Thailand offered yesterday to host a regional conference to prevent the mass migration — and resulting suffering — of refugees, after the Thai navy was accused of brutally mistreating boat people from Bangladesh.
Thai Foreign Ministry officials met envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Myanmar to discuss the exodus of refugees from camps in Bangladesh, ministry spokesman Thani Thongpakdee said.
“We are also in talks with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees both in Thailand and in Geneva to help alleviate what these people are facing right now,” he said.
Thousands of Bangladeshis and Rohingyas — members of a stateless, Muslim ethnic group that fled to Bangladesh to escape persecution in Myanmar — leave Bangladesh aboard rickety boats each year in hopes of finding work elsewhere. One of the most popular migration routes in recent years has been by boat to Thailand, then overland to Malaysia.
Thailand has recently come under fire for allegedly mistreating those migrants.
Two migrants told a refugees’ advocacy group they were among hundreds detained and beaten by Thai authorities on a remote island and abandoned in the Indian Ocean in boats with no engines and only a few bags of rice.
The Bangkok-based Arakan Project provided transcripts of the migrants’ accounts on Friday. It was the second time the group has released testimony from Bangladeshi and Rohingya illegal migrants who allege the Thai navy has left hundreds of them at sea twice since last month. About 300 are believed to have drowned in one of the incidents.
Thai military officials have repeatedly denied they forced migrants out to sea, insisting they only detain and then repatriate them.
The survivors who spoke to Arakan are jailed on India’s remote Andaman islands, where they were taken after an Indian helicopter spotted them on an island.
According to their accounts, they were headed from Bangladesh to Thailand when their boats were intercepted around Dec. 27 by Thai naval ships. They were detained with hundreds of other migrants for several days on a deserted Thai island in the Andaman Sea.
The migrants said they survived on banana leaves and handfuls of rice and were beaten by guards whom they identified as Thai security forces.
The Thai government initially denied the abuse charges, but Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said they would be probed.
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
Through a basement door in southeastern Turkey lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country’s largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century BC. Archeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city “almost by chance” after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020. Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120m of tunnel carved out of the rock. However, that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000m2 area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkey’s
Soaring high across a gorge in the rugged Himalayas, a newly finished bridge would soon help India entrench control of disputed Kashmir and meet a rising strategic threat from China. The Chenab Rail Bridge, the highest of its kind in the world, has been hailed as a feat of engineering linking the restive Kashmir valley to the vast Indian plains by train for the first time. However, its completion has sparked concern among some in a territory with a long history of opposing Indian rule, already home to a permanent garrison of more than 500,000 soldiers. India’s military brass say the strategic benefits
‘RADICAL LEFT LUNATIC’: Trump earlier criticized Kamala Harris, his new opponent, calling her ‘the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called on voters to defend the country’s democracy as he explained his decision to drop his bid for re-election and throw his support behind US Vice President Kamala Harris. As “the defense of democracy is more important than any title,” Biden said that he was stepping aside to deliver an implicit repudiation of former US president Donald Trump in his first public address since his announcement on Sunday that he would not be the Democratic candidate. He did not name Trump, whom he has called an existential threat to democracy. “Nothing, nothing can come in the