tagged w/ malaysian immigration
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My friend Sin Yi fled Burma when the Burmese military junta started coming to his village and forcing boys like him to join the army.
"They stop us at the bus station or on the street and by gun point they say to us:
'Come, you must join the army. If you don't join we will kill you. Come, join...'"
Aye Aye Cho told me she left Burma because the junta used to come to her village and separate the women from the men.
"Then they would come and take any woman they wanted to sleep with them in a little hut for the night."
"If you refused to go with them you had to pay them instead. One night they came for me, I told them to come back later and I would pay them. But I didnt have any money, so that night I ran from one bush to the other. I ran away from Burma."
"In Thailand i had friends who told me to go to Malaysia where I would be safe."
"Sadly," she told me, "I listened to these friends."
Unfortunately, what Sin Yi and Aye Aye Cho found waiting for them in Malaysia was equally as tragic as what they left behind.
Burma is bleeding well beyond its borders.
To date there are more than 2,100 political prisoners in Burma, including Buddhist monks and one Nobel Peace Laureate (Aung San Suu Kyi). Military and civilian officials are involved in the unlawful conscription of child soldiers and wide-spread acts of forced labor inside of Burma. And scores of people are perishing due to the extreme poverty caused by the regime's mis-use of power and by its handling of the Cyclone Nargis crisis.
Yet there is another Burma-related tragedy, which until now has not been widely told.
In April 2009 the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee published the results of a year-long investigation into allegations that the Malaysian government has been complicit in the human trafficking of people seeking refuge from the extreme persecution they faced in Burma. Once in Malaysia, through a highly organized process between police, immigration officials and traffickers, the refugees are sold to prostitution rings and fishing trawlers.
Please Don't Say My Name is an audio documentary; it stems from my friendship with a small group of Burmese refugees who work together in a restuarant in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I spent a year and a half getting to know them and in early 2009 I traveled to Kuala Lumpur to record their stories. Many of them have been sold to traffickers by Malaysian Immigration Officials--and some of them were arrested while I was there.
The audio-only documentary is one hour in length; the interviews are intimate in tone and record many aspects of their lives both inside and outside of work, prison, detention camps and RELA immigration raids highlighting their continued vulnerability in Malaysia--as well as their ability to create family-like bonds despite the severity of their circumstance.
Listen to the whole doc or just to selected clips, and read a photographic essay.
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www.pleasedontsaymyname.orgMy friend Sin Yi fled Burma when the Burmese military junta started coming to his... more
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