VIEWPOINT
Finding Freedom with a Fake Passport For many Myanmar dissidents living in exile, forged travel documents were the only thing standing between them and prison By AUNG ZAW
14
TheIrrawaddy
W
hen Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, one of the many serious issues it raised about the safety of international travel is the fact that there is a thriving worldwide trade in stolen passports. As investigators started trying to determine the cause of the incident, one of the first things they discovered was that two of the passengers were Iranian nationals traveling with EU passports that had been stolen in Thailand. Although it turned out that the two men were not terrorists, the ease with which they were able to pass through airport security with their fake identities was unsettling for many. It is even more disturbing to learn that the world is awash in false documents. According to a senior member of Thailand’s National Security Council who spoke to the Londonbased newspaper The Independent, around 10,000 passports are lost or stolen in the country each year, many of which end up in the hands of foreign forgers. Thailand’s huge fake-document market undoubtedly caters to criminals of every description, from mafia types to human traffickers and terrorists. But among those who have used the services of these passport forgers are many individuals whose only goal is to escape poverty or repression in their home countries. For many years, Myanmar was one of the world’s leading sources of such people. And among the millions who fled in search of work or freedom, there were countless thousands who needed to assume new identities. In the early 1990s, as an exile living in Thailand, I witnessed the operations of a passport mill working out of a small apartment in Bangkok. A small machine was used to press photos, visa stamps and stickers into blank passports. Everything was scattered all over the room, as the workers in this “passport-making factory” cranked out one fake passport after another to meet demand from Myanmar nationals who
April 2014