Thai fishing industry traffics, imprisons and enslaves
Rohingya migrants
trafficked through deadly jungle camps have been sold to Thai fishing vessels
as slaves to produce seafood sold across the world, the Guardian has
established. So profitable is the trade in slaves that some local
fishermen in Thailand have
been converting their boats to carry Rohingya migrants instead of fish.
A Guardian investigation into Thailand’s export-orientated
seafood business and the vast trans-national trafficking syndicates that had,
until recently, been holding thousands of Rohingya migrants captive in jungle
camps, has exposed strong and lucrative links between the two. Testimony from survivors, brokers and human rights groups
indicate that hundreds of Rohingya men were sold from the network of trafficking
camps recently discovered in southern Thailand.
According to those sold from the camps on to the boats, this
was frequently done with the knowledge
and complicity of some Thai state officials. In some cases, Rohingya
migrants held in immigration detention centres in Thailand were taken by staff
to brokers and then sold on to Thai fishing boats.
Other Rohingya migrants say Thai officials collected them
from human traffickers when they arrived on the country’s shores and
transported them to jungle camps where they were held to ransom or sold to
fishing boats as slave labour. Thailand’s seafood industry is worth an estimated $7.3bn a
year. The vast majority of its produce is exported. Last year, another Guardian
investigation tracked
the supply chain of prawns produced with slave labour to British and American
supermarket chains.
Though the Guardian has not irrefutably linked individual
Thai ships using Rohingya slaves to specific seafood supermarket produce, the
likelihood is that some seafood produced using this labour will have ended up
on western shelves.
The scale of the profitable and sophisticated human
trafficking networks making money from the desperation of hundreds of thousands
of stateless Rohingya “boat people” has been emerging over the past weeks. Tens of thousands of Rohingya fled state-sponsored ethnic
cleansing in Burma in the first three months of this year. Stateless and
unwanted, their only option was to take to the seas in their desperate attempt
to reach the relative safety of Malaysia... Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/20/thai-fishing-industry-implicated-enslavement-deaths-rohingya
