The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea: slavery in the Thai fishing industry
A survivor’s graphic
memoir and a feature film reveal horrific exploitation and violence on the high
seas – and the shame of the world’s complicity..
In 2006, a young Cambodian sculptor, Vannak
Anan Prum, left his village to look for labouring work. He needed to earn
enough money to pay for his wife Sokun’s impending hospital stay to give birth
to their first child. He intended to be away for two months. He would not see his wife again for 5 years. After a middleman on the Thai-Cambodian border promised he could earn a
lot of money drying fish, Prum was sold into slave labour, sent to sea on a
fishing trawler. He was forced to work around the clock and through storms,
allowed a maximum two hours’ sleep by day and two hours at night.
Violence happened on the boat every day for
the next 4 years as a way of keeping those enslaved in line, Prum tells
Guardian Australia through a translator. He says people would disappear off the
boats without warning, and were assumed to have been killed and thrown into the
sea. One night, Prum says he saw one Thai worker cut another man’s head off
with a cleaver.
Prum writes about and explicitly draws
these horrific experiences in his new graphic memoir of modern slavery, The
Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea. The story includes his experience of jumping
ship to attempt to swim to his escape, only to be sold by his “rescuers” into
slavery on a palm oil plantation on the Malaysian coast. His return home to his wife and the daughter
born in his absence was eventually secured by LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights
organisation, in 2011.
“There are many slaves who die in the
ocean, and their children don’t know where they have gone,” says Prum. “If we
don’t share these stories, the world doesn’t know what’s going on in the middle
of the ocean.” The rest of the world is implicated in this slavery....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/21/such-brutality-tricked-into-slavery-in-the-thai-fishing-industry
