4.12 PM Thursday, 28 March 2024
  • City Fajr Shuruq Duhr Asr Magrib Isha
  • Dubai 04:57 06:11 12:27 15:53 18:37 19:51
28 March 2024

Fisherman goes home after 22 years as slave

Every year, thousands of migrant workers are tricked or sold into the seafood industry's gritty underworld. (AP)

Published
By AP

All he did was ask to go home.
 
The last time the Burmese slave made the same request, he was beaten almost to death. But after being gone eight years and forced to work on a boat in faraway Indonesia, Myint Naing was willing to risk everything to see his mother again. His nights were filled with dreams of her, and time was slowly stealing her face from his memory.


 
So he threw himself on the ground and roped his arms around the captain's legs to beg for freedom.
 
The Thai skipper barked loud enough for all to hear that Myint would be killed for trying to abandon ship. Then he flung the fisherman onto the deck and chained down his arms and legs.


 
Myint was left for three days to burn in the searing sun and shiver in the nighttime rain, without food or water. He wondered how he would be killed. Would they throw his body overboard to wash up on shore, like the other corpses he'd seen? Would they shoot him? Or would they simply bash his head open, as they had done before?
 
He was never going to see his mother again. He would simply disappear, and she wouldn't even know where to look.



Every year, thousands of migrant workers like Myint are tricked or sold into the seafood industry's gritty underworld. It's a brutal trade that has operated for decades as an open secret in Southeast Asia's waters, where unscrupulous companies rely on slaves to supply fish to major supermarkets and stores worldwide.
 
As part of a year-long investigation into the multibillion-dollar business, The Associated Press interviewed more than 340 current and former slaves, in person or in writing. The stories told by one after another are strikingly similar.


 
Myint is a thin, soft-spoken man with the wiry strength of someone who has worked hard all his life. Illness has left his right arm partly paralyzed and his mouth clenched into a forced half-smile. But when he breaks into laughter, you see flashes of the boy he once was, despite all that has happened in between — a 22-year odyssey recounted by Myint and his relatives.
 
He comes from a small village off a narrow, dusty road in southern Myanmar's Mon State, the oldest of four boys and two girls. In 1990, his father drowned while fishing, leaving him as the man in charge at just 15. He helped cook, wash clothes and care for his siblings, but they kept sliding deeper into poverty.


 
So when a fast-talking broker visited the neighborhood three years later with stories of jobs in Thailand, Myint was easily wooed. The agent offered $300 for just a few months of work — enough for some families to survive on for a year. He and several other young men quickly put their hands up to go.
 
His mother, Khin Than, wasn't so sure. He was only 18 years old, with no education or travel experience. But he kept begging, arguing that he wouldn't be gone long and relatives already working there could look after him.


Finally, she relented.
 
Neither of them knew it but, at that moment, Myint began a journey that would take him thousands of miles away from his family. He would miss births, deaths, marriages and the unlikely transition of his country from a dictatorship to a bumpy democracy. He would run away twice from the ruthless forced labor on a fishing boat, only to realize that he could never escape from the shadow of fear.


Yet on the day he left home in 1993, all Myint saw was promise. The broker hustled his new recruits to grab their bags immediately, and Myint's 10-year-old sister wiped tears from her cheeks as she watched him walk down the dirt track away from their village.


His mother wasn't home. He never got to say goodbye.

Thailand earns $7 billion a year from a seafood industry that runs on labor from the poorest parts of the country, along with Cambodia, Laos and especially Myanmar, otherwise known as Burma. Up to 200,000 estimated migrants, most of them illegal, work at sea. Their catch ends up halfway around the globe in the United States, Europe and Japan — on dinner tables and in cat food bowls.