Saturday, May 23, 2015

Sold for ransom: On the trail of Thailand's human traffickers...

Earlier this month, I accompanied a group of Thai volunteers through the steamy mangrove forest of an island on the Andaman coast. They were following up hazy reports of unmarked graves on the island; it was known to have been used by traffickers to hold large groups of migrants while they waited for transport south towards the Malaysian border.

They dug down deep into the waterlogged soil, before the first fragments of bone appeared. Then they pulled at a soggy wet cloth. It was a dress. Inside were the yellowing bones of a woman. Who she was, or how she died, we still do not know. But it is almost certain she was one of the migrants.

She must have endured a gruelling sea journey to reach this desolate spot. Had she lived, the ordeal ahead of her, on her route to a better life in Malaysia, might have been even worse.

Last October, I was in almost exactly the same area. We had dashed down from Bangkok on news that a group of migrants had been rescued by officials in the district of Takua Pa. In the community hall we found 81 men in acute distress, weeping and praying.

Rohingya Muslims have been fleeing here from mistreatment in Myanmar for several years - but this time the men were not Rohingyas. They were Bangladeshis. And some of them told us they had been forced on to the boats that transported them here. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Ruthless $570-per-child traffickers exploit Nepal tragedy...
  2. Thailand secretly supplies Rohingya refugees to trafficking rings...
  3. The deadly business of migrant smuggling...
  4. Slave trade booms in Dark Triangle...
  5. Revealed: Asian slave labour producing prawns for supermarkets in US, UK...
  6. There are more slaves today than EVER before in the history of the world...
  7. Thailand’s disgraceful human trafficking record...
  8. Locked in cages and whipped with toxic stingray tails: The Burmese slaves...
  9. A dangerous journey: trafficking women in Africa...

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