There and Back Again

IT BEGAN AROUND 6 JUNE—two weeks after Thailand’s military chief, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, seized power. Cambodian migrant workers started fleeing the country en masse, driven by fears of a military-led crackdown on the irregular workforce. Already, the UN-affiliated International Organisation for Migration estimated, on any given day Thai authorities deported about 150 undocumented Cambodians to Poipet, a key checkpoint and transit town in Cambodia that straddles the Thai border. Now tens of thousands started spilling across, arriving in a stream of overcrowded cattle trucks, buses and Thai immigration vehicles.

I reached Poipet on 16 June. The normally quiet border was in pandemonium, with countless migrants, soldiers, police and relief officials teeming around. Some found a purpose handing out food and toiletries. Others waited, dazed, for news—any news—of what was going on.

Amid it all was Hon Channy. Soft-spoken and slight, the 21-year-old migrant worker huddled under a makeshift tent surrounded by garbage and a rising sludge. It had been raining for three days. She cradled her two-month-old daughter, Liza, seemingly unperturbed by the surrounding cacophony. “I was working illegally in a garment factory outside of Bangkok when my mother called me, urging me to come home,” she said through a translator. “She told me that the Thai army was conducting a massive crackdown on undocumented migrant workers. She heard rumours of workplaces being raided, Cambodians getting arrested and people getting shot.”

Not one to take chances, Hon Channy said, she repatriated voluntarily. She boarded a bus with her daughter, alongside scores of others, and was taken to an immigration police station in Aranyaprathet, just across the border from Poipet. After being processed, she was crammed into the back of a pickup truck for the seven-kilometre journey to Cambodia. After two days of travel, the tent was a welcome refuge, and she accepted it with placid resignation. She told me she paid a broker to smuggle her across the border just four months ago, when she was seven months pregnant, penniless and starving. “This was my third time in Thailand,” she said. “I was a subsistence farmer in Cambodia—I ate what I grew. I only made about 10,500 Baht a year”—about $330—“it was not enough to live on. I needed to escape. There are no jobs where I come from.”

Many Cambodians face the same worry. The International Labour Organisation estimates that between 250,000 and 300,000 new workers enter Cambodia’s labour market each year. The official unemployment rate is below 2 percent, but few workers find decent jobs or earnings. Most Cambodians rely primarily on agriculture, where the work is seasonal and the pay is low. The average monthly wage, according to the ILO, was a mere $119 in 2012—$130 for men, and just $105 for women. As a result, hundreds of thousands migrate in search of work every year, many of them to Thailand. There, the international NGO Human Rights Watch reports, migrants from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos make up the bulk of a foreign workforce numbering somewhere from 1.8 million to 3 million, including accompanying family members. They account for between 5 and 10 percent of Thailand’s total labour force. But, due to the vagaries of Thai regulations, most lack legal status, and so face a high risk of abuse and exploitation. With precious little employment at home and no certainty over their security and future in Thailand, Hon Channy and her fellow migrants are trapped in a cycle of displacement and fear.

“Life is extremely uncertain and unsafe for migrants in Thailand as they flee one difficult or deadly situation into another,” Brad Adams, Asia director at HRW, is quoted as saying in a report from the organisation. “They are a living example of the Thai proverb which describes how the vulnerable ‘escape from the tiger, but then meet the crocodile.’” In a 2010 investigative report, HRW found migrants facing repeated extortion, threats and physical harm, both from Thai authorities and their employers. Lacking proper documentation, the report states, many feel “powerless to resist such intimidation,” and “rarely complain because they fear retribution, are not proficient enough in the Thai language to protest, or lack faith in Thai institutions that too often turn a blind eye

to their plight.” While undocumented workers are the easiest targets, documented workers also regularly report similar abuses.

Overall, the same report states, “Thai government policy continues to be dominated by national security concerns with little regard to workers’ basic rights.” Undocumented migrants can be imprisoned for up to five years, and Thai law provides monetary rewards for informing on the whereabouts of undocumented workers. Once arrested, migrants must pay “substantial bribes, depending on the area, the circumstances of the arrest and the attitudes of the police officers involved.” The law also allows employers to deduct from a migrant’s pay to cover the cost of deportation, for which money is funneled into a government-controlled fund.

HRW also points out that migrants, both documented and otherwise, are often paid less than the minimum wage under Thai law. Hon Channy’s salary for loading garment trucks was just over $230 per month; the minimum wage is roughly $10 per day. But even with this, she said, she could cover her expenses and send money to her elderly mother in Cambodia. Many Cambodian families depend on such remittances, which the World Bank estimated to total $256 million in 2012. On occasions when migrants are promised higher wages, they face another set of potential risks, as those are sometimes used to lure them into forced labour, and into the hands of human traffickers. This year, a US State Department report blasted Thailand as “a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking.”

In Poipet, away from the crowds and standing next to an International Organisation for Migration bus, I met Brett Dickson, a project manager with the group. Dickson said he and his team had arrived about a week ago to find “total chaos.” Immediately, they began working alongside the Cambodian military to transport migrants to their home provinces. He estimated that about 157,000 had made the crossing in the last ten days, including 10,000 children. “There are lots of rumours circulating,” he told me. “What is clear is that we have an unprecedented situation on our hands. We have never seen so many migrants before. People had been left stranded, children are lost and separated from their parents … We have no idea how many migrants will return.” His outlook was bleak: “These migrants are returning to the same places where they couldn’t find a job and had no opportunities—the reason why they migrated in the first place.”

While Dickson worked into the night, the Thai military junta released a statement adamantly denying reports of a crackdown. Rather, Thai authorities claimed, most migrants were returning home to farm, while others had simply come to the end of their employment contracts. Still, there was no clarity. Just three days earlier, the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, an umbrella group of 21 non-profit organisations, had accused the Thai military of subjecting migrant workers to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” Its investigators said they had “credible witness accounts that up to nine Cambodian migrants had been killed and that beatings had occurred at the hands of the Thai armed forces.”

The migrants kept coming, and it was not until the end of the month that the scale of the displacement became clear. By 26 June, the IOM calculated, about 250,000 had crossed, in what Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen described as the largest repatriation the country has ever seen. Yet by 28 June, thousands began heading back to Thailand. Some took advantage of a new visa system set up by Thai authorities in an effort to regularise the labour force. Others, taking their chances, paid brokers to smuggle them across.

As night fell on the evening of 16 June, Hon Channy and baby Liza secured passage on a military truck bound for Battambang, their home province in north-west Cambodia, about 125 kilometres away. Hon Channy took one last glance around. Hundreds of migrants were climbing down from vehicles arriving from Thailand, and hundreds more were being crammed into vehicles headed into Cambodia. Cradling Liza, she climbed cautiously into the back of the truck, already overcrowded with migrants and their meager possessions. “I am going home to my mother,” Hon Channy told me. “I don’t know what I will do but there is always farming. I will go back once things settle down. All of us will. We make more money.”

A minute later the truck grumbled into life. Hon Channy formed the fingers on her free hand into a “V,” smiled and flashed me a peace sign, then settled down for the long night ahead.