Ma Win was tricked, sold, exploited, bashed and spent sleepless nights on a fishing boat terrified of a man who had been ordered to kill him by a ruthless human trafficking boss. Amazingly, he survived to tell his story.
“I’d never thought of working on a fishing boat,” Ma Win said through a translator. “My days on the ship were not pleasant.”
He said his stressful journey into the human trafficking chain began two and a half years ago when he left his hometown in a small village near Yangon to pay respect to the Shwedagon Pagoda.
He was jobless and depressed by his mother’s recent death. He decided to leave Yangon for a job looking after range cattle in Myawaddy city opposite Tak’s Mae Sot district in Thailand.
After 10 days of work, Mr Ma Win said he was persuaded by another Myanmar man to cross the Thai-Myanmar border into Mae Sot where they were introduced to the owner of a sugarcane farm.
“I knew he was a policeman because he often wore police uniform,” Ma Win said. “I worked for him for two weeks and saw a Myanmar broker, named Sor Leng, bring 20 Myanmar people to the farm.”
The policeman met the Myanmar group and said there were good jobs at a pineapple canning factory that offered an 8,000-baht monthly salary.
Ma Win said he was asked by the policeman if he was interested in the job. He was told he would have to pay 7,000 baht as a transport fee to obtain the position.
The following night, Sor Leng led Mr Ma Win and a group of Myanmar people through a mountain area near Mae Sot’s Mae Ku sub-district.
The trek took about four days before they finally met other groups of Myanmar people waiting on the mountainside.
About 15 pickup trucks arrived at the spot to take the Myanmar people from the area at 3am. None of the migrants had passports or work permits.
They arrived at a pineapple canning factory in Kanchanaburi at 11am. A Myanmar couple, “Kuku” and “Matusa”, who appeared to be brokers, turned up and demanded 13,000 baht from Ma Win for transport to the factory.
A life of misery
Having no money, Mar Win said he was prepared to work at the factory to pay the fee in monthly instalments.
He was able to pay 9,000 baht after four months but the brokers, who appeared to be husband and wife, said his debt payment was slow so he had to be sent to work at Mahachai to pay off the remaining debt.
Ma Win said three Myanmar brokers named “Ma Yee Piw,” “Ta Nga” and “Sor Wen” came to pick up Mr Ma Win at the factory and paid 10,000 baht to Kuku and Matusa.
The three took him to Mahachai and locked him in a room for two days. He remembered seeing a temple near the room.
Sor Wen then took him to a fishing boat at a pier in Krokkrak sub-district of Samut Sakhon.
He saw a Thai skipper of the boat pay Sor Wen what he estimated was 30,000 baht. He also saw Sor Leng take two Myanmar migrants to the fishing boat.
Sor Wen told him he would earn 9,000 baht a month working on the fishing boat. There were three Cambodian and 35 Myanmar people on the boat.
“I realised at that point that I was sold. But I couldn’t leave as the boat was it about to leave the pier,” he said.
The boat set sail for Indonesian waters where he was shifted to another fishing boat that carried five Myanmar workers and two Thais. He was provided with a passport.
On his first day on the fishing boat he was bashed by the Thai skipper after he dropped a fish on the deck.
He said he was also kicked on one occasion by a Thai sailor because he was too sick to get up from bed. There were no rest days on board.
“The working conditions were tough,” he said. “But I was on a boat, how could I run away?”
His days of despair continued until the 21st month when he met a Myanmar fisherman at a pier in Indonesia. The man passed him a phone number of a United Nations official.
The Myanmar fisherman advised him to turn himself in to the Indonesian police and sent a text message to the UN official to ask police to contact the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta to help him.
Ma Win said he followed the advice three times but each time was sent back to the boat by police.
He finally decided to call the UN official, which prompted her to contact the Myanmar embassy in Indonesia directly. Soon the embassy official came to take him from the boat and sent him to a hospital for a medical check.
The official discovered his passport, provided by the ship’s Thai skipper, was fake.
The embassy later issued a new passport to him and and ordered the boat skipper to take him back to Mahachai.
But that was not the end of the ordeal, Ma Win said. He said he spent nine sleepless nights on board the fishing boat while travelling back to Mahachai after one of the Myanmar fishermen confessed he had been ordered by the skipper to kill him to cover up the fake passport issue.
“He told me I was as old as his father and he couldn’t kill me,” Ma Win said.
Ma Win said he arrived back in
Mahachai on June 7 and was picked up at the fishing pier by an official from the Thailand-based Labour Right Promotion Network.
He said he worked on the boat for 23 months without any rest and was paid only 3,000 baht a month. Ma Win said he did not know about the fate other Myanmar people he met on the same boat and other fishing boats.