SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Something quite remarkable has been happening this year at Mae Sot, a Thai border town about 500 kilometres north-west of Bangkok.
This remote and otherwise nondescript place is one of the most important links between Thailand and Myanmar, which inevitably makes it a hub for transnational shipments of all manner of contraband and dubiously sourced resources.
The remote town of Mae Sot on the Thai-Myanmar border is a hub for trafficking all manner of contraband, from drugs to people.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Much of it pours eastward over the border to Thailand, and then to the world beyond. Drugs, for example.
Illegal stuff goes the other way, too. For the past five years, at least, jaw-droppingly vast flows of a particularly valuable resource have been smuggled into Myanmar, making for what the United Nations has labelled a humanitarian crisis.
It is people, many of them with little or no education, and from impoverished nations. They are the workforce of the Myanmar scam compounds, the human production line of sophisticated online swindles that reap billions of dollars a year from ordinary people around the world. Estimates put the number of scam workers in Myanmar at more than 100,000.
Some of them in the eastern regions of Myanmar choose the work, to be sure, but it appears many more are lured into Thailand with fake job offers, then trafficked over the border where the Asian crime syndicates behind frauds operate with near impunity.
Indonesian trafficking victims wait to be processed at the Thai border after being released.Credit: Kate Geraghty
This extraordinary and complex ecosystem, however, is not the remarkable happening I’m referring to. What is remarkable is that thousands of trafficked workers are being freed as part of a clampdown by Thailand.
Photographer Kate Geraghty and I recently visited the borderlands to see for ourselves, flying into Mae Sot at the peak of the chaotic and high-stakes human transfers to the safety of Thailand.
Our reporting began rather inauspiciously. Day one involved Kate and I standing for hours atop a rocky, steep and shadeless wasteland beside the Mae Sot immigration facility, peering through long lenses and gaps in fencing for glimpses of the freed workers coming over the Friendship Bridge 2.
It was so hot that my phone shut down. Soon, we were meeting people breathing in their first minutes of freedom after months and even years as captives in Myanmar.
One man, who asked to be known as Munra, told us how he’d gone to Bangkok to get an old leg injury fixed once and for all, only to be abducted at gunpoint by the man who was supposed to be taking him to the hospital. Instead of medical treatment, he was sent to the scamlands of Myanmar.
Was the story real? It’s impossible to say. But such things happen – there are no rules or decorum in the elaborate parallel universe of the scam gangsters. As if whiffing my scepticism, Munra retrieved his leg X-rays from his beaten-up backpack.
From Mae Sot, we wangled our way into an armoured convoy of Thai military men patrolling the border. They showed us the vast crime estates just over the Moei River, pointing out the white terminal dishes atop the compound rooftops: “Starlink”, they said, courtesy of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. They told us this was how the scammers in these remote borderlands stay connected to the global victim marketplace.
A Royal Thai Army soldier patrols the market located on a sandbar in the middle of the Moei River, that separates Thailand and Myanmar. Credit: Kate Geraghty
Our reporting branched into unexpected areas by way of conversations with the Karen, an ethnic group from eastern Myanmar. Meandering up and down the borderlands, passing through innumerable checkpoints where guards took our photos, in case we were trafficked ourselves, we visited a secret hospital treating wounded soldiers of the resistance in Myanmar’s brutal civil war.
More driving, and we met with refugees and internally displaced people escaping the violence wrought by Myanmar’s ruling junta. One stony-faced group waded across the Moei to Thailand to tell us stories of their uncertain hell. Then we watched them wade back again.
