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 He never did.
When he reported for work at a house on the outskirts of Teknaf, a
man there gave him a drink of water. Soon, his eyelids sagged and
his head started spinning.
When he awoke, it was dark. He had lost all sense of time. Two
Bangladeshi men then forced him and seven others onto a small boat
and bound them.
"My hands were tied. My eyes were blindfolded," said Miae, 20.
The boat sailed through the night until it reached a larger ship
moored far offshore. Miae was thrown into its dark, crowded hold by
armed guards. He and his fellow captives survived on scraps of food
and dirty water, some of them for weeks.
The ship eventually sailed toward Thailand where, as Reuters
reported last year, human-trafficking gangs hold thousands of boat
people in brutal jungle camps until relatives pay ransoms to secure
their release.
Testimonies from Bangladeshi and Rohingya survivors provide evidence
of a shift in tactics in one of Asia’s busiest human-trafficking
routes. In the past, evidence showed most people boarded smuggling
boats voluntarily. Now people are being abducted or tricked and then
taken to larger ships anchored in international waters just outside
Bangladesh’s maritime boundary.
It’s unclear exactly how many people are being coerced onto the
boats. But seven men interviewed by Reuters who said they were taken
by force described being held until the boats filled up with
hundreds of people in what are effectively floating prisons. Two of
the men were taken to trafficking camps in Thailand.
 "EATING LEAVES"
The experiences of these men recall the trans-Atlantic slave trade
of centuries ago. Miae and four other men who were held on the same
ship as him described being kept in near total darkness and being
regularly whipped by guards. Two men from another boat said they
were forced to sit in a squatting position and that the hatch to the
hold was only opened to remove dead bodies.
Miae and 80 other men were abandoned, starving and dehydrated, on a
remote island by their captors, who appear to have fled for fear
their operation had been exposed, according to two local Thai
officials who were involved in rescuing the men in Phang Nga,
located just north of the popular tourist island of Phuket.
"Their conditions were beyond what a human should have to go
through," said Jadsada Thitimuta, an official in Phang Nga. "Some
were sick and many were like skeletons. They were eating leaves."
More than 130 suspected trafficking victims, mostly Bangladeshis but
also stateless Rohingya Muslims from western Myanmar, have been
found in Phang Nga since Oct. 11, according to Thailand’s Ministry
of Social Development and Human Security. Prayoon Rattanasenee, the
acting governor of Phang Nga province, said that interviews
conducted by police, rights groups and his own people revealed that
the victims were “brought by force. Many were drugged but we don’t
know the exact number,” he told Reuters.
Evidence indicates that many of the boats appear to be from
Thailand. The abducted men recalled ships with either Thai flags or
Thai-speaking crews. In June, six people were killed and dozens
injured when a mutiny broke out in Bangladeshi waters on what the
Bangladesh Coast Guard described as a “Thai trawler” trafficking
hundreds of men to Thailand.
The Bangladesh Coast Guard told Reuters it was aware of trafficking
ships lurking just outside Bangladesh’s territorial waters.
Intercepting them wasn’t easy, said Lieutenant Commander M. Ashiqe
Mahmud.
"At night they enter our waters, take the people and again cross the
boundary," he said. "It is very difficult to identify those ships at
sea."
Ashiqe said the coast guard was intercepting smaller boats that were
leaving Bangladeshi shores with people to feed the larger ships. A
report in August by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said
that in the first half of the year, Bangladeshi authorities
reportedly arrested “over 700 people (including smugglers and crew)
attempting to depart irregularly by sea from Bangladesh."
The Royal Thai Navy, which patrols the coastline with the Marine
Police Division, also said it was aware people were being held
captive on ships off its coast. "The truth is they use fishing boats
to transport people and the bottom of the boat becomes like a room
to put the people [in], but it seems like a commercial fishing
boat,” said Royal Thai Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Kan Deeubol.
The ship on which Miae was held set sail with its human cargo for
Thai waters four days after he was taken aboard. Others interviewed
by Reuters say they spent up to six weeks in the hold of the ship
anchored in the Bay of Bengal. Fourteen armed guards were aboard,
said Miae.
The men were forced to squat for much of their journey and sometimes
had their hands and feet bound with rope or cloth. The guards
routinely beat them with sticks or whipped them with rubber fan
belts.
Food was a handful of rice a day, or nothing at all. What little
drinking water they received was contaminated with sea water. "We
tasted it in our hands and it was salty," said Muhammed Ariful
Islam, 22, a Bangladeshi fruit vendor who was on the same boat as
Miae.
A NEW WEAPON
Miae, who left behind his wife and three children, said he was
kidnapped. "I never thought I would leave Bangladesh," he said,
sitting in a government shelter in Phang Nga.
That’s a change. In the past, many impoverished Rohingya Muslims
from Myanmar and Bangladesh voluntarily boarded small, local fishing
boats heading across the Bay of Bengal in the hope of reaching
Muslim-majority Malaysia where they could find work. Smuggling, done
initially with the consent of those involved, differs from
trafficking, which involves entrapment, coercion and deceit.
Thai authorities say the existence of the boats in which people are
being held against their will is a response to the more strenuous
efforts they are making to combat trafficking. Police operations
have led to the rescue of 200 to 300 trafficking victims in the past
six months, said Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, who is
in charge of counter-trafficking operations for immigration police
in southern Thailand.
“The traffickers have become more sophisticated and cautious, partly
because of the Thai government policy to crack down,” he said.
The country’s military government says it is beefing up cooperation
with neighboring Malaysia and has registered more than one million
illegal migrant workers to prevent them falling prey to traffickers.
“That’s a big step,” said Sek Wannamethee, a spokesperson for the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Human rights groups say the growing use of force is because
trafficking has become increasingly lucrative, not because of any
new measures taken by Thailand. Competition between a rising number
of people smugglers explains why they are resorting to kidnapping,
said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, a Rohingya advocacy group.
"There are always five to eight boats waiting in the Bay of Bengal.
And the brokers are desperate to fill them."
Matthew Smith, the executive director of Fortify Rights, an
organization that documents human rights violations in Southeast
Asia, said the size of the ships being used by traffickers has
increased as business is thriving and the trafficking rings are able
to operate largely with impunity.
THAILAND'S ROLE
A series of Reuters investigations in 2013 revealed the complicity
of some Thai authorities in smuggling Rohingya and in deporting them
back into the hands of human traffickers.
Thailand was downgraded in June to the lowest category in the U.S.
State Department's annual ranking of the world's worst
human-trafficking centers, putting it in the same category as North
Korea and the Central African Republic. The same month, the Thai
military vowed to "prevent and suppress human trafficking," after
having seized power from an elected government on May 22.
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Five months later, jungle camps are still holding thousands of
people in remote hills near the border with Malaysia, according to
testimonies from two recent escapees and a human smuggler. The men
and women aboard the prison ships who reach Thailand are sold for
$200 each to trafficking gangs, according to one of two Rohingya men
interviewed by Reuters who recently escaped from the trafficking
camps.
"The camps are running very smoothly," the human smuggler, based in
southern Thailand, told Reuters.
The smuggler, a long-time Rohingya resident of Thailand who spoke on
condition of anonymity, estimated there were up to eight large camps
holding 2,000 to 3,000 people at any one time.
The two men who recently escaped described the brutality in the
camps. One of them told Reuters he witnessed camp guards gang-raping
a woman.
Police Major General Thatchai describes a vast and complex
trafficking network in which Bangladeshis and Rohingya kidnap and
trade their own people with the help of nationals from Thailand,
Myanmar, Malaysia and Pakistan. "It's transnational crime," Thatchai
said.
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR confirmed the existence of
"bigger fishing or cargo vessels" that carry up to 700 passengers
across the Bay of Bengal to Thailand – a five- or six-day journey.
This time of year is rush hour for smugglers and traffickers.
October marks the start of the four-month "sailing season," the
busiest time for smuggling and trafficking ships plying the Bay of
Bengal.
The Thai Navy’s Kan said most of the boats and crews were from
Thailand and that patrols against traffickers had been increased in
the country’s territorial waters. But Kan said the bigger boats were
operating beyond Thailand’s maritime boundaries, in international
waters, and so the navy couldn’t move against them.
WHOSE JURISDICTION?
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS),
to which Thailand is a signatory, each nation “shall take effective
measures to prevent and punish the transport of slaves in ships
authorized to fly its flag.” The Navy didn’t respond to queries on
why it wasn’t acting against trafficking ships carrying the Thai
flag outside its territorial waters.
Robert Beckman, the director of the Center for International Law at
the National University of Singapore, said the Thai Navy would have
jurisdiction over a ship flying a Thai flag in international waters.
Under UNCLOS it had a right, not an obligation, to act against
someone suspected of engaging in the slave trade, he said. The
“uncertain state of the law on these matters,” Beckman added, meant
that navies and coast guards were “usually very reluctant to arrest
persons outside their territorial waters, especially if they are on
ships flying the flag of another state.”
Interviews with two Rohingya, who in early October escaped from a
Thai trafficking camp, corroborate the testimonies of the Phang Nga
victims. They also suggest the slave ships have been operating for
some time.
Mohamad Nobir Noor, 27, says he was living in an impoverished
Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh, near the border with Myanmar,
when he was taken. One September evening last year, men with knives
and sticks forced him onto a small boat that sailed all night to
reach a larger vessel moored at sea.
It would eventually hold 550 people, Noor estimated.
They were guarded by 11 men with guns, he said. Most were Thai
speakers but one was Rakhine, the majority Buddhist ethnic group in
Rakhine State, where communal violence since 2012 has killed
hundreds and left 140,000 homeless, most of them Rohingya.
About 30 of those being held were women. "There was one woman who
was very beautiful,” said Noor. “The guards took her upstairs. When
she came back she was crying and her clothes were wet. She didn't
say anything."
Drinking water was so scarce that Noor said he drank his own urine
to survive. When someone died, a small group of men was permitted to
carry the body up on deck. A quick prayer was said and then the
bodies were thrown into the water. “For the sharks," Noor said.
ESCAPE AND MUTINY
Once, Noor tried to escape by jumping overboard during a trip to the
toilet. The guards dragged him back in and gave him electric shocks
with wires attached to the ship's generator, he said.
Usually, most passengers were too physically weak or terrified to
confront the guards. But, on at least one occasion, desperation
trumped fear.
On the morning of June 11, the Bangladesh Coast Guard arrived off
the coast of St. Martin’s Island, in Bangladesh waters, to record
the bloody aftermath of a high-seas firefight that followed a mutiny
aboard a Thai trafficking ship. Desperate for food and water,
passengers had overwhelmed the crew. But another trafficking ship
quickly arrived and its crew opened fire on the mutineers, said
Lieutenant Commander Mahmud of the Bangladesh Coast Guard.
Six people were killed and 30 sustained bullet injuries. Among the
injured were “two Thai crew members and one Myanmar human
trafficker,” according to a Bangladesh Coast Guard statement.
A record 40,000 Rohingya passed through the Thai camps in 2013, Lewa
of the Arakan Project said. They are held captive until relatives
pay the ransom to traffickers to release them over the border in
Malaysia, she said.
By early 2014, not just Rohingya but other nationalities were also
ending up in the trafficking camps. In a series of raids earlier
this year, Thai police found hundreds of Bangladeshis, as well as
Uighur Muslims from China's restive northwestern province of
Xinjiang.
The camps were also the likely destination of the Bangladeshis
rescued in Phang Nga. But something went wrong.
They were brought ashore at the remote island in Phang Nga under
cover of darkness. Phang Nga official Jadsada says he believed they
were about to be transferred by road to another location, but a
tip-off to the authorities compelled their captors to flee.
Local officials have yet to account for another 190 passengers they
believe came on the same boat as Miae and Islam from Bangladesh via
the Bay of Bengal. Jadsada said they might already be trapped in
trafficking camps.
(Reporting By Peter Hirschberg; Additional reporting by Serajul
Quadir in Dhaka and Mohammad Nurul Islam in Cox's Bazar; Editing by
Peter Hirschberg and Bill Tarrant)
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