Daily Times Tuesday, April 22, 2008
* Rioters protest UN failure to secure their placement in third country
KUALA LUMPUR: Detainees from Myanmar rioted at a Malaysian detention camp on Monday, torching a building, after hearing they had been denied asylum in a third country, the authorities said.
Some 72 Myanmarese, who were being held at a camp just outside the capital Kuala Lumpur, forced their way into an administrative block and set it ablaze, the Immigration Department’s head of enforcement, Ishak Mohammad, said. “They were disappointed on hearing the UNHCR (the UN Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) couldn’t get a placement for them in a third country,” he told Reuters. Malaysia considers them to be illegal immigrants.
Police said the rioters, who were unarmed, would be charged with arson. No one was injured. “They set fire at the ground floor causing damage to office furniture and computers,” the local Star newspaper quoted Osman Abdullah, the police chief in the southwestern Negeri Sembilan state, as saying in its online edition. The camp is located at Lenggeng in the state.
The camp, housing some 800 illegal immigrants including Bangladeshis and Indonesians, would be closed temporarily, the immigration department said. Malaysia is home to around 3 million foreign workers, 1 million of whom are working illegally, Home Minister Syed Albar said at the weekend. The country currently has about 39,000 refugees registered with the UNHCR, the body said.
Of the total, about 13,000 are members of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority and another 12,000 are members of other Myanmar minority ethnic groups. The Rohingyas came in the 1990s from Myanmar, but the government there disputes their origin and refuses to let them return. reuters
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