Summary
Rohingya children receive religious
education in an internment camp, Sittwe
Township, Rakhine State, Myanmar. The
camps lack adequate resources, including
food, medicine, shelter, and education,
driving many Rohingya families to flee the
country.
©Fortify Rights, 2014
repurposed fishing vessels and deprived them of adequate food, water, and space. Many
victims died at sea at the hands of the traffickers or by suicide, jumping into open waters to
escape the pain and suffering inflicted by their captors.
Chapter II documents human traffickers’ abuses in human-trafficking camps along the
Malaysia-Thailand border, including in Wang Kelian and in human-trafficking houses in
Malaysian and Thai towns and cities. Traffickers killed and buried the bodies of trafficked
victims in mass graves; in some cases, forcing captives to bury the bodies. Traffickers
also inflicted pain and suffering on their captives using pipes, bats and clubs, belts, wires,
tasers, nails, threats and intimidation, and other means.
“When I was unable to pay the money to the men, they poured boiling water on my head
and body,” said “Rahim Ullah,” a Rohingya Muslim from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, who
was 16-years old when traffickers tortured him in a camp on the Malaysia-Thailand border
in 2014. “They did this every day . . . My legs are no longer conscious. They are numb, and
there is not enough circulation.”
Traffickers in the camps denied their captives access to adequate food, water, and space,
resulting in deaths, illness, and injury—including paralysis—particularly of those unable
pay the money demanded by the traffickers to obtain their release.
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