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Friday, April 10, 2015

Number of slaves found on Indonesian island at almost 550

JAKARTA, Indonesia — The number of enslaved fishermen found on a remote Indonesian island has now reached nearly 550, after a fact-finding team returned for a single day to make sure no one had been left behind nearly a week after more than half of the men were removed in a dramatic rescue.

Many of the 210 identified Thursday were Burmese who wanted to leave, but there were a few holdouts — men who claimed they were owed years of back pay from their bosses, said Steve Hamilton, deputy chief of mission at the International Organization for Migration in Jakarta.

An in-depth investigation by The Associated Press published last month led to the discovery of massive rights abuses in the island village of Benjina and surrounding waters. The report traced slave-caught seafood from there to Thailand where it can then enter the supply chains of some of America's biggest supermarket chains and retailers.

Many of the men interviewed said they were tricked or even kidnapped before being put on boats in Thailand and taken to Indonesia. They were forced to work almost non-stop under horrendous conditions, some brutally beaten by their Thai captains when they were sick or caught resting.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Phillips seafood operates from that region.

Anonymous said...

Had heard from a person from an
Ocean City Restaurant that most
all the Seafood comes from Thailand. Scarey, huh?

Anonymous said...

Her's a news flash people. The US government is well aware of this and is indirectly supporting it by doing nothing. You all think that colonialism is dead? Its not.

One of the goals of colonialism is to enslave the population of any given area so they work for free or as close to free as possible. What do you think is going on with outsourced jobs? its about massively reducing overhead by paying people in third world countries next to nothing. And its legitimized by these trade agreements politicians are so fond of.

This is nothing new and classic slavery as we know is alive and well all over the world. Africa, Asia, South America, North America and Europe all have slavery. And I don;t mean the philosophical debt slavery.

Wake up. Globalization is a failure for everybody but the extremely wealthy.

Anonymous said...

I don't buy seafood from there. Especially since the Tsunami...all that contamination.