Labour rights organisation Tenaganita today claimed that the deportation of Filipinos have split families and made 'orphans' of children left behind in Sabah by their parents who were forced to return to Philippines.

Its director Irene Fernandez said two Tenaganita coordinators discovered this when visiting an illegal immigrant detention centre in Tawau in July.

"They went to Tawau knowing then that there would be consequences arising from the implementation of the [new provisions of the Immigration Act] on Aug 1. We were shocked to see large numbers of children who were 'orphaned' in Sabah," said Fernandez during a press conference in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

She said Tenaganita will go on a fact-finding mission to Sabah next week to check on complaints of abuse and ill-treatment of immigrants and their children by security officials.

She alleged that police raids to detain illegal immigrants resulted in many children being left behind in Sabah after being separated from their parents who were deported back to the Philippines.

Children beaten and kicked

"Some of the children had been locked up in police stations and others in camps. The children pointed to healing scars of beating they received while in police lock-ups (pic).

"They had been beaten and kicked by the police when they asked for their parents. Many of the children were also covered with sores arising from conditions in the camps," she said.

Fernandez said the Tenaganita team also met five siblings, aged between one and 12, who were released by the police and are now in the care of other members of the Filipino community in Tawau when their parents were forcibly deported.

"One young person told us that she had come to Sabah when she was just one year old. She grew up in Sabah, gone to school and now has started to work there."

Fernandez said many other Filipinos were caught in a similar situation since they had lived for the past 10 to 20 years in Sabah, and had no place to return to in the Philippines.

"The Filipinos had been accepted [by Malaysians] to live in Sabah for so long but now they are suddenly told that they are illegal. The only thing that has changed is our perception of them," she explained.

Meanwhile, Philippines newspapers reported its foreign ministry's assistant secretary Antonio Rodriguez as saying that it had gathered testimony confirming that Malaysian police had made 'sex slaves' of some Filipino women.

The republic's department of health was also reported to have recorded nine deaths seven children and two adults after the deportees arrive in Mindanao.

Compensation

Rodriguez said the Philippines should bring these cases to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and to the International Criminal Court to seek compensation if the allegations were true.

Malaysia is not a signatory to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers and members of their Families, nor the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad had ordered a full-scale probe into the rape allegations of a 13-year-old Filipino girl by a policeman after receiving a strongly-worded letter from President Gloria Arroyo.

In the letter, Arroyo was said to have expressed her "personal outrage" over the matter and that the alleged rape "may constitute an act of aggression against civilisation itself."

Yesterday, Sabah police chief Ramli Yusuff said that a team headed by a senior police officer had been formed to carry out investigations into the rape of the girl and all other allegations of offences said to be committed by the police.