Up to 27 million trapped in slavery worldwide

Found on: http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/africa/5026077/Up-to-27-million-trapped-in-slavery-worldwide

Up to 27 million people are modern-day slaves, and migrants fleeing violence in North Africa are among those most at risk of being exploited, a senior US official said on Wednesday.

Countries where migrants arrive should try to identify potential victims and protect them, rather than opting for immediate repatriation which often sends them back into the hands of human traffickers, US Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca said.

Tens of thousands of migrants are fleeing turmoil in North Africa, with many trying to reach Europe by boat, but the problem of slavery exists all over the world and India, Thailand and Malaysia are among the worst-affected countries.

The European Union has urged African border authorities to bolster controls to prevent human smugglers taking advantage of the situation.

But CdeBaca, who directs the US Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said it was more effective to fight slavery in the countries where the victims are exploited.

“You don’t fight trafficking on the borders, because people don’t yet know they are trafficking victims, it’s only when they get to where they are going that they are enslaved,” he said at a conference organised by the US embassy to the Vatican.

“People should be keeping an eye on where these refugees end up, what kind of jobs they are being put into and how they are being treated,” he said.

He estimated between 12.5 and 27 million people are trapped in slavery around the world, ranging from children forced to work as domestic servants or in sweatshops to women coerced into prostitution.

Speakers at the conference stressed the need for more cooperation between governments, companies and religious groups to prevent more people from falling victim to the slave trade.

“The criminal organisations that prey on men, women and children are highly organised and well connected from one part of the world to the other,” said Sister Estrella Castalone, who co-ordinates anti-trafficking group Talitha Kum.

“It is only through an equally well organised network that links the countries of origin to those of transit and destination, that we can prevent the weakest and the most vulnerable from becoming a human commodity.”

The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility said it was pressing businesses to scrutinise their supply chains and ensure their labour contracts included clear language to prevent human trafficking.

It called for more public reporting on the measures firms are taking to fight slavery.

- Reuters

Burmese migrant workers: caught between a tyrant and a tiger

Article by Joseph Allchin, a journalist with the exiled Burmese news network theDemocratic Voice of Burma.

Malaysia’s economic boom has been driven by the exploitation of cheap migrant labour, from Burma and Thailand. Underpaid and with no rights, this is their story.

They were not illegal, nor criminals, not protesting nor agitating. For 900 Malaysian ringgits (around $290) a month they had travelled, through a broker, to the southern Malaysian town of Johor. There to bend the metal, mould the bars and solder the nuts that will bolt together the terrific rise in Asia’s economies.

However the 35 Burmese workers found that, after two months, instead of the promised amount, they were to receive 640 a month, with no overtime pay, as promised.

So the workers organised, led by five individuals. They initially complained to their employers.

The employers immediately called the police, all 35 were detained on 12 January. No charges were brought, and 30 were released that day.

“Whenever workers do actually complain to their employers or against [them], employers tend to discriminate against them or even terminate [their contracts],” says pioneering Malaysian human rights lawyer,Charles Hector.

Before any legal rationale could be brought, or advocates or government bodies mobilised, the five leaders were whisked away to the airport for deportation, because, as Hector notes, “the employer wins by default if they are deported”, they cannot compete in a labour dispute, and migrant workers are not allowed to be members of a union or stay inMalaysia without employment.

Out of the five leaders who complained, three have been forced back toBurma despite signing a three-year contract, two, however are missing.

Malaysia’s growing “tiger economy”, is driven by a workforce of around 20% migrant labour, with an estimated 500,000 from Burma, many of them illegal, taking their place at the bottom of Malaysia’s semi-apartheid ethnic mix.

With GDP per capita hard to record in Burma, the IMF estimated in January 2009 that it was around $250. This compares with the IMF’s 2010 estimate for Malaysia of $7,775.

Despite a constitution and laws pertaining to universal rights in Malaysia, law enforcement and other political precedence places migrant workers at immediate disadvantage. All companies in Malaysia that hire foreign labour are required to pay a levy. This is very often deducted from workers’ pay, even though the practice was made illegal in April 2009.

Tun Tun, head of Burma Campaign Malaysia, notes that the overwhelming ethos is for employers to take responsibility for their workers as opposed to the workers having rights as individuals. He points out that when you arrive in Malaysia as a tourist, you need no visa and can rapidly leave the airport. However, migrant workers have to wait for their employer to pick them up and take them, in custodial fashion, to wherever they please.

Not all Burmese are just economic migrants. Many of those who eke out a living between the concrete apartment buildings and highways of Kuala Lumpur have fled political oppression in their homeland.

Kyaw Hsan was jailed in Burma at the age of 15. His “crime” was distributing pamphlets about democracy, with news and information that circumvented Burma’s draconian military censors. He would leave pamphlets on the roof of a bus, so as it drove through the streets of Rangoon they would flutter down, as innocently as freshly falling rain. He was picked up outside a meeting of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy on 16 September 2000.

His confinement was marked with weeks of torture, including night-long beatings by teams of guards. This was followed, in 2003, by periods of up to 32 days chained to a wet floor with dozens of other prisoners for protesting the rearrest of Aung San Suu Kyi.

He contracted tuberculosis, which quarantined him for a further year after his release from Rangoon’s colonial-era Insein jail.

Beyond the scars marking his body, and despite his affable nature, the psychological toll is unmistakable. At the time of writing, a combination of dislocation, alcohol and the breakdown of a relationship had led to angry outbursts, which saw him lose his job as a waiter.

Read more from the Guardian here.

Interview with Mary Burke on Human Trafficking

Human bycatch

KYAW-KYAW grimaces as he explains how he was sold, like a spare bit of machinery, to a Thai trawler captain. And how his life then slid into a nightmare of beatings, amphetamines, perpetually interrupted sleep and casual death.

Kyaw-Kyaw is 25 years old, and he can’t read or write. When he was 15 he fled from the violence and crushing poverty of eastern Burma’s Karen state and wound up in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, where he earned a bare living tending water buffalo.

A year ago, a broker arrived in his village offering work and a tempting, up-front inducement. “The broker told me I would have a good job and he gave me 8000 baht [$270] cash,” Kyaw-Kyaw says. “I asked him the nature of the work but he didn’t answer. He just said I would earn 5000 baht ($170) a month.” The broker took him south to the coast and directly to the Thai trawler – which is where he first learned he would be working at sea. “He sold me straight to the fishing boat,” Kyaw-Kyaw says with some bitterness.

Australia spends many millions of dollars a year on wild-caught fish from Thailand, where the industry is fed by thousands of boats of varying sizes and degrees of shabbiness. They are crewed largely by migrant Burmese, with some Cambodians and a smaller proportion of Laotians and Thais; most of them endure appalling conditions at sea for little pay. Imprisoned by the vast blue of the world’s oceans, they are routinely “sold” by brokers, or by one captain to another. They tell of spending months at sea without seeing land, taking amphetamines to keep working, stitching up their own wounds, trying to understand instructions in another language, enduring assaults and the threat of death. They have been described as the slaves of the modern age.

Thailand’s deep-sea fishing vessels range for thousands of kilometres, from eastern Indonesian waters all the way to Somalia and Yemen, and many stay at sea for months or even years, the crews regularly transferring the catch to a mothership and receiving supplies of food and water in return. Sometimes these vessels have legal concessions, but often they poach. The captains are nearly always Thai, and they usually carry a pistol to maintain discipline. Stories of casual and never-reported murder are common. Tales abound of put-upon crew trying to escape: leaping overboard if there is any hope at all, or fleeing into strange and pathless jungles in Indonesia and elsewhere.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s 2009 National Fishery Sector Overview for Thailand estimates that in 2007 the marine catch was worth 63 billion baht, or about $2.15 billion. Some 60 per cent of the haul, which included threadfin bream, Indo-Pacific mackerel, coastal tuna, big-eye snapper, squid, sardines, round scad and anchovies, was from Thai waters; the rest was caught by the Thai fleet elsewhere. The report concludes that the fishing sector faces various obstacles including “persistent difficulties in recruiting the crews” and problems arising from poaching. “Thai fishing vessels are frequently seized by neighbouring coastal states, and skippers accused of illegal fishing and/or unlawful intrusion in the EEZ [exclusive economic zone] of the country concerned,” it notes drily.

It’s a big industry, and one that has links with nations around the world. According to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics’ Australian Fisheries Statistics 2009 report, Thailand sold Australia at least $24 million worth of frozen fish, fish ¬fillets, smoked, dried and salted fish, fish meal, fish balls, fish cake, fish sausages, caviar and caviar substitutes, and fish livers and roes. This figure excludes canned fish and seafood, which are mostly produced from imported materials. And besides exports, domestic consumption in Thailand is huge.

It seems Thai trawlers have not yet encroached into Australian waters, but Tamsin Allen, acting spokeswoman for the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, says they have been seen nearby. “Australian surveillance aircraft regularly sight large mothership and carrier-type boats operating near the Australian-Indonesian EEZ boundary; these vessels have been identified as operating in support of smaller fishing vessels in Indonesian waters. The large motherships sighted north of Australia are often of Thai origin.”

Kyaw-Kyaw, with the muscles of hard work bulging under his T-shirt, saw one of the men on his trawler fall overboard. It seems the man was not a valued crew member, because he was left to drown. “Nobody helped him,” Kyaw-Kyaw says, impassively. “We weren’t so far from shore, maybe about two kilometres. He might be dead or alive; nobody knows what happened to him.”

After eight months of working on the boat, on voyages rarely longer than a fortnight, and after fruitless requests for his wages, Kyaw-Kyaw decided to make a run for it. He asked again for money, this time saying he wanted to go to a karaoke bar, which in Thailand is often a place of drinking and commercial sex. The crew leader, from the Mon people of Thailand and Burma, grumbled, but finally gave him 3000 baht ($100). Kyaw-Kyaw took it and ran. For eight months’ work, often waking up every few hours at night to bring the catch in, he had a grand total of 11,000 baht (about $380) to show for it – and 8000 of that was the inducement to travel with the broker.

Kyaw-Kyaw says he was beaten twice, for minor infractions. Drug use was rife on the boat and a tablet of amphetamine cost just 250 baht ($8.50). He shrugs. Now he has found work as a gardener in Bangkok, and his life is much easier. As well as being unable to read or write, he can’t speak Thai very well, so his options are limited. For the moment, though, he is simply happy to be off the boat.

Like the mafia
Aung Thu Ya, president of the Seafarrers’ Union of Burma, says the Thai fishing industry is enmeshed in criminality. Falsified documents, corruption, systematic poaching, assault, forced labour: the billion-dollar trade fuels multi-dimensional and multi-faceted evil. “The nature of the industry is like the mafia,” he says in his office in Bangkok, explaining that the trawlers both steal fish from other countries and steal wages and liberty from the crews. Aung Thu Ya says that, according to eyewitnesses and other reports, between 300 and 1000 men have been murdered on the Thai fleet since 1995.

More die as a result of neglect. Aung Thu Ya proffers legal papers connected with the Prapasnavee case. In mid-2006, the Prapasnavee fleet of six trawlers returned to Mahachai port near Bangkok from a three-year voyage in Indonesian waters. The owners, the Pongsataporn family, had spent months trying and failing to negotiate an extended fishing concession for the boats. The fleet spent the time hiding in Indonesian waters, banned from entering ports, and unable to restock on food and supplies. Finally the captains were ordered to return to Thailand.

Two men had died before the boats left Indonesian waters; during the return voyage an average of three men died each day from malnutrition. The boat captains ordered the bodies to be dumped overboard. By the time the fleet reached Thailand 39 men had died, and one died later in hospital.

With the help of various aid agencies, the surviving workers sued the owners and got the police involved. The captains fled; the owners denied they were aware of conditions on the boats, and said they did not have the captains’ full names and addresses. No one has been ¬convicted, and Aung Thu Ya understands only minimal back-pay (10,000 to 40,000 baht; $340 to $1360 for years of work) has been given to those workers who agreed to the owners’ offers. “According to the stories of our fishermen, the skippers and officers – they beat, they hit, they kill,” says Aung Thu Ya. “So many cases. They torture the fishermen. But the ¬industry is booming.”

Inland from Mahachai port, in the warren of streets in the town, a few seafarers talk about their lives. Aye is very handsome, with smooth brown skin and bright teeth, and he smiles a lot. He knows, all too well, how much endurance is needed to work on Thai fishing trawlers, but he worries about having his photo taken and his name used. He fears reprisals if he tells his story. It gets worse: the people in charge of the office where he agrees to meet don’t even want their organisation named; they, too, mutter about the “mafia” culture of the fishing industry.

Sitting casually on the tiled floor, Aye talks about the horrors of life at sea. He talks about men who suffer without medicine when they’re ill, who are beaten because they fail to understand instructions in Thai, and of how he once spent two years at sea without seeing land. Aye, now 29, is from Rangoon, and he has been working on the boats for 15 years. Why does he carry on? He says he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and doesn’t know how to start.

Workers like him, with experience and some knowledge of the Thai language, have an easier time at sea. That evening he planned to catch the bus to Nakhon Si Thammarat, on Thailand’s east coast, opposite Phuket, to board a fishing boat, and earn perhaps 5000 baht ($170) a month, with no need to pay for food or accommodation. “I will go anywhere, if I can earn more money, I will go. I have been married and divorced. My aim and my goal is to earn a lot of money. I want to live like other people.”

After all, he has seen the worst of it now. In 2005, he says he saw a Burmese worker argue first with the boat’s Thai engineer, and then with the Thai captain. The captain took out a gun and shot the worker, whose body slumped into the sea. Nothing more happened, either to the ¬captain or the witnesses. “I was living at sea for a long time; how could I report it?” Aye asks. “How can we, because we are in the hands of the ¬captain.” He says with no hard evidence it would be meaningless to report such a thing to the Thai police, and laughs at the thought he could have reported it to the Burmese embassy. “We don’t even know where the embassy is.”

Get the full story here from The Australian.

 

Human traffickers disguise themselves as benefactors

Human traffickers have made the job of stamping out their trade more difficult by posing as their victims’ benefactors, a children’s advocate says.

Cruel actions have been replaced with good relationships. The traffickers make their victims trust them and ally with them, said Chakkrid Chansang, Regional Advocacy Coordinator of Save the Children.

 

“It makes our work more difficult, as the victims themselves do not want to leave the traffickers,” he said.

“Police and my team were surprised when they cracked down on a brothel and we accompanied them to help the victims there. One told us before we took her from the brothel that she wanted to say goodbye to the brothel owner. She looked intimate with him.”

Chakkrid said many women he had taken from brothels told him they wanted to go back to work there.

“I had to persuade them not to go back. I told them it was illegal and they would get better work opportunities. We had to monitor them closely to prevent them going back.”

Read the full article here at The Nation.

1.2 Million Children

a short animated film by Effie Pappa. The film depicts a third world child pursuing the dream of freedom but falls victim to exploitation.

NEW WEBSITE REVEALS EXTENT OF SLAVERY IN EVERYDAY GOODS

From Christmas decorations in China, T-shirts in India and tobacco in Malawi, the shocking range of everyday items produced through slavery can be seen for the first time on a new interactive website from Anti-Slavery International: www.productsofslavery.org.

Launched for the UK’s inaugural Anti-Slavery Day (Monday 18 October 2010), Anti-Slavery International’s Products of Slavery website, is a data visualisation website that shows details of the 122 products made using forced and child labour in 58 countries across the world, from Argentina to Malaysia to Uzbekistan.

Death for Malaysian in Indonesia maid murder

A Malaysian court sentenced a man to death for murdering his Indonesian maid in a landmark verdict hailed by Indonesian diplomats Tuesday as a warning that the abuse of foreign domestic workers must stop.

Ties between Malaysia and neighboring Indonesia have been occasionally strained over incidents in which Indonesian maids working in Malaysia were assaulted or complained of other mistreatment.

In one of the worst cases of abuse, 40-year-old Muntik Bani died last October after police found her beaten, starved and locked in a bathroom following a tip-off by a visitor to her employer’s home.

A High Court on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur on Monday convicted A. Murugan, a 36-year-old sugar cane juice seller, of Bani’s murder, said government prosecutor Mohamad Dusuki Mokhtar. It was the first time a Malaysian has been sentenced to death for the killing of an Indonesian maid, Mohamad Dusuki said.

Read the full article from The Jakarta Post here. More on the same issue is found in The Star here.

Malaysian Charged with Exploiting 63 Indonesians in Massive Human Trafficking Case

Kuala Lumpur. A Malaysian court charged a man with exploiting 63 Indonesian women who claimed they were lured to Malaysia and forced to work as house cleaners with little or no pay, a lawyer said on Tuesday.

Lee In Chiew, a 49-year-old businessman, was charged in a district court in northern Perlis state Monday with multiple counts of human trafficking, his lawyer K. Kumarathiraviam said.

If found guilty, he could face up to 20 years in prison on some of the counts.

Kumarathiraviam said he believed it was the biggest case of alleged human trafficking brought into Malaysian courts so far. No plea was recorded, and the next court date is Oct. 13, he said.

Authorities rescued the 63 women, together with eight others who have already returned to Indonesia, from Lee’s house in July after three managed to flee and called help.

The women, promised work as maids for 500 ringgit ($160) a month, claimed they were forced to work long hours as cleaners at various houses, mostly without pay, for at least two years. The youngest rescued woman is 17 years old.

Malaysia employs nearly 2 million foreigners, mostly from poorer regional countries, in its construction, plantation, manufacturing and service industries. Many complain of overwork, unpaid salaries and sometimes even physical abuse, but prosecutions have been rare.

This article was reported in the Jakarta Globe on 7 September 2010

Outcry Over 63 Indonesian ‘Slave Women’ in Malaysia

Jakarta. The case of 63 Indonesian women who were tricked into practical slavery by an unscrupulous Malaysian businessman is prompting calls for the government to offer stronger protection and legal assistance to Indonesians working abroad.

Get the full story here at Jakarta Globe.