54 Burmese Migrants Suffocate On Thai Soil

[Junglejumbo]

--AP 2008-04-10 MAY BUDDHA AND GOD BLESS THEM ALL AND THEIR LOVE ONES, I CRY A THOUSAND TEARS FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE, WHAT A WASTE OF LIVES, THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE IS IN THE HEART AND THE LAND, MAY HEALTH AND HAPPINESS BE WITH US ALL, ALWAY BE SURE TO LET YOUR LOVE ONES KNOW, THAT YOU CARE, AS IT COULD BE YOUR LAST WORDS.

KOTO KEEPER OF THE OCEAN

I think only loved ones will be crying a thousand tears and nobody will be crying a thousand tears for each and everyone. Let's keep the discussion real.

I just can't imagine why 120 people would get into a truck space which is just 6 metres long by 2.2 meters. That's 10 people per square metre. They must have had some people sitting on shoulders of others sitting on the floor, or literally lying on top of each other allowing just some room for the head to breath. This is obviously not only a fault of the truck firm and driver, but also of the Burmese. Rich or poor have to learn that money isn't everything in life. People in Burma are not dying of starvation...there's no famine or disease leaving people without any choices..And most of these people came from the Islands, which are abundant in fresh fruit and fish, and have a growing tourist trade.

[LiveSteam]

people pay to get into this hellhole ?

it's only a paradise for rich old FAT farang farts and the local thai rich population that does everything to suppres that kind of people but are happy to emploi them for a few thousand (4-5) baht to work as maid, ...

Wish I could be a RICH OLD FAT FARANG, you can get more chicks and it pisses off skinny cheap charlies back-packer types.

LiveSteam

[mitrapaap]

thailand is a 3rd world country..what is burma a 4th world country..wanting to be smuggled in to thailand must mean things are alot worse then anyone knows..

Are you serious ??

"Thailand a 3rd world country" when did they get promoted ?

It will be a long time before events like these are relegated to history. Human life means very little here and even less in Burma.

I feel sorry for the people who died, but feeling sorry ain't gonna bring them back.

And there they go again, with their 3rd world and 4th world couuntry bull shit.

Believe having read some posts mentioning about same cases in the UK and US, aren't those 1st world countries?

[sriracha john]

The tomb and its occupants....

Matichon newspaper

[tropo]

Kraithong blamed the driver for failing to turn on the air conditioning in the back of the truck, which normally was used to transport seafood.

Perhaps some expert on air-conditioning may correct me on this, but would air-conditioning have made any difference? I would have thought that an air-conditioning unit would just recirculate the same air inside the air-tight container. Perhaps cooler air may have given them a little more time?

Edited April 10, 2008 by tropo

[sriracha john]

Thailand volunteer rescue workers collect the bodies of dead Myanmar migrant workers Thursday, April 10, 2008, from the back of a seafood van in Ranong, Thailand. Fifty-four migrant workers from Myanmar, most of them women, suffocated in the back of an unventilated seafood truck in southern Thailand while being smuggled to the popular resort island of Phuket, police said Thursday.

Associated Press

Edited April 10, 2008 by sriracha john

[RobinHolmes]

A terrible thing to happen anywhere..........yes it has happened in England too. There are evil bastards everywhere taking advantage of poor people.

[isabelle17]

Thats such a terrible way to die and the fact that the driver didn't stop for them until many of them died shows how horrible of a person he is. RIP.

[mads]

Terrible.......R.I.P

[hardy1943]

A terrible thing to happen anywhere..........yes it has happened in England too. There are evil bastards everywhere taking advantage of poor people.

YES MONEY IS EVERYTHING

[Meg_2003]

Disgusting - Terrible way to die.. RIP to all.

[stanley2550]

Should the Police thru diligent police work find the driver, hopefully they can find the smuggling ring which is no doubt made up of Thai people who were to receive or had received the blood money.

Hopefully too they will all hang.

Hopefully too the Junta in Burma will meet the same fate; soon!

[wrecker]

It remains te be seen how the Thai police will handle this matter. in former (mass murder) cases related to Burmese, they walked simply away from it. It would be absurd to arrest only the driver, as you can assume that the big fish are related to people in high circles.

[Junglejumbo]

Looking at the pictures, and thanks for them, I can only confirm to myself that the Burmese were just as much to blame as anyone. They may be poor but they're not animals; they're all born with a human brain capable of thinking and having some common sense. Just look at the shear number of people, and that's only the dead people, and double that number to include injured and survivors and then imagine them all in that space.....anyone getting into that truck is akin to walking off a cliff when being told to do so. The air-condition or not, these people would have died, this is about space and oxygen. In fact the air-condition may have shortened their lives more, as compressors suck out a degree of oxygen along with the heat.

There are also legal means for Burmese to enter Thailand legally. Many Burmese and Laoatioan currently work legally and anyone who's been to Suan plu over the past few years will notice that the majority people are Burmese.

[razino]

RIP and condolence to the families...

[scotbeve]

people pay to get into this hellhole ?

it's only a paradise for rich old FAT farang farts and the local thai rich population that does everything to suppres that kind of people but are happy to emploi them for a few thousand (4-5) baht to work as maid, ...

Hellhole???? What the hel_l are you doing here then????? I, myself, am not particularally rich, not too old, nor too fat (I DO fart tho'... ) and my Burmese workers are: paid the same as Thai workers, have the same health scheme (if not better) than Thais, get 3 holiday bonuses a year, get paternity leave (paid). Their only restrictions are, of course, caused by the xenophobic government wallies and their suffocating red-tape rules and regs....

[jmdelan5]

I know we all have our rants and complaints ( I'm one of the worst offenders).

Yet when stories like this come to light, it makes one sit back and take stock of the things we actually have, not just the things that we would like to have.

These poor people are being exploited in the most terrible way, their only crime is to be born poor.

I for one feel very fortunate at this moment, to be sitting in my A/C office having the time to surf the web whilst getting paid.

For many of the worlds population, the very things we take for granted are only dreams that will remain dreams forever.

Stories like this are very disturbing.

RIP to all.

how the heck did they get 121 in a space that small? a true tragedy. can you imagine the horror of their last few minutes?

RIP

[dougieboy]

My heart goes out to all the families of those who died, many of them I have no doubt where seeking to eventually richen the lives of those they left behind. I hope the smugglers are caught and receive the highest level of punishment available, surley someone knows when and where the truck was purchased/registered. I am so touched by this terrible event.

[Brigante7]

I know we all have our rants and complaints ( I'm one of the worst offenders).

Yet when stories like this come to light, it makes one sit back and take stock of the things we actually have, not just the things that we would like to have.

These poor people are being exploited in the most terrible way, their only crime is to be born poor.

I for one feel very fortunate at this moment, to be sitting in my A/C office having the time to surf the web whilst getting paid.

For many of the worlds population, the very things we take for granted are only dreams that will remain dreams forever.

Stories like this are very disturbing.

RIP to all.

Hear Hear.

It's the same old story, money talks.

[Artisi]

This should leave any thinking person speechless knowing fullwell that there wouldn't have been any check at the border as money certainly would have changed hands to look the other way.

[george]

Update:

RANONG TRAGEDY

Owner of ill-fated truck arrested

RANONG: -- Police arrested the owner of the cold storage truck which was used to smuggle 121 Burmese, 54 of whom died from suffocation just two hours into their journey that started in Ranong province on late Wednesday.

Damrong Pussadee was arrested Thursday morning at his residence that doubled as a used-cars outlet in Ranong's Muang district.

Damrong admitted that the truck belonged to him and identified Suchon Boonblog as the driver of the ill-fated truck. Suchon fled when he saw the victims in the back of his truck.

It was not clear if Damrong admit to any wrong doing.

A senior police officer said that Damrong was just a middle man behind the human smuggling ring linked to the tragic incident late Wednesday.

He were allegedly paid Bt5,000 per each Burmese, which would mean that he would be receiving Bt500,000 per route.

--The Nation 2008-04-10

[lazeeboy]

54 Burmese migrants suffocate

BANGKOK: -- At least 54 Burmese migrant workers suffocated as they were being smuggled into Thailand inside a cold storage container.

Another 21 were seriously injured, police said.

The victims were among 121 people crammed inside the container that was 6m long and only 2.2m wide, said Colonel Kraithong Chanthongbai, commander of the local police station in the southern border province of Ranong where the bodies were found.

The airtight container was normally used to carry frozen seafood.

But the migrants were trying to enter Thailand by hiding inside the container which was travelling across the border, he said.

The migrants were supposed to pay a Thai smuggling ring 5000 baht ($170) each to transport them from the Burma-Thai border in Ranong to the nearby resort isle of Phuket, he said.

Once there, they hoped to find work as day labourers, he said.

When the man driving the truck carrying the container realised some of the migrants had died, he parked on the side of a road, opened the door to the container, and fled.

"The people said they tried to bang on the walls of the container to tell the driver they were dying, but he told them to shut up as police would hear them when they crossed through checkpoints inside Thailand," he said.

The 46 people who survived without injury had been arrested.

-- AFP 2008-04-10

unbelievable what people will do for 100baht

[easybullet3]

how sad. thats awful.

and to think that the thai police have stuck the survivors in a nasty thai jail! and yes, I wonder if they ever do anything about the smugglers that recieved a nice big sum of money ffrom these poor immigrants.

where is the heart? surely the immigrants deserved a bit of nice treatment for the ordeal they went through. being arrested after such a sad event is the icing on the cake!!

and some rich smugglers are probably having a great time somewhere, enjoying life and its benefits... I wonder if a few police were ever paid off too by these guys.

appauling that the 'little guy' ends up at the bottom.

yup. absolutely... my heart goes to the families and the people that died.

and, 'shame' on the thai system

[maamoot]

What a tragic sad story this is .

[callipposhots]

A similar incident happened when chinese workers were suffocted trying to enter England. However, rather than arrest the perpetrators or the survivors the English sent a police group over to China to investigate and the families of the chinese dead wanted compensation from the English tax-payer.

total rubbish.

the lorry driver got 14 years jail for manslaughter, the Turkish 'brains' got 10 years and various other members of the conspiracy also got fairly lengthy jail terms on related charges.

there was also no chance of the UK government compensating the victims, as the crime was actually conceived and the conspiracy executed in the Netherlands. The act of switching off the air vent and the supply of oxygen to the victims, causing their deaths, took place in Belgium, not the UK. The victims died in international waters.

in the Morecambe cockling incident, when 20 Chinese drowned, the compensation fund set up by the film maker Nick Broomfield and others only received 20,000 UK pounds in donations.

http://linkchinese.net/news/2007/06/21/morecambe-victims/

[CaptainNemo]

Terrible though it is, it's also extremely common. As said, we see Africans habitually chancing it across the med'; not to mention the influx of eastern Europeans to the West, and Chinese peasants too... even in northern Italy, where there were anti-Chinese immigrant riots not too long ago. I'm sure Americans could report the huge Latino influx north.

This is a direct result of globalisation and free-market capitalism, and the neo-colonialist policy of immigrationism where you institutionalise the import of cheap labour from the developing world to keep costs low for the relatively affluent and exploit the working classes of the host population and the poor immigrants... it's like covert slavery... it's promoted the massive growth of human trafficking and effective slave-trade that profits only criminal gangs like these and ruling elites, whether gangster regimes like in Burma, or corporate capitalist regimes like in the "West".

It isn't sustainable; it's also immoral.

Unfortunately, I think as global population growth seems to be exponential in some parts of the developing world, this is only going to get worse, as increasing numbers of desparate people fight over pressured resources. The rice riots across the world are alarming and depressing forebodings of what may come.

In pre-emptive response to any criticisms...

...No, I'm not a commie; but I am an ethical patriot: because I believe in putting people before profits; and because I believe in putting my own ethnic group before aliens and immigrants in my own country.

...Solution to human trafficking... The "West" needs to stop immigration, and take the issue to the developing world and basically re-instate a version of locally-supported colonialism, where we create Special Economic Zones in the developing world, and train and manage the people to manage themselves better... a sort of merger of the UN and NATO.

Of course, I'm well aware that this sounds naive and idealistic now; but I'm not so sure it will in a couple of decades time when world population is up another 50%...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

...and food (farmable land) and freshwater resources,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security...al_water_crisis

...even in Thailand... the Mekong could be reduced to a trickle over the next 30 years... Camel Treks across the Isaan desert might be nice though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security...o_food_security

At the end of the day, these poor people risked all because there ain't no Clint Eastwood to ride into town and kick out the baddies; because Burma's puppetmaster China has such an enormous positive trade balance with the "West", and "our" governments are too short-termist and cowardly to take on China... we can see from the pugilistic, arrogant, and aggressive response from the Chinese to the public ourpouring of revulsion with Chinese behaviour in Tibet before these Olympics the monster we're feeding.

The only hope is that the pro-Tibet, anti-China protests gather such momentum that they force democratic governments to stand up to China, and threaten the boycott of the Olympics... that's the key to stopping this kind of human trafficking happening in the first place.

I read though, that the influx of Burmese, and South Asians into Thailand is starting to alarm even Thai people. My wife, from a military family, is particulary hostile to this... including the Sino-Thais (the fair skinned ones with extra-long Thai made-up names - "chitty-chitty-bang-bangs" as my wife called them!)

Edited April 10, 2008 by CaptainNemo

[george]

Interior Minister calls for urgent probe of Myanmar migrant workers' tragedy

BANGKOK: -- Thailand's Interior Minister Chalerm Yoobamrung on Thursday instructed the governor of Ranong to speed up the investigation of a Myanmar migrant workers' mass death by suffocation tragedy.

The interior minister's call for prompt action was made after at least 54 illegal Myanmar migrant workers being smuggled into Thailand's murky labour underworld, most of them women, died of suffocation in a small container truck designed to carry seafood for long distances under refrigeration.

The vehicle belonging to Rung Ruangsab company was taking them to the popular twin Andaman Sea resort destinations of Phuket and Phang-nga in hope of a better life. The driver of the vehicle fled the scene, apparently in fear of being prosecuted by the authorities.

Survivors told police that they each paid 5,000 baht (US$157) to be smuggled into Thailand.

The tragic incident is the first of its kind to have taken place in Thailand, which involves the death of illegal migrant workers in such a scale.

Pressed by media who questioned how a tragedy of such scale could take place, Mr. Chalerm conceded that it was difficult to prevent human trafficking across the porous Thai-Myanmar border.

The driver of the truck carrying 123 intending workers were crammed into the ill-fated cold storage container truck, and at last 54 did not survive due to suffocation.

The interior minister said he is asking Thailand's border-related authorities to consider using the United States' stringent border-control measures to cope with illegal immigration, which he believed might help solve the problem more systematically.

"The illegal immigrant problem is one of the government's top priorities, but if the government is too strict, it might affect Thailand's industrial sector, However, laxity or not strict enough law enforcement, can also affect the country's security," said the minister.

Thailand's industrial sector, the fisheries in particular, currently relies on the cheap labour such migrant workers from neighbouring countries -- especially Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos -- provided.

--TNA 2008-04-10

[Heng]

people pay to get into this hellhole ?

it's only a paradise for rich old FAT farang farts and the local thai rich population that does everything to suppres that kind of people but are happy to emploi them for a few thousand (4-5) baht to work as maid, ...

5,500 Baht. And that's on top of room, board, and medical.

[Heng]

It would be absurd to arrest only the driver, as you can assume that the big fish are related to people in high circles.

Maybe not. There are plenty of unconnected (but still relatively big fish nonetheless) low lifes out there. They are the "big fish" that sometimes wash up dead for no good reason - other than pissing off bigger fish.

[TheWizardofRnR]

Thailand definitely needs to do something to get some good news in the world press.

As it sounds now , come to Thailand and see if you'll be a SURVIVOR.....if you're still alive , after your visit you've won !!!

Between walking on the beaches or arguing with the wrong person or being smuggled into Paradise

or motorcycle bandits , not satisfied with robbing people , figure they get extra points for a senseless kill..... they'll even try to swim out to your boat (He was a Farang tryin' to rob & kill some Yactties in PKT , but wound up dead himself )

It's time to either hire a larger police force at better wages or make do with the way it is now but stop wasting their time (as many police forces do) on non- violent crime....make those offenses , most anyway, a fine , raising the amount of the fine for 3-5 offenses, then a jail term on the same scale , or by number of offenses raises your sentence.

Surveys done on police and non-violent crime statistics , always show , if time is not wasted on

non-violent crimes......Violent criminal acts decrease with the increase of arresting officers available to deal with the perps.

Please get Thailand some good press TOT ! BB