He said captains and boat owners don’t allow the migrants any legal documents for fear they will attempt to escape. Migrants in Thailand without registered documents are at great risk of being arrested, tortured, jailed, deported or subjected to extortion.
When the fishing boats dock, the captives are kept in camps on the shore, watched over by armed security guards. There are few chances for the captives to escape while ashore, and even when they do, they usually end up arrested by local police in collusion with the traffickers, who return them to the fishing boats’ owners.
Sein Htay said the owners of many of the fishing boats are leading figures in the communities, including politicians, local businessmen and administrators, and all have connections with police. Local police, he said, receive bribes to return the slaves to the boat owners and captains.
Sein Htay’s claims are backed up by David Hammond, CEO and founder of Human Rights at Sea, a British nonprofit that helps raise awareness and accountability for human rights violations throughout the maritime environment.
Hammond told the Journal that individuals who work in human trafficking and the smuggling trade are from established criminal networks that are embedded in local economies and often supported by local constabulary; this has been the subject of media reports, which named senior military, political and state officials who are now being implicated and criminally charged for their involvement in the “human supply chain.”
“Such a network is not an opportunistic one; instead, it is a well-established structure and arguably has become embedded in the fabric of some echelons of society where human beings are the traded commodity,” Hammond said.
He added that the apparent normalization of the slave trade is testimony to its tacit acceptance in some constabulary, military and executive circles, underpinned by the hard fact that profit comes before people.
“Without NGOs such as ours, abuses will undoubtedly continue to go unreported and in the vacuum of awareness and inability by society to effectively respond. Evil multiplies, criminals profit, and ordinary people continue to be abused,” Hammond said.
Global Market and Slavery Chain
Modern slavery in fishing boats in Southeast Asian waters proves that the slavery of ancient times continues because of the global market’s demand for seafood and products for pet foods.
Investigative reports by international newspapers, including The Guardian, The New York Times and Associated Press, have found that many of the ingredients in pet food and seafood that are sold in the United States and Europe are being produced by cheap labor and slave labor from Thai fishing sectors.
The New York Times reported July 27 that much of pet food, such as canned cat and dog food, or food for poultry, livestock and farm-raised fish shipped and sold to United States comes from the waters off Thailand.
In May of this year, human trafficking in Southeast Asia gained international attention when more than 3,000 Rohingyan migrants from Burma and Bangladesh were left adrift by traffickers and smugglers in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal, and several hundred bodies believed to be corpses of victims of human trafficking were found in Malaysia and Thailand in camps run by gangs and traffickers.
Thai and Malaysian officials’ responses to the mass grave discoveries disrupted trafficking patterns and led to additional abuses against Rohingyan and Bangladeshi migrants, as the traffickers pushed boats out to sea and denied survivors any resources.
Since 2012, more than 150,000 Rohingya have fled western Burma to escape persecution, and human traffickers in Burma and Bangladesh have bought and sold tens of thousands of them, duping them onto modern-day slave ships with promises of lucrative employment in Malaysia.