Outstaying Our Welcome

This morning we were up early and took a taxi/sky train ride to the Bangkok Police Immigration Centre to visit a family of Sri Lankan Tamil detainees behind two walls of cage mesh who had the misfortune of outstaying their welcome in Thailand . . .

. . . Hmm, maybe I should explain this lest ye get the impression that this was new kind of new pervo alternative Bangkok-style petting zoo experience (I certainly wondered at first!). Carolyn has some friends who belong to the Bangkok Refugee Centre, a charity organisation mainly who try to look after immigrants who are seeking asylum. It would appear that, while the UN accepts the principles of asylum seeking, the Thai government doesn’t. And said Thai government seriously wants to discourage people staying on in the country after their visa has run out. Or even coming into the country without a visa in the first place. It didn’t help last October that the Centre’s own Sri Lankan translator was deemed to be in breach of said regulations, as was her entire family, as was another 45 Tamils. To make matters worse for them, this translator’s brother had been banged up two years before but no one had dared visit him because they knew they’d be arrested too.

Glad that’s cleared up. That leaves the question: why the hell were we there? That took Carolyn even longer to explain. First we had to go to a nearby market and buy fruit and shampoo and stuff. Then we had to get our passports copied in a nearby shop. Then we had to go to the police building and fill in a form, each of us asking to visit an individual whose name I could neither spell nor pronounce. “Where you from?”, asked the guard. “Embassy!”, I replied (taking my cue from Carolyn -- seemed to be the best answer to any question the police asked). We gave them copies of our passports and in return we got a torn off slip of paper allowing us to visit their detainee. Then we had to wait an hour in a nearby café and come back.

Hmm . . . Better make this long story short(er). Eventually, we joined a line of other (more legitimate) visitors, surrendered our passports and valuables, got searched (the women complained of “having their cracks inspected”), surrendered our bags of fruit and shampoo for inspection, and finally joined a throng of people at a 6x60 ft mesh grill all shouting all at once to a mixture of Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Cambodian and occasional Western detainees who were clinging to a similar grill a few foot away.

Why? You may well ask. It appears that by having visitors like us (well not exactly like us as we were a bit bogus) was the only way families could get together albeit for a single hour. When they are arrested, the women and children are separated permanently from their fathers and brothers. What the Centre plans to do is identify all the family names from their refugee lists and get “visitors” to visit them all on the same day so they can come to the same common area. (The food and shampoo we bring is an added bonus.) It transpires that many of these families have been banged up for years mainly because they have no other country to go to (and if you believe they are genuine refugees then that would be so) and the UN is incredibly slow to find countries that will take them. The Thais have got themselves in a bit of a pickle over this in some ways. Having arrested them, they are now responsible for them for ever; food medical and other humanitarian issues notwithstanding. As it stands, I’ve heard stories from the charities that suggest that so many people of each gender are banged up is what used to be police administrative office space (with cages built in) that there isn’t enough room for them all to sleep on the floor at the same time so they have to sleep in shifts. Other stories include that food is pumpkin soup three times a day, seven days a week, etc. The ironic thing is, as many of the charity workers have been to the proper Thai prisons they can confirm that conditions at the detention camp are actually worse than at the prison. The moral of the story is: if you are going to get arrested over here make sure its for a decent offence rather than the heinous crime of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time”. Still, its put me right off outstaying my welcome in Thailand. (Hmm, perhaps that’s why our hosts took us there in the first place!)

Next on our holidays: the local leper colony.