Exposing Social Injustice Under Malaysia’s Lockdown Sharon Roobol | Executive Producer ‘101 East’
Kuala Lumpur has been the home base for 101 East, Al Jazeera’s flagship current affairs programme covering the Asia Pacific, for the last 15 years. When COVID-19 broke out in 2020 and the Malaysian capital went into lockdown, our team began seeing how barbed wire barricades were being erected in neighbourhoods that are home to large populations of migrant workers. Then we discovered that authorities were raiding these areas, arresting people with and without visas,
loading them into crowded trucks and ferrying them to detention centres. Malaysia’s government had earlier promised that no action would be taken against undocumented foreigners who came forward for COVID-19 testing. However, it soon became clear that this promise was not being upheld. As fears began to grow about the spread of the virus, we turned our attention to the treatment of migrant workers.
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