By LAWI WENG Friday, December 9, 2011
Burmese sex workers outside a Ranong brothel in Thailand. (Photo: The Irrawaddy)
Sompong Sakaew, the director of the Labor Rights Protection Network, told The Irrawaddy on Friday that the four women were rescued following a tip-off from the victims during a 3 pm raid of the shrimp factory by local police and human rights activists on December 7.
“The four women will be deported soon. Now they are at the ITC (Immigration Detention Center) in Bangkok,” he said.
Poe Kwor, a member of the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma who was involved in the raid on the shrimp factory, said that 39 people were detained in Kamphaeng Phet province in October for illegally entering Thailand. They were detained in prison for 24 days, then for another 8 days in a Chonburi jail before being sent to the Thai-Burmese for deportation.
The 39 Burmese migrants were allegedly trafficked by the Thai police and a prison car driver from Chonburi province while being transported to the border post in Mae Sot, Thailand for deportation to Myawaddy, Burma.
The victims informed the human right activists that the prison car stopped at an unknown location in Chonburi Province, where four cars picked them up for trafficking.
“They told us that they were divided into different groups and the police threatened them by pointing his gun, told them to get out of the prison car and forced them to get in the human trafficking agents cars,” said Poe Kwor.
The victims reported that the broker, an alleged trafficker who said her name was Ma Maw, is an ethnic Mon from Chonburi Province. The four women were from Rangoon and Moulmein and the broker trafficked each woman to the shrimp factory in Mahachai, Samut Sakhon Province for 11,000 baht.
Of the 39 people in the prison car, 15 men were trafficked to Thai-run fishing boats in Chonburi Province, six women were trafficked to the shrimp factory in Mahachai and the fate of the other 18 persons is not yet known.
The human rights activists reported that they knew where the 15 men were trafficked, but not the location of where they are currently working. They also said that two of the six women trafficked to the shrimp factory were released before the raid because their relatives paid money to the owner.
The Thai anti-human trafficking group in Mahachai intends to take action against the Chonburi police officers and prison car driver who trafficked the migrants and will continue to investigate what happened to the 15 men who were sold to fishing boats and forced to work at the sea, as well as the other 18 people who have not yet been located.
Human trafficking often occurs in Mahachai in southern Thailand, where there is a large fishing industry. Many Burmese migrants who have come to work in the area have been trafficked to fishing boats and forced to work at sea.
According to a US report, the Thai government “reported 18 convictions in trafficking-related cases in 2010—an increase from eight known convictions during the previous year; as of May 2011, only five of the 18 convictions reported by the government could be confirmed to be for trafficking offenses.”
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