transferred Ula Mya and approximately 270 other Rohingya to two subsequent ships followed by a fleet of vans until ultimately reaching a human-trafficking camp in the mountains. Ula Mya described the camp, saying: [The traffickers] took us to one big mountain and dropped us [off] there. From that place, we walked for three hours to reach another mountain that was surrounded by an iron fence. They had made some camps there with canvas and bamboo and put us there . . . The Shan and Rohingya operated that camp. There were already many people there, and after us, there were many newcomers. There were around 800 people . . . If we spoke to each other, they would beat us. They would beat us with a wooden stick.270 In several cases, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)—the U.N. agency mandated to protect refugees—visited Rohingya in Thai detention whom the Thai authorities later transferred to human traffickers. For instance, UNHCR representatives visited “Abdul R.” in 2013 after he fell ill while detained in an immigration detention center in Ranong, Thailand. He told Fortify Rights: 266 Fortify Rights interview with #17, Pahang State, Malaysia, August 13, 2014. 267 Ibid. 268 Ibid. 269 Ibid. 270 Ibid.