The headline and the photos hit me hard.. :54 MYANMAR MIGRANTS DIE IN THAI TRAGEDY"
Planes load of grads landing in Singapore everyday..and Bangkok and Malaysia.. to the more affuluent neighbours and further ashore!!
We heard and seen some Myanmar Nationals risked their lives swam across Johor Straith to only landed in the hand of Singapore law enforcers. They know they might drown. They know they might get caught. They paid a tidy sums for that passage all the way from Myanmar to Singapore...
A few months ago, from world telecasts we witnessed the Myanmar illegal Migrants' bodies floating in Thai's water.
And now..read and feel the extract from the news.." Survivors inside the truck told police the group traveled Wednesday night by fishing boat to Ranong, about 290 miles south of Bangkok, from Victoria Point, said Col. Kraithong Chanthongbai, police chief for Ranong's Suksamran district.
They were loaded into a cold storage truck normally used to carry seafood, locked inside and forced to ride standing up in a sweltering container area measuring 7 feet wide by 7 feet high and 20 feet long.
The migrants were on the road for about two hours when passengers started collapsing, survivors said. Temperatures in the province reached 93 degrees.
"I thought everyone was going to die," Saw Win, 30, told The Associated Press. "If the truck had driven for 30 minutes more, I would have died for sure."
He said that about 30 minutes into the trip the occupants pounded on the truck walls, screaming for ventilation, and then used a cell phone to call the driver, who briefly turned on air conditioning.
The air conditioning was later shut off, and they called the driver again 30 minutes later but his phone was off. They continued pounding and screaming until he stopped the truck about an hour later, unlocked the door and ran away when he saw the state of the victims, Saw Win said.
The translator for the police gave a somewhat different account.
He said survivors told him the air conditioning had broken down while the truck was waiting for a police checkpoint to close for the night.
The interpreter, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the driver ran away without unlocking the door.
It was only when nearby villagers heard screams and banging from the vehicle that they came to investigate and opened the doors, he said.
"When police got to the scene, they found that 54 of the workers were already dead in the packed container truck," said Kraithong, the police colonel. Thirty-seven of the dead were women and 17 were men. The 67 survivors were split about evenly between men and women.
Television footage showed police lifting bodies out of the truck until it was emptied except for a few pieces of clothing.
The dead, limbs stiffened and many wearing little more than T-shirts, shorts and sandals, were laid out on the floor of a storage facility of a local charity.
Why everyone is leaving home! Leaving families? And in droves? Why paid so much money to swim across the waters? Why paid money to get ferried through the non-ventilated van? Are they sure there is good things like good jobs waiting for them at the end of the passages?
Knowing life is a stake!High fees! The danger of exploitations! Feeling helpless and homesick abroad!
Well I can only think of one thing..The cons for calculated risks for uncertainties they may encounter seemed fairer than the pros of certain hardships at home..
BURMA DIASPORA (DIASPORA=the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland ).. if we have to name...
So more tragedies to come..(truely not anticipating but inevitable giving the state of the worsening who-cares economy back home)
