Cambodians rescued from Thai boat in Somalia
11 August 2017
- The Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Cambodian embassy in Bangkok are helping to repatriated 18 migrant workers who are on a Thai fishing boat in Somalia.
According to a statement from Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Chum Sounry on Friday, the ministry has instructed its embassy in Bangkok to cooperate with Thai police and the International Organization for Migration to help repatriate the Cambodians.

He added that Thai police had rescued one Cambodian migrant worker, who reported that there were another 18 Cambodians on Thai boats in Somalia.

Mr Sounry said Thai police considered the case to be human trafficking and had ordered two Thai fishing boats to dock at Basaso port in Somalia. Thai police asked Interpol to send the men to Kenya in order to bring them back to Thailand...
http://www.khmertimeskh.com/5077789/cam ... t-somalia/

Cambodian Fisherman Taken From Thai Boats to Be Sent Home
Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:22
The Cambodian government is working to send home 18 fisherman rescued from two Thai boats in the waters off the coast of Somalia, the Foreign Affairs ministry announced on Friday.

Thai police rescued one Cambodian fisherman, who led them to the others, though no details of how or when this occurred were released in Friday’s ministry statement. The two Thai boats were stopped at the northeastern Somali port of Bosaso, the ministry said.

“The final confirmation is the 18 Cambodian fishermen in Somalia will be sent to Nairobi, Kenya, after Thai police and Interpol cooperated with Somalai’s police, then they will be sent to Thailand,” said the statement issued by ministry spokesman Chum Sounry.

Thai police rescued one Cambodian fisherman, 24-year-old Rey Kea, who said the other 18 “Khmer migrants faced misery working on two Thai boats,” the statement said. No further details were released.
Cambodia Daily

Long read: An interesting tale.
Ten years on, a western journalist catches up with the Cambodian fishermen who were his fellow captives in Somalia.
In the first place, the Cambodians were tricked into working on fishing boats in slave-like conditions by a Taiwanese recruiting agency, which was legally licensed in Cambodia by the Minister of Labor, but is now closed. The Cambodians' five-year kidnapping resulted in financial hardship and mental trauma once they were rescued and brought back to Cambodia.

Three Seafarers Contend with the Trauma of a Five-Year Kidnapping in Somalia
A fellow former hostage visits Cambodia to talk about the struggle to recover from a harrowing shared experience.
By Michael Scott Moore
May 25, 2022

Em Phumanny comes from the lush province of Kampong Chhnang, north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. He’s thirty-nine years old, a new father, and now lives on the outskirts of the city for the sake of a job in a Chinese garment factory. A decade ago, he worked on his parents’ farm, growing chilies and other vegetables. But he didn’t like the work, and he wanted to see the world. He heard that a local recruitment agency needed seafarers. “One of my aspirations was to go to sea and see other countries, and then the money they offered, a hundred and fifty dollars a month . . .” He trailed off.

I met Phumanny nine years ago, in Somalia, on a tuna vessel called the Naham 3, after Somali pirates hijacked it on the high seas and took twenty-eight of its crew members hostage. (They killed the twenty-ninth, the captain, on the spot.) I was a hostage, too. Somali gunmen had captured me on land, as a luckless journalist, and stowed me on the Naham 3 for safekeeping, probably to consolidate captives and save money. For almost six months, I lived on the ship and got to know its crew members and their stories. Most were not professional fishermen but, like Phumanny, were former farmers and laborers from the countrysides of Cambodia, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Indonesia.

I spoke no Khmer, so we communicated in a simple ship’s pidgin of English and Chinese. Life on the ship was tedious, crowded, and sometimes tense, but as long as the generator functioned it was a huge improvement over life on land. On the ocean there were no flies or mosquitoes, for one thing. I became friends with Phumanny and three other Cambodian seafarers over time, as well as the rest of the kidnapped men. Friendship in captivity can be intense, and after I was moved ashore in the fall of 2012, to be held in solitary confinement, I missed them. I was released in 2014 after two years and eight months as a hostage.

The crew of the Naham 3 would be held for nearly five years—just shy of a record for hostages taken by modern pirates.

Full article here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch ... in-somalia