Slavery on Southeast Asian seas.
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Slavery on Southeast Asian seas.
Photo: Byron Lippcott/ Flickr
By JJ Rose
31 October 2018
Caught in the net: slavery on Southeast Asian seas
About an hour south of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, down a dusty, broken-edged road, dotted with grimy stores and street stalls, with the incessant buzz of motorbikes, stands a desolate building complex. Turn right at the festering drain, past the guard dozing in his chair, and the dog licking itself on the pavement, if you look hard, you’ll see an office.
It would be clichéd perhaps to suggest he was a coiled spring, too Robert Ludlum perhaps. But his sinewy arms, veins running like subterranean cables from a blue t-shirt with the aggressively fonted word “Savage” blaring across its chest, seemed explosive and dangerous.
Chairat was dumped on one of the many sparsely populated islands in Indonesia. Without any papers or identification, he ended up in prison with a friend (not the one who said who suggested he go to sea), they rotted away for four months. During this time, Chairat wrote letters to the Thai government, but if they were even sent, there was no reply. He told me through an interpreter:...
He was rescued by an act of extraordinary good luck. As part of a trip to identify discarded former slave fishermen, a delegation from Thailand, including NGOs and government representatives, was on the island. Thinking there was maybe 100 ex-slaves there, they found 1000. Someone told them about the two men in jail and they too were included, and released to go back to Thailand.
The next stage of the slave rescue process, Patima says, is to gather a posse of figures, from government to police to NGOs and media, to descend upon a location such as Ambon or Benjina and to begin finding the hapless crews, and start repatriating them.
The sky was heavy in the rainy-season as Chairat and a few others whisked me off for 30 minute trip to the docks to see some of the ships involved in the slave fishing trade. A flotilla of festering hulks, rust bleeding down their flanks, were banked up in groups about the smallish harbour, not known on any map, but known to locals as Guan Yin Shrine Port.
Full https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-inter ... asian-seas
Re: Slavery on Southeast Asian seas.
If you have any inside info on the industry contact the author of this piece.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/worl ... -pets.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/worl ... -pets.html
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