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Sections of Kuala Lumpur usually bustling with foreign workers are now eerily quiet, as an amnesty for illegal immigrants ends and a crackdown gets under way.

Sidewalk food stalls, backyard factories, low-cost flats and squatter settlements outside the city where migrant workers are usually found  were relatively quiet yesterday.

'They started to leave last week ... I don't know where they went,' said mechanic Ronny Lim, 47, who owns a car repair shop in Sungei Besi, an industrial suburb about 12km southwest of the city. 'You can see the difference here - there are far fewer people.'

There were also few foreigners in Pudu Raya, the transport hub of the city.

'Many foreigners have returned home while others have fled to rural areas to hide in farms and oil palm plantations,' said a labour activist.  'All the publicity has frightened them.'

On Sunday, Indonesian ship KMM Umsini took 5,800 Indonesian workers from Port Klang, about 30km from the capital. The ship returned yesterday to pick up another 1,900 workers.

'This is the final batch to leave voluntarily before the operation starts,' said an Indonesian embassy official.

The government has mobilised about 500,000 police and uniformed civilian volunteers to hunt down  the migrants who will be either deported immediately or jailed and whipped.

About 400,000 workers who had left voluntarily are eligible to apply and return to their former jobs but with valid work permits.

A coalition of 40 NGOs says widespread human rights abuse is inevitable when civilians are given weapons and 'let loose' to  search for the migrants. They also oppose the decision to pay uniformed civilian volunteers  M$80 ($164) for each migrant worker arrested.

'This operation is a form of vigilantism and causes racism and violence,' said  Irene Fernandez, director of  Tenaganita, an NGO.

The government said the volunteers were trained  and  forbidden to use force, except in self-defence.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is worried the crackdown could sweep up genuine refugees and has deployed mobile teams to monitor and help refugees, mainly from Aceh and Myanmar.

'Malaysia has many jobs, many mosques to pray and food is cheap,' one migrant worker from Indonesia said. 'They need us and we will be back.'



Eerie silence descends ahead of crackdown on migrants