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 The foreign ministers of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia will
meet in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday to discuss how to tackle
trafficking, after the clampdown led criminals to abandon boats
crammed with thousands of migrants rather than risk landing on Thai
shores.
Boatloads of Bangladeshi migrants and Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar
have arrived in the waters of Indonesia and Malaysia, and many
thousands more migrants remain adrift.
Southeast Asian governments have shown little sign of a coordinated
response to the crisis and have pushed some migrant boats back and
forth across their maritime borders.
The Royal Thai Police said they suspected Patchuban Angchotipan, a
former official in the provincial government of the southern Satun
province, was the boss of a large human trafficking network.
"In Satun province he is high-level," said Thai national police
chief General Somyot Poompanmuang. "He is the chief. He has many
subordinates."
 Patchuban, whose nickname is 'Kor Tong', has been charged with a
range of offences including human trafficking, smuggling illegal
migrant workers into Thailand, detention of others leading to bodily
harm and holding people for ransom.
He denies the charges against him.
Thailand ordered a clean-up of suspected traffickers' camps earlier
this month after 33 bodies, believed to be of migrants from Myanmar
and Bangladesh, were found in shallow graves near the Malaysian
border.
Bangkok is under international pressure to show progress after the
United States last year downgraded Thailand and Malaysia to its list
of the worst centers of human trafficking.
Police have arrested 30 people over the past two weeks suspected of
links to human trafficking networks, said Thai Deputy National
Police Chief Lieutenant General Jaktip Chaijinda. Thirty-five others
are still on the run.
STRANDED AT SEA
Some 2,500 migrants have landed in Malaysia and Indonesia over the
past week, while around 5,000 remain stranded at sea in rickety
boats with dwindling supplies of food and water.
Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand have turned back or towed
overcrowded migrant boats away from their coastlines, in what the
International Organization for Migration has described as "maritime
ping-pong with human lives".
Ministerial talks in Malaysia on Wednesday would focus on
human trafficking and people smuggling in the region, Malaysia's
foreign ministry said in a statement.
Thai and Indonesian foreign ministry officials did not immediately
comment on what they expected to get out of the meeting.
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An estimated 25,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingya boarded smugglers'
boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many as in
the same period of 2014, the United Nations' refugee agency has
said.
Thai junta leader and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has vowed to
stamp out human trafficking gangs, making the well-trodden route
through Thailand to Malaysia too risky for criminals who prey on
Rohingya fleeing oppression in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and
Bangladeshis looking for better livelihoods abroad.
The United Nations said last week that the deadly pattern of
migration across the Bay of Bengal would continue unless Myanmar
ended discrimination.
Most of Myanmar's 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims are stateless and
live in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine State. Almost 140,000
were displaced in clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012.
Malaysia, which says it has already taken in 120,000 illegal
migrants from Myanmar, prodded Myanmar to deal with the crisis on
Sunday and said it may call an emergency meeting of the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to deal with the issue.
But officials from Myanmar were defiant on Monday.
"We don't think they are refugees who run away from Rakhine State
because of the clashes," Information Minister Ye Htut was quoted as
saying by Myanmar state TV.
Zaw Htay, a senior official from the president's office, said that
while some of the "boat people" were from Myanmar, "the origin of
these boat people is Bangladesh."
Myanmar terms the Rohingya "Bengalis", a name most Rohingya reject
because it implies they are immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh
despite having lived in Myanmar for generations.
(Additional reporting by Pracha Hariraksapitak in BANGKOK; Editing
by Simon Webb and Alex Richardson)
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