Rights groups hit at Malaysia worker crackdown: Financial Times

By John Burton in Kuala Lumpur

Published at FT.com: August 6 2007 17:31

In the early hours of a recent Monday morning, trucks belonging to Malaysia’s People’s Volunteer Corps (Rela) suddenly surrounded a neighbourhood in the shadow of Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang area, home to some of the city’s glitziest hotels and shopping malls.

The Rela members, dressed in green uniforms and tan berets, banged on doors and ordered the occupants outside, many of them foreigners working in menial jobs at nearby hotels and restaurants.

Project Maje Report on Burmese Refugees in Malaysia

A new report, “We Built this City: Refugees from Burma at Risk in Malaysia” has been released by Project Maje. The report reveals the plight of refugees from Burma who have worked on Malaysia’s massive infrastructure projects but gained no gratitude for their labor. “We Built this City” highlights the persecution currently being inflicted on the refugees by a highly controversial government-sanctioned anti-immigrant vigilante force called Rela, which has been hunting down, beating, robbing and imprisoning foreigners in Malaysia. “We Built this City” includes background on the refugees in Malaysia, interviews with refugee construction workers from Burma’s Chin State, and links to articles on the Rela raids, as well as a letter writing action campaign.
“We Built this City: Refugees from Burma at Risk in Malaysia” can be found at www.projectmaje.org

Project Maje is an independent information project which has distributed information on Burma’s human rights and environmental issues since 1986.

Rela and Malaysia’s invisible war

Published 24 January, 2007 at Aliran

The volunteer corps’ crackdown on undocumented foreigners is not a war on terror; it is a war on defenceless migrants, observes Romany.

Like George W Bush’s ‘war on terror’ waged by the United States, an unseen, little-publicised ‘war on undocumented immigrants’ is being waged in Malaysia. This war, waged under cover of darkness, is hidden from public view and much information about it lands in the dead-news boxes of the editors of mainstream newspapers.

Keeping mum about brutal RELA raids

Published March 15th, 2006 at  Malaysia Media Monitors’ Diary

The senseless attack by RELA personnel on defenceless Indian migrant labourers waiting outside their own embassy for their problems to be sorted out by representatives of their home country is something that should be deeply embarrassing to Malaysians and the Malaysian government. It says so much about Malaysian attitudes towards foreigners, even those legally in the country. This is an announcement to the international community that we are ‘anti-foreigners’ – especially if they are not rich, professional, economically sound or from a G7 nation.

These downtrodden people had already been cheated out of their life-savings by unscrupulous conmen posing as employment agents, exploited by similarly conscienceless profiteering employers who feel no tinge of guilt at using what is little more than slave labour. And now, these honest but helpless workers have been further victimised by the authorities. Why have they been put into detention? What wrong have they done in seeking help from their High Commission officials?