Mr A broke down as he spoke about the family he left behind in Indonesia. Behind the two rough hands, his red face was trembling. The room fell silent but emotions ran high.
The 32-year-old returned to Thailand last week after a decade-long ordeal that saw him held captive on a fishing boat and then left to fend for himself on a remote island.
In the time he spent on that island, Mr A built a life for himself. He left two children — one three years old and the other only nine months — and his wife to make the journey back to Thailand. His body language showed a man whose mind was wrestling with the dilemma of whether he should have returned to tell his mother that he is still alive.
Asked if he missed his children, he nodded and began to cry. “But I came back for my mum,” he said.
After a decade without any contact, the reunion was an emotional one. “I walked past her at first. I did not recognise her. But she remembered me well,” Mr A said.
Mr A is among 10 fishermen who were repatriated on Monday by the Labour Rights Promotion Network Foundation (LPN), a Thai activist organisation. Since August last year, LPN has brought home seven batches of fishermen — 42 men in total — who were forced to work on deep-sea fishing trawlers in Indonesian waters.
Under horrendous work conditions, some of these fishermen spent years confined to the greasy, dirty galleys of cramped boats, going months at a time without setting foot on dry land. Mr A said his boat once spent an entire year without reaching port, as Ambon Island, where they unloaded their catch, was embroiled in a religious conflict.
The isolation and uncertainty took its toll on those on board. “People on the boat were stressed and sometimes attacked each other,” Mr A said.
Mr A met Spectrum the day after he returned to Thailand by air. His eyes were red, apparently from lack of sleep. He wore the same black T-shirt covered by a tattered flannel shirt that he had worn when boarding the flight two days earlier. With dark, rough skin, Mr A has a lean but strong body, suggesting years of hard manual labour.
After the years at sea, Mr A eventually found refuge on Ambon Island, a 775 square kilometre patch of mountainous land off the coast of West Papua, about 2,400km east of the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
He was not alone. Samak Tubtanee, head of the LPN’s labour rights protection section, estimated there are about 100 Thais with similar experiences to Mr A still living on Ambon Island, which is home to about 400,000 people. Another 100 are believed to be living on Tual Island, about 600km southeast of Ambon.
“We met a couple of Thais who had successfully settled there. One of them even taught the locals about farming,” Mr Samak said. “That person has a family there and did not want to go back to Thailand.”
But that is not the case for the majority of Thais abandoned there.
Survivor: Mr A arrived back in Thailand last week, but had to leave behind his two children and a wife in Indonesia. He wanted to see his mother again.
LOST AT SEA
When Mr A first met Spectrum, he was upbeat. “I will tell you anything,” he said, and began recalling the day that changed his life.
“It was around 2003 or 2004. I went out with my friend. We got drunk and I ended up crashing at the Royal Plaza area,” he said.
When he woke up, a stranger asked him if he wanted a job. “He offered me choices: baking, carrying cement or carrying rice bags. I told him I wanted to carry rice bags. Then, the man put me in a van from Royal Plaza and gave me a place to stay for a night.”
The morning after, Mr A was transported to Mahachai in Samut Sakhon province, where he stayed at a house for a night. “There was a large Manila tamarind tree in front of the house,” he recalled. The next morning, he was given a towel, a blanket, coffee, two sets of clothes, one pouch of dried tobacco, two tubes of toothpaste, two bottles of talcum powder and a box of crackers, and told to board a fishing vessel.
The agent told him he would only stay offshore for a few days.
“The agent gave me 2,000 baht. But people on the boat later told me that the agent got 18,000 baht for bringing me there,” Mr A said.
Other crew members, with a mix of nationalities, were already aboard.
Mr A can still recall vividly the name of the vessel which he worked on. The name suggests it belonged to a Thai company, which Spectrum has chosen not to name as it is now the subject of a major police investigation.
As the fishing trawler was about to leave port, Mr A said he wanted to escape.
“I looked at the ship — it was huge — and I thought that a boat that size would stay offshore for more than a couple of days,” he said. “I wanted to jump off the ship, but people told me I would be killed by the propeller.”
It took two weeks for the vessel to travel from Mahachai to Indonesia. Mr A would remain on the boat for the next three years, his main job to haul in the massive nets.
“We caught a lot of tuna fish that were very large, much bigger than anything we have in Thailand,” he said. “We spent most of our days and nights on the boat, sleeping wherever we could find space — usually on the deck or in the galleys.
“Once, there was a conflict between the local Christian and Muslim population on Ambon Island, and we had to stay aboard the boat for a whole year. We could not resupply and unload at the island.”
Stressed, homesick and suffering from cabin fever in the cramped confines of the trawler, the crew turned to alcohol, and inevitably turned on each other. Violence was common.
After six months, Mr A told the captain he wanted to go home. He was worried about his mother, a quality control officer at a factory in Chon Buri. The captain denied the request, saying he could not leave until someone was sent to replace him.
Three years later, that replacement had still not arrived, and Mr A began to plot his escape.
“The captain slapped me across the face. It was the last straw,” he said.
One day when the ship docked at Ambon Island, Mr A managed to flee. But he found himself alone and without money in a country where he couldn’t speak the language.
He survived by working odd jobs on the island, such as carrying goods at the local fish market.
Mr A said the locals on Ambon Island were mostly welcoming. “The Indonesians were good to me. Some were not when they were drunk.”
Traumati sed: A group of Thai fishermen previously repatriated from Ambon.
BREAKING OUT
The plight of Mr B, a 21-year-old Thai, is eerily similar. The heavily tattooed Bangkok native said he was lured into work on a fishing trawler more than two years ago.
One day, while he was walking along Khlong Lot, a man approached him and asked if he wanted to earn good wages from fishing.
“He told me it would take only around 15 days and we would come back. I stayed at this agent’s house for one night before he took me to Mahachai to board the trawler,” Mr B said.
“When I boarded the vessel, I was wondering why the ship was so large. Was it possible that it would take only 15 days to go offshore and return? A crew member told me we were not going home any time soon because the vessel was going to Indonesia. I knew then that I had been lied to.”
Mr B said there were about six or seven other Thais on board, in addition to 12 Cambodian crew.
“I asked the other Thais if they wanted to escape with me,” he said. “Two agreed to join me. The others were too afraid.”
When the vessel arrived at Ambon Island, Mr B escaped with the two that had agreed to join him.
One of them was only 15 years old, who Mr B always refers to as his “younger brother”. The other was a middle-aged man. The three strangers were bound by their mission to escape.
As the boat pulled in to Ambon Island, the trio managed to flee their captors and went into hiding. They soon discovered that life there would not be easy.
“We did not speak the language. We used sign language to survive,” Mr B said. “We slept on the street when it was dark.”
Days later, he went to the market area to earn money doing odd jobs for local vendors. “People there were nice and they helped us,” he said.
The three Thais eventually met a local man who ran a small bicycle taxi company on the island, who offered them work. But they still had to pay 60,000 Indonesian rupiah (about 150 baht at current exchange rates) per day to rent the bikes.
“We collected what we had. I had two mobile phones — one Nokia and one Samsung — and a waterproof wristwatch. My ‘brother’ had a Nokia phone and a watch. We sold them all for one million rupiah and used the money to rent a bicycle.”
Although Mr B could not speak the local language, he managed to communicate with customers using sign language. “The passenger would show me the direction using their hands,” he said. “For a trip between the market and the department store, we could earn 10,000 rupiah. On a good day, we made up to 300,000 rupiah."
Mr B and his “young brother” later found a job in a brick factory, while the third escapee found work as a parking attendant. The three lived together inside the brick factory.
Mr B later married, but would still stay at the factory from time to time.
All of them returned to Thailand on Dec 9, along with seven other Thai fishermen, but have remained under protection during the Department of Special Investigation probe.
Home at last: A previous batch of 10 Thai fishermen repatriated from Ambon arrive at Don Mueang airport in Bangkok on Dec 9 last year.
‘WE HAD TO WORK ALL THE TIME’
Mr C worked in a chromium coating company until nine years ago, when his friend asked if he wanted to earn better wages from fishing. “I boarded a vessel at Mahachai with four shirts because I thought I would be home soon,” the 36-year-old from Samut Sakhon said.
After several days at sea, Mr C heard a call come over the captain’s radio saying that their trawler was now entering Indonesian waters.
“I was in a panic,” he said. “But the captain told me not to worry because I would work there for just one year.”
A year later, a return journey to Thailand did not appear any closer to fruition. “The skipper said he did not have anyone to replace me,”
Mr C said. On the boat, there were 25 crew members — six were Thai, the rest from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
Using large seine nets to catch fish, the vessel would take to sea for six months at a time before returning to port in Ambon.
Most of Mr C’s meagre wages went towards essentials such as toothpaste and coffee. “It’s better to stock up on them onshore, otherwise the captain would sell them to us on the boat for a much higher price,” he said.
“We had to work all the time. Even while we were waiting for fish to be caught, we had to repair holes in the nets.”
Isolated and with little room to move, the mood on board the vessel grew tense, especially when the crew heard that Indonesian authorities would sink foreign fishing boats found operating illegally — a threat they followed through on several times last year.
“People quarrelled and fought. People were stabbed and died,” Mr C said.
After two years and seven months, Mr C started to lose hope of ever seeing Thailand again. He made his escape and, like Mr A and Mr B, found refuge on Ambon Island where he could earn about 100,000 rupiah per week doing odd jobs.
Mr C was among the first batch of Thai fishermen repatriated from Indonesia by the LPN in October.
He is now working with the foundation to help locate other Thai fishermen enslaved on boats or abandoned on Indonesian islands.
‘I HAD TO GO INTO HIDING’
Mr Samak, from the LPN, said the exploitation of Thai fishermen in Indonesia only came to light last year, after LNP staff investigated an incident on Ambon Island.
The organisation had previously received complaints from Myanmar workers about the plight of fishermen in Indonesia, but it was widely assumed that those workers were non-Thai.
The investigation was hastened after a crackdown by the Indonesian government against illegal foreign fishing trawlers in its waters. In December, the Indonesian navy sank two Thai fishing boats and destroyed a Vietnamese vessel found to have entered its territorial waters.
It warned of a similar fate for any other boats found encroaching on its territory.
Indonesian president Joko Widodo has publicly stated there are 5,000 foreign fishing boats operating illegally in his country’s vast, resource-rich waters, costing the local fishing industry billions of baht annually.
LPN director Sompong Srakaew said Thai fishermen in Indonesia were categorised into two groups: first, those found on boats seized by Indonesian authorities; the second, those abandoned on remote islands.
“Our priority now is the second group,” Mr Sompong said. In August last year, word began spreading among the Thai community on Ambon Island about a visit by a group of people from their homeland.
A group of Thai journalists travelled there separately and talked to some of the fishermen, including Mr A.
“The reporters said that people would come back to rescue me,” Mr A said.
The journalists returned home and published a report about Mr A, along with his photo. Mr A’s mother saw the picture, the first confirmation in years that her son was still alive.
Mr B’s photo also appeared in a newspaper report, which he said prompted a Thai agent to send a group of thugs to track him down.
“I had to go into hiding. Once, I hid in a graveyard,” he said.
Testimony from those fishermen who came back to Thailand in the first batches with the LPN led to the arrest of three people suspected of being involved in human trafficking.
RETURN JOURNEY
Mr Samak said the first fact-finding trip to Ambon Island showed that the Thai fishermen there did not have any identification cards or passports, as they had been confiscated by the agents or boat captains. Most had entered foreign waters using falsified documents.
Those who escaped said they chose to take refuge on the island rather than seeking help, as they feared they might end up being slaves on another boat.
Some of the fishermen had not escaped the boats, but had instead been dumped on the island after the trawlers they were working on were seized by Indonesian authorities.
The LPN has been working with the Indonesian harbour department and Thai consular officials to investigate cases of illegal foreign labour. During interviews with the trafficked fishermen, the LPN met many who wanted to go home. Some preferred to stay.
But the process of repatriation is slow, as the men’s identities have to be verified, a task made difficult by their lack of ID.
Mr Samak said the LPN asked the men for basic information such as where they were from and whether they could remember any phone numbers in Thailand. The organisation then cross-checked the information with a government database.
“Sometimes, there were three or four people with the same name in the system. We had to look at the photographs for verification,” Mr Samak said.
For Mr A’s case, Mr Samak said LPN staff also went to Chon Buri to talk with his mother. Once the LPN was certain of Mr A’s identity, they went back to bring him home.
BUILDING A CASE
Paisith Sungkahapong, director of the Justice Ministry’s Anti-Human Trafficking Centre, said that based on preliminary interviews, the Department of Special Investigation had found that half of the 10 fishermen repatriated last week were likely to be categorised as victims of human trafficking.
“The number might change after we pursue the investigation into these cases,” he said.
To be considered a victim of human trafficking, the DSI must show the fishermen were deceived, exploited for financial benefit and forced to work. However, if the victim is less than 18, the case will certainly fall under human trafficking laws.
Based on the evidence and witness testimony collected since October, the DSI is pursuing cases against the operators of four fishing boats.
Confirming the veracity of the fishermen’s testimony has not been easy, as most are unable to recall precise details such as the date of their departure from Thailand.
“We want to make sure that we have solid information before we issue any arrest warrants,” Mr Paisith said.
The DSI is working with various government agencies — the Marine Department, the Department of Consular Affairs and the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security — as well as the LPN as it attempts to build its cases.
Arrest warrants have already been issued for an alleged illegal broker, a ship captain and a mechanic of one of the ships. Only two of the suspects have surrendered to authorities.
The DSI expects to seek more warrants soon. “If the owners of the vessels are found to be involved in this, we absolutely will prosecute them,” Mr Paisith said. n