That outright slavery can operate openly speaks volumes. That it crumbles before public exposure is also obvious and the more applied the better. In fact, the global media needs to hunt out slavery everywhere and bloody well follow it around with a camera crew.
All slavery is about criminal coercion and secrecy. The high seas allows for secrecy. Simply enforcing labor laws properly with inspections can end this all easily. Consumers and the corporations buying this type of tainted product must seriously inspect all their suppliers regardless of reputation.
Recall how easily China got burned with tainted baby formula. That was at least difficult to catch. This is not difficult to halt and most certainly the operators have been paying bribes to continue their practices. Collecting a few of these operators on criminal charges will also help end it.
Yet it is still the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the enslavement of women in these same countries.
Myanmar fisherman goes home after 22 years as a slave
TUAL, Indonesia (AP) — All he did was ask to go home.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d8afe2a8447d4610b3293c119415bd4a/myanmar-fisherman-goes-home-after-22-years-slave
The last time the Burmese slave made the same request, he was beaten
almost to death. But after being gone eight years and forced to work on a
boat in faraway Indonesia, Myint Naing was willing to risk everything
to see his mother again. His nights were filled with dreams of her, and
time was slowly stealing her face from his memory.
So he threw himself on the ground and roped his arms around the captain's legs to beg for freedom.
The Thai skipper barked loud enough for all to hear that Myint would
be killed for trying to abandon ship. Then he flung the fisherman onto
the deck and chained down his arms and legs.
Myint was left for three days to burn in the searing sun and shiver
in the nighttime rain, without food or water. He wondered how he would
be killed. Would they throw his body overboard to wash up on shore, like
the other corpses he'd seen? Would they shoot him? Or would they simply
bash his head open, as they had done before?
He was never going to see his mother again. He would simply disappear, and she wouldn't even know where to look.
Every year, thousands of migrant workers like Myint are tricked or
sold into the seafood industry's gritty underworld. It's a brutal trade
that has operated for decades as an open secret in Southeast Asia's
waters, where unscrupulous companies rely on slaves to supply fish to
major supermarkets and stores worldwide.
As part of a year-long investigation into the multibillion-dollar
business, The Associated Press interviewed more than 340 current and
former slaves, in person or in writing. The stories told by one after
another are strikingly similar.
Myint is a thin, soft-spoken man with the wiry strength of someone
who has worked hard all his life. Illness has left his right arm partly
paralyzed and his mouth clenched into a forced half-smile. But when he
breaks into laughter, you see flashes of the boy he once was, despite
all that has happened in between — a 22-year odyssey recounted by Myint
and his relatives.
He comes from a small village off a narrow, dusty road in southern
Myanmar's Mon State, the oldest of four boys and two girls. In 1990, his
father drowned while fishing, leaving him as the man in charge at just
15. He helped cook, wash clothes and care for his siblings, but they
kept sliding deeper into poverty.
So when a fast-talking broker visited the neighborhood three years
later with stories of jobs in Thailand, Myint was easily wooed. The
agent offered $300 for just a few months of work — enough for some
families to survive on for a year. He and several other young men
quickly put their hands up to go.
His mother, Khin Than, wasn't so sure. He was only 18 years old, with
no education or travel experience. But he kept begging, arguing that he
wouldn't be gone long and relatives already working there could look
after him.
Finally, she relented.
Neither of them knew it but, at that moment, Myint began a journey
that would take him thousands of miles away from his family. He would
miss births, deaths, marriages and the unlikely transition of his
country from a dictatorship to a bumpy democracy. He would run away
twice from the ruthless forced labor on a fishing boat, only to realize
that he could never escape from the shadow of fear.
Yet on the day he left home in 1993, all Myint saw was promise. The
broker hustled his new recruits to grab their bags immediately, and
Myint's 10-year-old sister wiped tears from her cheeks as she watched
him walk down the dirt track away from their village.
His mother wasn't home. He never got to say goodbye.
Thailand earns $7 billion a year from a seafood industry that runs on
labor from the poorest parts of the country, along with Cambodia, Laos
and especially Myanmar, otherwise known as Burma. Up to 200,000
estimated migrants, most of them illegal, work at sea. Their catch ends
up halfway around the globe in the United States, Europe and Japan — on
dinner tables and in cat food bowls.
As overfishing decimates stocks near Thailand's shores, trawlers have
been forced to venture farther and farther into more plentiful foreign
waters. The dangerous work keeps men at sea for months or even years
with fake Thai identity documents, trapped aboard floating prisons run
by captains with impunity. Though Thai officials deny it, they have long
been accused of turning a blind eye to such practices.
After easily skirting police at the border with Thailand and being
held in a small shed with little food for more than a month, Myint was
shoved onto a boat. The men were at sea for 15 days and finally docked
in the far eastern corner of Indonesia. The captain shouted that
everyone on board now belonged to him, using words Myint would never
forget:
"You Burmese are never going home. You were sold, and no one is ever coming to rescue you."
He was panicked and confused. He thought he would be fishing in Thai
waters for only a few months. Instead the boys were taken to the
Indonesian island of Tual in the Arafura Sea, one of the world's richest
fishing grounds, stocked with tuna, mackerel, squid, shrimp and other
lucrative species for export.
Myint spent weeks at a time on the open ocean, living only on rice
and the parts of the catch no one else would eat. During the busiest
times, the men worked up to 24 hours a day, hoisting heavy nets rippling
with fish. They were forced to drink foul-tasting boiled sea water.
He was paid only $10 a month, and sometimes not at all. There was no
medicine. Anyone who took a break or fell ill was beaten by the Thai
captain, who once lobbed a piece of wood at Myint for not moving fish
fast enough.
Nearly half the Burmese men surveyed by the AP said they were beaten,
or witnessed others being abused. They were made to work almost nonstop
for nearly no pay, with little food and unclean water. They were
whipped with toxic stingray tails, shocked with Taser-like devices and
locked in a cage for taking breaks or attempting to flee. Sometimes, the
men said, the bodies of those who died were stashed in the ship's
freezer alongside the fish.
Workers on some boats were killed for slowing down or trying to jump
ship. The Burmese fishermen said others flung themselves overboard
because they saw no escape. Myint spotted several bloated bodies
floating in the water.
By 1996, after three years, he had had enough. Penniless and
homesick, he waited until his boat returned to Tual. Then he went into
the office on the dock and, for the first time, asked to go home.
His request was answered by a helmet cracking his skull. As blood
oozed out, he used both hands to hold the wound together. The Thai man
who hit him repeated the words that already haunted him:
"We will never let you Burmese fishermen go. Even when you die."
That was the first time he ran away.
On islands scattered throughout Indonesia's Maluku chain, also known
as the Spice Islands, thousands of migrant fishermen who have escaped or
been abandoned by their captains quietly hide out in the jungle. Some
start families with local women, partly to protect themselves from slave
catchers. It's risky, but one of the only ways to find a semblance of
freedom.
An Indonesian family took mercy on Myint until he healed, and then
offered him food and shelter in exchange for work on their farm. For
five years, he lived this simple life and tried to erase memories of the
horrors at sea. He learned to speak the Indonesian language fluently
and acquired a taste for the food, even though it was much sweeter than
the salty Burmese dishes his mother fixed.
But he couldn't forget his relatives in Myanmar or the friends he
left behind on the boat. What happened to them? Were they still alive?
Sometimes Myint quietly visited other runaway Burmese slaves on the
island to talk about home, bringing a big bag of vegetables he grew
himself.
"He was a bit afraid to go around," remembered Naing Oo, another
former Burmese slave in Tual. "It was very brutal on the fishing boats."
In the meantime, the world around him was changing. By 1998,
Indonesia's longtime dictator Suharto had fallen, and the country was
moving toward democracy. Myint wondered if maybe things were getting
better on the ships too.
In 2001, he heard one captain was offering to take fishermen back to
Myanmar if they agreed to work. He was determined to find a way home.
So, eight years after he first arrived in Indonesia, he returned to the
sea.
Right away, he knew he'd fallen into the same trap again. The work
and conditions were just as appalling as the first time, and the money
still didn't come.
If anything, the slavery was getting worse. Thailand was rapidly
becoming one of the world's biggest seafood exporters, and needed more
cheap labor. Brokers deceived, coerced or sometimes even drugged and
kidnapped migrant workers, including children, the sick and the
disabled.
After nine months on the water, Myint's captain broke his promise and
told the crew he was abandoning them to go back to Thailand alone.
Furious and desperate, the Burmese slave once again pleaded to go
home. That, he said, was when the captain chained him to the boat for
three days.
Myint searched wildly for something, anything, to open the lock.
Working it with his fingers was useless. Then he managed to fashion a
small piece of metal into a makeshift pick and spent hours trying to
quickly and quietly unlatch freedom. Finally, there was a click. The
shackles slid off. He knew there wasn't much time, and if he got caught,
death would come swiftly.
Sometime after midnight, he dove into the black water and swam to
shore. Then he ran without looking back, in clothes still weighted by
sea water.
He knew he had to disappear. This time, for good.
The slave trade in the Southeast Asian seafood industry is remarkable
in its resilience. Over the past decade, outsiders have begun to take
notice, and the U.S. government slams Thailand in annual reports year
after year for pervasive labor abuses in fishing. Yet it continues, and
it seldom lets go of the lives of those it ruins.
After he ran the second time, Myint hid alone in a bamboo shack in
the jungle. But just three years later, he fell ill with what appeared
to be a stroke. His nerves seemed to stop firing properly, leaving him
easily chilled despite the oppressive tropical heat.
When he became too sick to work, the same Indonesian family cared for
him with a kindness that reminded him of relatives back home. He had
forgotten what his mother looked like, and knew that by now his favorite
little sister would be all grown up. They likely thought he was dead.
What he didn't know was that his mother was like him: She never gave
up. She prayed for him every day at the little Buddhist altar in her
family's traditional stilt house, and asked fortune tellers year after
year about her son. They assured her he was alive, but in a faraway
place difficult to leave.
At one point, another Burmese man told the family that Myint was
fishing in Indonesia and married. But Myint never wanted to be tethered
to the country that had destroyed his life.
"I didn't want an Indonesian wife, I just wanted to go back home to
Myanmar," he said. "I felt like I lost my young man's life. I just
thought that all of this time, I should have been in Burma having a wife
and a proper family."
After eight more years in the jungle without a clock or calendar,
time began to blur. Now in his 30s, he started to believe the captain
had been right: There really was no escape.
He couldn't go to the police or local officials, afraid they might
hand him over to the captains for a fee. He had no way to call home. And
he was scared to contact the Myanmar embassy because it would expose
him as an illegal migrant.
In 2011, the solitude had become too much. Myint moved to the island
of Dobo, where he had heard there were more Burmese. He and two other
runaway slaves farmed chilies, eggplant, peas and beans until the police
arrested one in the market and put him back on a boat. The man later
fell sick at sea and died.
It was yet another reminder to Myint that if he wanted to survive, he needed to do it carefully.
One day in April, a friend came to him with news: An AP report
linking slavery in the seafood industry to some of the biggest American
grocery stores and pet food companies had spurred the Indonesian
government to start rescuing current and former slaves on the islands.
To date, more than 800 have been found and repatriated.
This was his chance. When the officials came to Dobo, he went back
with them to Tual, where he was once a slave — this time to join
hundreds of other free men.
After 22 years in Indonesia, Myint was finally going home. But what, he wondered, would he find?
The flight from Indonesia to Myanmar's biggest city, Yangon, was a
terrifying first for Myint. He walked out of the airport with a small
black suitcase and a donated hat and shirt — all he had to show for his
long time abroad.
Myint was coming back a stranger to his own country. Myanmar was no
longer ruled by a secretive military government, and opposition leader
Aung San Suu Kyi was free from years of house arrest and in Parliament.
The currency was baffling. He struggled to convert 15,000 Indonesian rupiah into about 1,000 Myanmar kyat, both roughly $1.
"I feel like a tourist," he said, sweat dripping down his face and chest. "I feel Indonesian."
The food was different, and so were the greetings. Myint kept shaking
hands and touching his heart the Indonesian way, instead of bowing with
his hands in a prayer position like a Burmese.
Even the words seemed odd. While he waited with other former slaves
for the bus to Mon State, they chatted not in their native Burmese, but
in Bahasa Indonesia.
"I don't want to speak that language anymore because I suffered so
much there," he said. "I hate that language now." Yet he continued to
slip in and out of it.
Most of all, just as the country had changed, so had he. He had left
as a boy, but was returning a 40-year-old man who had been enslaved or
in hiding for more than half his life. And he was the only one from his
village to come back at all.
When he reached his home state, Myint's emotions started to fray. He
was too nervous to eat. He fidgeted, running his hands through his hair
and constantly rubbing the heart-shaped abalone pendant around his neck.
Finally, it all became too much, and he started to sob.
"My life was just so bad that it hurts me a lot to think about it," he choked out. "I miss my mom."
He wondered if he would even recognize his mother and sister, or if they would remember him.
An hour later, he slapped his head in frustration as he tried to
remember which way to go. The roads were now paved and lined with new
buildings. He rubbed his palms on his pants and squirmed in excitement
when he recognized a police station. He knew he was close.
Finally, the car he was riding in turned into a small village. He
called a phone number that he had gotten only the day before. Seconds
later, when he saw a plump Burmese woman — on the same road that had led
him away so many years ago — he knew immediately it was his little
sister.
They exploded into an embrace, and the tears that spilled were of joy
and mourning for all the lost time apart. "Brother, it's so good that
you are back!" she sobbed. "We don't need money! We just need family!
Now you are back, it's all that we need."
But his mother was missing. Myint anxiously scanned the road as his sister frantically dialed a number.
And then a small, frail figure with gray-streaked hair began to run.
When he spotted her, he howled and fell to the ground, burying his
face in his hands. She swept him up in her arms and softly stroked his
head, cradling him as he let everything go.
They wailed and wept so loudly, the whole village emerged to see what
seemed like a ghost. "That guy's been gone for 20 years," one man said.
Myint, his mother and his sister walked arm-in-arm to the simple
stilt house of his childhood. At the front gate, he crouched on his
knees, and they heaved water with a traditional tamarind soap on his
head to cleanse away evil spirits.
As his sister helped wash his hair, his 60-year-old mother turned
pale and collapsed against a bamboo ladder. Then, suddenly, she grabbed
her heart and began to gasp for air. Relatives and neighbors fanned her
and fetched water and a lime to smell, but her eyes rolled back into her
head. Someone yelled that she wasn't breathing.
Myint ran to her, dripping wet, and blew three breaths into her mouth.
"Open your eyes! Open your eyes!" he screamed, beating his chest with
both hands. "I'll look after you from now on! I will make you happy! I
don't want to see you sick! I am back home!"
She slowly revived, and Myint took a long look into her eyes.
He was finally free to see the face from his dreams. He would never forget it again.
WHERE THIS STORY CAME FROM:
Myint Naing's story comes from interviews with him, his family, his
friends and other former slaves, and through following his journey from a
makeshift camp set up for rescued men at an Indonesian port in Tual,
Indonesia, to his home in Myanmar. He's among hundreds rescued and
returned to their families after a year-long AP investigation exposed
extreme labor abuses in Southeast Asia's seafood industry. Reporters
documented how slave-caught fish is shipped from Indonesia to Thailand.
It can then be exported to the United States and cloud the supply chains
of supermarkets and distributors, including Wal-Mart, Sysco and Kroger,
and pet food brands, such as Fancy Feast, Meow Mix and Iams. The
companies have all said they strongly condemn labor abuse and are taking
steps to prevent it.
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