Relief, tales of abuse as fishermen return

Thursday, 30 August 2012
Sen David
The Phnom Penh Post

A group of five fishermen who had endured more than a year in forced labour on a Thai fishing vessel returned to an emotional reunion with their families in Phnom Penh last night.

In a scene that has become all too familiar over the past year, a group of five fishermen who had endured more than a year in forced labour on a Thai fishing vessel returned to an emotional reunion with their families in Phnom Penh last night.

The men flew into the capital’s international airport from Indonesia, where the boat they worked on was found illegally fishing.

Sim Yeng, 32, from Kandal province, said he had gone to Thailand believing that a broker in his village had found him work at a high salary for one year.

Instead, he ended up working for nothing on a fishing boat.

‘Slaves’ finally home

Four trafficked fishermen return to Cambodia yesterday after being rescued by South African authorities. Photograph: Vireak Mai/Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 06 July 2012
Phak Seangly
The Phnom Penh Post

Four Cambodian men held for months as slaves on a boat off the coast of South Africa were greeted by their relieved families at Phnom Penh International Airport yesterday after being rescued from their ordeal.

One of the fishermen, Kha Mara, 29, said the group had suffered months of physical and mental torment after believing they had signed up to work in Japan.

“We were forced to work without rest and salary and even during rainstorms,” he said on his return. “If we refused to work, they beat us.”

The four men, all from Kampong Cham province, were punched and kicked if their Taiwanese captors believed they were not doing enough work or if they “looked lazy”, Kha Mara said.

Challenges for Cambodian migrant workers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fjLUf6Cz08

Horrors of human slavery revealed in art

Cambodian artist Vannak Anan Prum created a series of drawings about his harrowing four years of kidnapping, forced labor and escape.

https://picasaweb.google.com/heng.soy/PrumVannakSOrdealHorrorsOfHumanSlaveryRevealedInArt?authuser=0&feat=directlink

Prum Vannak - Human trafficking victim in Thailand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM5-RQHhB00

https://www.box.com/s/d65ace9057d96aadd7e6

Using Art to Fight Human Smuggling

Vannak Anan Prum (l) is presented with an award for his anti-trafficking work by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (r), June 19, 2012. (Photo: RFA)

A Cambodian man wins a U.S. award for raising awareness of human trafficking in Southeast Asia.

2012-06-19

Radio Free Asia

A Cambodian who was mistreated, starved, and tortured as a victim of human trafficking was hailed Tuesday for raising public awareness of the criminal practice through drawings that recreated his bitter experience.

Vannak Anan Prum, who suffered years of forced labor on fishing boats in Thailand and on a plantation in neighboring Malaysia, was named by the U.S. State Department as one of 10 “Heroes Working to End Modern-Day Slavery.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented him with the award in conjunction with the department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report that tracks the extent of the human smuggling problem across the globe.

The award was given “in recognition of his amazing courage to escape slavery and his remarkable activism to end human trafficking.”

Swimming to freedom, and into center of fight against modern-day slavery

Tuesday, Jun. 19, 2012
By MATTHEW SCHOFIELD - McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- In 2009, Cambodian Prom Vannak Anan dove into a dark sea and away from a life of beatings, unpaid labor and imprisonment on a fishing boat. The lights of a port, four miles distant, guided him. The desire to be free kept him swimming.

Anan had been a new father and husband in 2005 when a "job agent" offered him a path to a better life, then moved him far from home. Instead of a job, he was sold as a laborer to a Thai boat owner. For years, he endured physical and emotional pain, hoping for a chance to escape.

So around midnight in 2009, as the crew slept on a rare night when they anchored near enough to see the shore, he swam for freedom.

Instead of mercy, the Malaysian police he'd hoped would help sold him to a palm oil plantation. It took him another year - much of it in jail - to finally find help, freedom and a way back to his family.

Interview of Prom Vannak, a Cambodian who slaved for 3 years on a Thai fishing boat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCExv2yGJl4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCExv2yGJl4

Confined To A Thai Fishing Boat, For Three Years

Vannak Prum of Cambodia was sold onto a Thai fishing boat where he was forced to work in miserable conditions for three years before escaping. Thailand's huge fishing industry is coming under increasing criticism for using trafficked workers who have been sold to unscrupulous ship captains.

Prum drew this picture of the Thai boat on which he was held and forced to work as a fisherman. (Becky Palmstrom and Shannon Service for NPR)

June 19, 2012
Shannon Service and Becky Palmstrom
NPR (National Public Radio, USA)

Thailand supplies a large portion of America's seafood. But Thailand's giant fishing fleet is chronically short of up to 60,000 fishermen per year, leaving captains scrambling to find crew. Human traffickers have stepped in, selling captives from Cambodia and Myanmar to the captains for a few hundred dollars each. Once at sea, the men often go months, or even years, without setting foot on land.

First of two parts

Cambodian Vannak Prum's destiny changed in a dirt-road town called Malai. It's a Cambodian outpost on the border with Thailand that is known for its involvement in the trafficking of human beings.

Prum arrived in Malai seven years ago searching for work. His wife was pregnant, and he needed money for the hospital bill. He intended to work for two months, but ended up meeting a human trafficker.

A few days later, Prum was sold onto a Thai fishing boat the length of a basketball court, where he worked in tight conditions with 10 men. He says he didn't reach land again for three years.

"I didn't get paid," he says. "I remained in the middle of the sea and worked day and night."

3 month investigat​ion of Thai fisheries abuse - the US’s second-lar​gest supplier of seafood reveals an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery

22 May 2012

By Mu sochua

Some of the young men on these boats end up farther than Thailand.

2 Cambodians called me last month from Senegal as the ship they were kept was being repaired in this African country. Somehow they had my phone number.

My advice to them was to reach a police station in own and seek help. They did! and arrived in Cambodia last week.

Latest trend: the employment agencies that used to recruit young women as domestic workers for Malaysia are now mobilizing young men for Thailand.

I am walking the campaign trail every day and half of the villages in this North West province is empty as the young and strong men have left for Thailand.

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Did these ex-slaves catch your lunch?

Thailand, a major source of fish imported to the US, depends on slave labor.

Click here to read this article

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Desperate life at sea

 The years grind away at young lives. Most slaves don't step on land for a full six years.

Click here to read this article

Desperate life at sea

Trawler. (GlobalPost)

The years grind away at young lives. Most slaves don't step on land for a full six years.

May 21, 2012

Patrick Winn

Global Post

SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand and PREY VENG, Cambodia — To hear Jord tell it, a deep-sea boatman’s life is one long knife fight. His nastiest scar starts above his eyes. It runs straight to his crown in a pink groove, the outcome of a man’s attempt to split his skull like a melon.

Other limbs of the 40-year-old Thai boat mechanic haven’t fared much better. A quarter-sized chunk of shin meat was sheared from his right leg. His back is pitted with hack marks. But a snarling boar, tattooed in jagged lines into his bicep, suggests that his enemies got the worst of it.

Jord tapped its inky snout and read aloud the lettering underneath. “I always win,” said the squat, sun-leathered fisherman in a high rasp.

Motherships in the abyss

Migrants from Cambodia and Myanmar unload fish off a boat Feb. 25, 2010, in Mahachai, Thailand. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

In the wild-caught seafood industry, forced labor persists because the first crucial supply-chain steps take place in a lawless, saltwater abyss.

May 21, 2012

Patrick Winn

Global Post

SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand, and PREY VENG, Cambodia — The laundering begins in a sub-zero chamber floating far from civilization. It is filled with heaps of fish, and men dressed like eskimos.

This is the fridge room on a vessel known as a “mothership.” These hulking vessels serve as deep-sea resupply stations for trawlers seeking fuel, meat, medicine, spare parts and even laborers to replace men lost at sea.

The ship’s most important function, however, is receiving wild catch into its icy bowels and ferrying it to onshore fishmongers. Some motherships and fishing boats operate under the same syndicate. Motherships that don't collect a fee for transporting catch to the buyer, typically a fishmonger stationed at a specific dock. Once a squid or sardine comes aboard the mothership, there is almost no way to know whether it was netted by paid fishermen or sea slaves.

“Motherships have freezing capacity to hold high-value fish for long periods of time,” said Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical specialist with the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking. “The fish is taken back to Thai ports for sale and, most likely, export if the fish is of high value.”

“The boat that caught it may or may not have used slave labor,” she said. “There’s just no way to know who actually caught these fish because of the way unregistered boats work with motherships many kilometers away from the shore.”

Most of the fisheries supply chain between the US and Thailand, America’s second-largest supplier of foreign seafood, can be traced. These are the links that can’t.

Slavery in Thailand’s deep-sea fishing trade is an open secret, acknowledged by the US, the UN and some within the Thai government. It is not all-pervasive. Thailand's biggest seafood export, shrimp, is sourced from coastal farms subject to spot checks. Most "Thai" tuna, the nation's second-largest seafood export, is actually imported from abroad and processed for re-export.

Did these ex-slaves catch your lunch?

For Americans, the calculation is worrisome. Thailand is the United States’ second-largest supplier of foreign seafood. Of America's total seafood imports, one out of every six pounds comes from the Southeast Asian nation. The accounts of ex-slaves, Thai fishing syndicates, officials, exporters and anti-trafficking case workers, gathered by GlobalPost in a three-month investigation, illuminate an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery.

A migrant laborer at work on a Thai fishing boat in Sattahip, Thailand's Rayong province, Sept. 1, 2011. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

Thailand, a major source of fish imported to the US, depends on slave labor.

May 21, 2012

Patrick Winn

Global Post

PREY VENG, Cambodia, and SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand — In the sun-baked flatlands of Cambodia, where dust stings the eyes and chokes the pores, there is a tiny clapboard house on cement stilts. It is home to three generations of runaway slaves.

The man of the house, Sokha, recently returned after nearly two years in captivity. His home is just as he left it: barren with a few dirty pillows passing for furniture. Slivers of daylight glow through cracks in the walls. The family’s most valuable possession, a sow, waddles and snorts beneath the elevated floorboards.

Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.

Spate of abuses continues

Trafficked fishermen return to Cambodia yesterday from Malaysia after being forced to work in slave-like conditions on Thai fishing boats. Pha Lina

Friday, 09 March 2012
Sen David
The Phnom Penh Post

Nearly two dozen fishermen were re­patriated to the Kingdom yesterday after being trafficked aboard Thai fishing boats where they endured forced labour and rampant abuse.

The 11 men bring to 30 the number of fishermen repatriated from Malaysia and Indonesia this year. They were visibly shaken as they recalled grim tales of abuse and exploitation.

Sem Sophon, 23, said that a broker he had used to find work in Thailand had sold him to a fishing boat. He was told he would make 4,500 baht (approximately US$150), but instead received no pay.

“We had to work so much, but we didn’t even get one riel,” Sem Sophon said.

If Hun Xen's regime creates enough jobs, nobody would want to to to Thailand! Hear that Hun Xen?

PM to workers: ‘don’t go’

Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Vong Sokheng
The Phnom Penh Post

Lamenting the steady stream of Cambodian men who are repatriated after falling victim to fishing boat slavery, Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday a lack of communication, not employment, was driving citizens to risky jobs abroad (sic!).

At a graduation ceremony, the premier told students the demand for agricultural workers in Cambodia was high but said advertising these positions remained a problem.

“In Ratanakkiri [province] the labour force wage is high – up to US$5 per day,” he said.

“Cambodia is now in the situation where it lacks labour (sic!), while a number of Cambodian people migrate for work outside the country, even if it is illegal.”

100 Escape From Traffickers

At least 100 Cambodians have been rescued from Thai fishing boats in Indonesia over the last year. Cambodian fishermen repatriated from Indonesia (File photo: The Phnom Penh Post)

NGOs are concerned by the growing numbers of Cambodians enslaved on Thai fishing boats.

2012-02-09

Radio Free Asia

“Corruption at all levels continued to impede progress in combating trafficking and fostering an enabling environment for trafficking” - 2011 US Trafficking in Persons report on Cambodia

At least 100 Cambodians have escaped from forced labor conditions on Thai fishing boats over the past year, according to rights groups, highlighting an increasing and dangerous trend in human trafficking in the Southeast Asian region.

All of them were found in Indonesia, where the boats linked to Thai human trafficking syndicates usually anchor at a fishing port on eastern Ambon island.

Ninety-three of the Cambodians have been repatriated home.

Mom Sok Char of Cambodia-based nongovernmental organization Legal Support for Children and Women (LSCW) said that his organization had received a number of telephone calls over the last year from Cambodian nationals seeking help in Indonesia after escaping from the fishing vessels.

Escapees From Thai Fishing Vessel Return From Indonesia

Cambodian fishermen repatriated from Indonesia (File photo: The Phnom Penh Post)

Tuesday, 07 February 2012
Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer | Phnom Penh

“They went out to work illegally because of joblessness and poverty.”

Seven men who escaped forced labor aboard a Thai fishing vessel returned to Cambodia on Tuesday, with more expected to return next week.

The men had been forced to work long hours for little pay aboard the boat before escaping to Indonesia.

“It was too hard to work on the fishing boat, because we didn’t have time to sleep,” Chhut Deum, 33, told reporters as he and the others landed at Phnom Penh International Airport. “Then we decided to return to the rice fields.”

Vorn Phea, 20, said they were only allowed to sleep about two hours per night, in what government officials and rights workers called a case of human trafficking.

Families fear abuse overseas

Family members of five men sent to work on Thai fishing boats in Africa file a complaint with Adhoc over the weekend, saying they have not heard from their sons in several months. (Photo Supplied)

Monday, 06 February 2012
Sen David
The Phnom Penh Post

Eight families in Kampong Chhnang filed complaints with Adhoc over the weekend, reporting that their sons and daughters sent abroad to work as maids and fishermen were being mistreated and that in some cases, they had not heard from them in nearly a year.

Adhoc provincial coordinator Sam Chankea said his office received reports from the families of six women who had been sent to work as maids in Malaysia, claiming that last year their daughters had complained of abuse and had “begged” for help.

Sam Chankea also said the families of five men who had been sent to work on Thai fishing boats in Africa reported that they had not heard from their sons for several months.

“The men who were working as fishermen stopped sending money back to their families, so their families became worried, and the six Cambodian maids reported incidents of abuse and begged for help,” he said.

Cambodians in bid to escape Thai boats

Tuesday, 31 January 2012
May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

A desperate group of Cambodian men have made calls to their families from Indonesia asking for help to escape from forced labour aboard exploitative Thai fishing boats.

The families of 14 men from Trea commune in Kampong Thom province’s Stoung district filed a complaint to rights group Licadho yesterday pleading for help to repatriate their loved ones.

Gnan Van, 33, said yesterday that her husband Yean Phean called her while docking at an Indonesian island on Sunday pleading for help to escape a fishing boat owner who made him work “night and day” and paid no salary.

More fishermen repatriated

Thirty Cambodian men arrive at Phnom Penh Airport yesterday after being rescued by Indonesian officials while working on Thai fishing boats. (Photo by: Mai Vireak)

Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Mom Kunthear with additional reporting by Mary Kozlovski
The Phnom Penh Post

Another 30 Cambodian men among 65 rescued in Indonesia after being trafficked into work on fishing boats in Thailand were repatriated to the Kingdom yesterday, following the return of 30 such workers last week.

The remaining five workers are set to be repatriated next month, Chiv Phally, deputy director of the anti-human trafficking and juvenile protection department at the Ministry of Interior, said yesterday.

“It was so great for me to see my country again after I left here two years ago,” 33-year-old Mouy Hoeun said upon his arrival at Phnom Penh International Airport yesterday.