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NEED TO KNOW:

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority ethnic group living in Myanmar and Bangladesh, is one of the most persecuted groups of people on the planet. This is how bad it is for them: In Myanmar, where the Rohingya have lived for generations, they are written off by authorities as Muslim invaders. The government restricts their ability to marry, work and travel. They are not considered citizens. They do not get passports. They are stateless.

“More than 150,000 of them have been violently routed into refugee camps where food and medicine is scarce and death is routine,” writes GlobalPost Senior Correspondent Patrick Winn. “Even those living outside these squalid camps are frequently preyed upon by soldiers and police.”

The Rohingya know the dangers of trying to escape Myanmar. But they are so desperate they try it anyway. They pay human smugglers $100 or more and are packed onto barely functioning wooden boats. Some of them wait on these boats for months until they are full before the smugglers send them off. Along the way, the price goes up. By the end, if they haven't been murdered, or died of starvation or sickness, the refugees will have paid as much $2,200 — an insane amount of money for most Rohingya.

The United Nations has said that more than 130,000 Rohingya have fled since 2012. But rights groups think that number is way higher. As many as a quarter of a million Rohingya refugees have likely risked their lives in the the Bay of Bengal in the last few years.

On Wednesday, hundreds more were found drifting at sea, pushed back from Malaysia, which didn't want them. Indonesia too has announced it would be pushing back boats, which typically arrive totally incapacitated, often sinking, over-flowing with abandoned, hungry people. Thailand does the same.

WANT TO KNOW:

For the Rohingya who live to step foot on land again, things can get much worse very fast. In Thailand, the smugglers march the surviving Rohingya off the boats and into the jungle, where they are imprisoned in camps. They are tortured and starved. When they are sufficiently terrified, the captors press a phone to their ears so they can call their relatives and frantically ask for money.

If they can't pay their captors, they are murdered or simply left for dead in mass graves. Ongoing raids by Thai authorities this month have turned up nearly 80 Rohingya prison camps along with dozens of corpses in mass graves. Winn interviewed Rohingya who had survived these camps. Their stories are horrifying.

There are daily beatings and for the women, rape. “The captive Rohingya sleep in mud, under plastic tarps, inside wooden cages. Their food supply is a trickle of soggy rice. Every twitch, every plea for food, can be grounds for overseers to lash captives with bamboo rods,” Winn writes.

The indignities don’t stop there. According to the refugees Winn interviewed, the captives were groomed to worship the kingpin of the trafficking syndicate that enslaved them. The man’s name, they said, was Anwar.

“We were forced to call him ‘Sir Anwar,’” one surviving refugee said. “We had to stand up straight and salute him. We were taught to show him honor.”

STRANGE BUT TRUE:

The Thai authorities knew about the camps for years. And did nothing about them. The thing is, some officials were benefitting from them. Thai authorities and even senior officials were receiving kickbacks from traffickers for allowing the camps to proliferate.

Only now, under international pressure, has the government responded. Arrest warrants have been issued for more than 60 Thai officials. Panicked traffickers are now abandoning boats. More than 8,000 people are right now believed to be adrift. Thailand's official policy regarding Rohingya who arrive by boat, meanwhile, is to give them food and water so they can get to Malaysia.

Rights groups are skeptical the government crackdown will last. They've seen it before. “The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge. The problem is a lack of political will to stop this,” one human rights worker told Winn.

Police have also locked up at least one alleged trafficking kingpin. His name is Anwar. “Put them to death,” Salima told Winn. She is a Rohingya refugee who survived the camps with her two young children. “Then take all the money they made and give it to us.”