Never-ending cycle: The human cost of slave labour

Terror and relief ran through Phal Chantha’s mind as he climbed ashore on a small beach in Malaysia, some 1,200 kilometres across the South China Sea from his home in Cambodia.

Behind him in hot pursuit were the Thai fishermen who he said had subjected him to four months of beatings and slave labour, drugged him and murdered his colleagues as he stood watching.

Ahead lay a hostile jungle, a foreign country and the hope of freedom.

That hope was to prove empty. Phal Chantha soon discovered that he was caught in a cycle of trafficking kept in motion by governmental corruption and multinational brokering networks that operate in Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia.

In late 2008 while working as a manual labourer for a mere 6,000 riel a day, Phal Chantha was introduced through a friend to a broker who extended a compelling offer: If he was willing to relocate to Thailand, he would be rewarded with a lucrative job in a fish-processing plant.

Employees could expect to earn about US$230 a month, an offer the desperately impoverished man, struggling to send money back home to his family, could not refuse.

It was to be the beginning of a series of deceptions for Phal Chantha, who would fall victim to a widespread and highly organised labour trafficking trade that rights groups say supplies an estimated one-fifth of Thailand’s fishing industry workers.

Labour trafficking ensnares impoverished individuals and their families in a web of slavery and extortion that ceases only when they have been sucked dry of every possession, says Manfred Hornung, a legal advisor from the Cambodian rights group Licadho.

“It goes over the whole three borders if you like, involving three nations with very distinct problems in relation to corruption at all levels,” says Manfred Hornung, who has investigated the slave labour market since 2006.

Shortly after arriving in Thailand, Phal Chantha was locked in a room and drugged. He awoke to find himself enslaved, trapped aboard a Thai fishing boat with no rights and no legal documents. Months of exploitation followed.

“I was forced to work day and night with only one or two hours of sleep in between, and if I didn’t work, they would kill me,” he said of the conditions that led him to risk his life by jumping overboard into darkness and dangerous waters while his boat docked for repairs on December 21, 2009.

In those early hours of the morning, Phal Chantha and three other men swam ashore and embarked on a three-day journey through a jungle somewhere off the northern coast of Sarawak without food, constantly hiding from their tormentors, in search of a town named Sibu mentioned by other slaves.

When they finally arrived and tried to turn themselves in to local authorities, police refused to arrest the men. Shortly afterward they were approached by a man who spoke Thai and talked of employment opportunities that could lead to repatriation.

Phal Chantha and Rim Rann saw through an all too familiar trick, but their colleagues whom they knew only as Phin and Ruen, were deeply homesick and couldn’t help taking the bait.

Manfred Hornung says Phin and Ruen were following a path for trafficked Cambodian workers, a path that has become so well established since he began observing it in 2006 that a thriving slave labour trade has arisen in Sarawak to exploit escapees.

“They are basically stranded in Sarawak and they don’t know where they are.

They don’t know the state, they don’t know the country, but once they are on land and walk the road to try and find help they have already been spotted by brokers,” he says.

Aegile Fernandez, anti-human trafficking coordinator of Malaysia-based NGO Tenaganita, says escapees arrive so frequently that brokers are literally waiting for them on shore.

“The agents are at the coastlines and they know certain spots where the trafficked fishermen jump ship. As soon as they come on shore ... the agents go and tell them you can earn some money.”

Recruited with the promise that after a few years they can earn airfare back to Cambodia, most men see little choice but to agree. With no local language skills, no rights and, most pressingly, no food, they are quickly sold into local labour markets.

Most will never see a paycheck and find themselves subjected to a second round of exploitation that has been documented by Licadho in dozens of cases.

Soon they find themselves faced with a terrible choice: Do they continue to work for an employer who provides no pay and little food, or escape again and throw themselves upon the mercy of the Malaysian legal system?

Those who choose the second path invariably end up in one of Malaysia’s immigration detention centres. Here too, the brokers are waiting.

Their intention at this final stage of exploitation is to extort money from the victim’s family in Cambodia, who must pay $300 to $400 in exchange for the men’s safe return.

This final stage, sometimes referred to as “re-trafficking”, is particularly disturbing, says Hornung. Having already endured terrible hardships, the victim returns to a family that has been financially destroyed.

“If you have to raise $400, you have to give up your land as collateral. If your son comes back with no money in his pocket, it’s a clear recipe for disaster.”

Sith Luos, chief of the anti-human trafficking and juvenile protection office at the police commissariat in Banteay Meanchey province, says the trade in trafficked Cambodian workers is driven by unstoppable illegal migration paths into Thailand.

“In the first half of 2010, 56,282 people have been sent back to Cambodia by Thai authorities,” he said, citing the data for Banteay Meanchey alone.

Just how many additional illegal migrant workers go undetected by Thai authorities remains unclear, but the scale of Thailand’s illegal fishing industry and reliance on foreign slave labour suggests the real figure is significantly higher.

Lim Tith, national project coordinator at the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region, estimates the total fish-selling trade in Thailand, registered or otherwise, to be worth $2 billion a year in exports.

“ILO research on the industry, although primarily looking at Burmese migrants, indicates that 20 percent of the migrant workers on the boats are trafficked,” he said.

“We are looking here in the range of tens of thousands of boats,” Licadho’s Hornung said, adding that he has seen little being done in Thailand at the policing level to crack down on the black-market operators.

“We’ve sent information through various channels to police about that, and the response wasn’t very strong, to say the least, about criminal investigations against these practices.”

Sith Luos says that officials in key Cambodian border provinces such as his own are trying to crack down on illegal migration and brokering but simply do not have the resources to deal with the massive flow of people over the border.

Chronic food shortages and poverty are so entrenched in Cambodia’s most impoverished rural provinces such as Prey Veng and Banteay Meanchay that even awareness campaigns alerting people to the risks involved in seeking unregulated employment abroad are failing to curb the wave of migration, Hornung says.

“I think it is a social issue. It has to do with a huge young labour force pressing onto the Cambodian labour market every year so people go out of desperation; its not a matter of choice,” said Hornung.