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Reuters-Thailand to send back illeg



Reply-To: "TIN KYI" <tinkyi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Reuters-Thailand to send back illegal Myanmar workers 

Thailand to send back illegal Myanmar workers
05:47 a.m. Nov 02, 1999 Eastern
BANGKOK, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Thailand on Tuesday rejected an appeal from
employers and entrepreneurs to let some 600,000 Myanmar labourers work
illegally in the country.

The Thai cabinet at its weekly meeting decided instead to repatriate them to
Myanmar, Labour Minister Wut Sukosol told reporters after a weekly cabinet
meeting.

``Only 106,000 Myanmar workers are properply registered by their employers
to work in selected areas allowed by the government. The hundreds of
thousands of others who are not in this category will be repatriated,'' he
said.

Thailand, hit hard by its worst economic crisis for the past two years, used
to host about one million Myanmar workers until late last year when it
repatriated about 300,000 of them.

The deadline for a decision on the future of the remaining 600,000 illegal
workers, on whose behalf employers had appealed, was due by November 4.

The illegal workers were allowed to remain as cheap labour in jobs rejected
by Thais in 18 sectors, mainly in the farm and fishery industries in 37 of
76 provinces in the country.

Niroj Vajjanaphum, the governor of western Tak province at the Thai-Myanmar
border where more than 100,000 Myanmar workers are working illegally, said a
combined force of 2,000 security, immigration and labour officers would
start rounding up the illegals from Wednesday.

The workers would be detained in a holding centre until Myanmar reopens its
2,400-km (1,450-mile) common border with Thailand, he told reporters.

Myanmar angrily shut its border with Thailand from October 1 after five
armed Myanmar dissident students seized Yangon's embassy in Bangkok and held
89 hostages for 25 hours.

The embassy attackers later escaped in a helicopter taking a Thai deputy
minister as guarantor for their safe passage into the jungles along the
Thai-Myanmar border.

The Thai action on the Myanmar workers is bound to have repercussions on its
cottage, agricultural and fisheries industries especially along the border
as they are dependant on the cheap labour.

``Workers and employers are very confused today because we do not know what
to do with them. We can't send them back due to border closure but we cannot
allow them to live in the factories during the night for fear of round
ups,'' a factory manager in Mae Sot opposite Myanmar's Myawadi town told
Reuters