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Traffickers use Abductions, Prison Ships to Feed Asia’s Slave Trade
Eighty-one men were held captive in the jungle by people who authorities believe planned to -sell them
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PHANG NGA – When Afsar Miae left his home near Teknaf in southern Bangladesh to look for work last month, he told his mother, “I’ll see you soon.” He said he expected to return that evening.
He never did.
When he reported for work at a house on the outskirts of Teknaf, a man there gave him a drink of water. Soon, his eyelids sagged and his head started spinning.
When he awoke, it was dark. He had lost all sense of time. Two Bangladeshi men then forced him and seven others onto a small boat and bound them.
“My hands were tied. My eyes were blindfolded,” said Miae, 20.
The boat sailed through the night until it reached a larger ship moored far offshore. Miae was thrown into its dark, crowded hold by armed guards. He and his fellow captives survived on scraps of food and dirty water, some of them for weeks.
The ship eventually sailed toward Thailand where, as Reuters reported last year, human-trafficking gangs hold thousands of boat people in brutal jungle camps until relatives pay ransoms to secure their release.
Testimonies from Bangladeshi and Rohingya survivors provide evidence of a shift in tactics in one of Asia’s busiest human-trafficking routes. In the past, evidence showed most people boarded smuggling boats voluntarily. Now people are being abducted or tricked and then taken to larger ships anchored in international waters just outside Bangladesh’s maritime boundary.
It’s unclear exactly how many people are being coerced onto the boats. But seven men interviewed by Reuters who said they were taken by force described being held until the boats filled up with hundreds of people in what are effectively floating prisons. Two of the men were taken to trafficking camps in Thailand.
“EATING LEAVES”
The experiences of these men recall the trans-Atlantic slave trade of centuries ago. Miae and four other men who were held on the same ship as him described being kept in near total darkness and being regularly whipped by guards. Two men from another boat said they were forced to sit in a squatting position and that the hatch to the hold was only opened to remove dead bodies.
Miae and 80 other men were abandoned, starving and dehydrated, on a remote island by their captors, who appear to have fled for fear their operation had been exposed, according to two local Thai officials who were involved in rescuing the men in Phang Nga, located just north of the popular tourist island of Phuket.
“Their conditions were beyond what a human should have to go through,” said Jadsada Thitimuta, an official in Phang Nga. “Some were sick and many were like skeletons. They were eating leaves.”
More than 130 suspected trafficking victims, mostly Bangladeshis but also stateless Rohingya Muslims from western Myanmar, have been found in Phang Nga since Oct. 11, according to Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. Prayoon Rattanasenee, the acting governor of Phang Nga province, said that interviews conducted by police, rights groups and his own people revealed that the victims were “brought by force. Many were drugged but we don’t know the exact number,” he told Reuters.
Evidence indicates that many of the boats appear to be from Thailand. The abducted men recalled ships with either Thai flags or Thai-speaking crews. In June, six people were killed and dozens injured when a mutiny broke out in Bangladeshi waters on what the Bangladesh Coast Guard described as a “Thai trawler” trafficking hundreds of men to Thailand.
The Bangladesh Coast Guard told Reuters it was aware of trafficking ships lurking just outside Bangladesh’s territorial waters. Intercepting them wasn’t easy, said Lieutenant Commander M. Ashiqe Mahmud.
“At night they enter our waters, take the people and again cross the boundary,” he said. “It is very difficult to identify those ships at sea.”
Ashiqe said the coast guard was intercepting smaller boats that were leaving Bangladeshi shores with people to feed the larger ships. A report in August by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said that in the first half of the year, Bangladeshi authorities reportedly arrested “over 700 people (including smugglers and crew) attempting to depart irregularly by sea from Bangladesh.”
The Royal Thai Navy, which patrols the coastline with the Marine Police Division, also said it was aware people were being held captive on ships off its coast. “The truth is they use fishing boats to transport people and the bottom of the boat becomes like a room to put the people [in], but it seems like a commercial fishing boat,” said Royal Thai Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Kan Deeubol.
The ship on which Miae was held set sail with its human cargo for Thai waters four days after he was taken aboard. Others interviewed by Reuters say they spent up to six weeks in the hold of the ship anchored in the Bay of Bengal. Fourteen armed guards were aboard, said Miae.
The men were forced to squat for much of their journey and sometimes had their hands and feet bound with rope or cloth. The guards routinely beat them with sticks or whipped them with rubber fan belts.
Food was a handful of rice a day, or nothing at all. What little drinking water they received was contaminated with sea water. “We tasted it in our hands and it was salty,” said Muhammed Ariful Islam, 22, a Bangladeshi fruit vendor who was on the same boat as Miae.
A NEW WEAPON
Miae, who left behind his wife and three children, said he was kidnapped. “I never thought I would leave Bangladesh,” he said, sitting in a government shelter in Phang Nga.
That’s a change. In the past, many impoverished Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladesh voluntarily boarded small, local fishing boats heading across the Bay of Bengal in the hope of reaching Muslim-majority Malaysia where they could find work. Smuggling, done initially with the consent of those involved, differs from trafficking, which involves entrapment, coercion and deceit.
Thai authorities say the existence of the boats in which people are being held against their will is a response to the more strenuous efforts they are making to combat trafficking. Police operations have led to the rescue of 200 to 300 trafficking victims in the past six months, said Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, who is in charge of counter-trafficking operations for immigration police in southern Thailand.
“The traffickers have become more sophisticated and cautious, partly because of the Thai government policy to crack down,” he said.
The country’s military government says it is beefing up cooperation with neighboring Malaysia and has registered more than one million illegal migrant workers to prevent them falling prey to traffickers. “That’s a big step,” said Sek Wannamethee, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Human rights groups say the growing use of force is because trafficking has become increasingly lucrative, not because of any new measures taken by Thailand. Competition between a rising number of people smugglers explains why they are resorting to kidnapping, said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, a Rohingya advocacy group. “There are always five to eight boats waiting in the Bay of Bengal. And the brokers are desperate to fill them.”
Matthew Smith, the executive director of Fortify Rights, an organization that documents human rights violations in Southeast Asia, said the size of the ships being used by traffickers has increased as business is thriving and the trafficking rings are able to operate largely with impunity.
THAILAND’S ROLE
A series of Reuters investigations in 2013 revealed the complicity of some Thai authorities in smuggling Rohingya and in deporting them back into the hands of human traffickers.
Thailand was downgraded in June to the lowest category in the U.S. State Department’s annual ranking of the world’s worst human-trafficking centers, putting it in the same category as North Korea and the Central African Republic. The same month, the Thai military vowed to “prevent and suppress human trafficking,” after having seized power from an elected government on May 22.
Five months later, jungle camps are still holding thousands of people in remote hills near the border with Malaysia, according to testimonies from two recent escapees and a human smuggler.
The men and women aboard the prison ships who reach Thailand are sold for $200 each to trafficking gangs, according to one of two Rohingya men interviewed by Reuters who recently escaped from the trafficking camps.
“The camps are running very smoothly,” the human smuggler, based in southern Thailand, told Reuters.
The smuggler, a long-time Rohingya resident of Thailand who spoke on condition of anonymity, estimated there were up to eight large camps holding 2,000 to 3,000 people at any one time.
The two men who recently escaped described the brutality in the camps. One of them told Reuters he witnessed camp guards gang-raping a woman.
Police Major General Thatchai describes a vast and complex trafficking network in which Bangladeshis and Rohingya kidnap and trade their own people with the help of nationals from Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia and Pakistan. “It’s transnational crime,” Thatchai said.
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR confirmed the existence of “bigger fishing or cargo vessels” that carry up to 700 passengers across the Bay of Bengal to Thailand – a five- or six-day journey.
This time of year is rush hour for smugglers and traffickers. October marks the start of the four-month “sailing season,” the busiest time for smuggling and trafficking ships plying the Bay of Bengal.
The Thai Navy’s Kan said most of the boats and crews were from Thailand and that patrols against traffickers had been increased in the country’s territorial waters. But Kan said the bigger boats were operating beyond Thailand’s maritime boundaries, in international waters, and so the navy couldn’t move against them.
WHOSE JURISDICTION?
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which Thailand is a signatory, each nation “shall take effective measures to prevent and punish the transport of slaves in ships authorized to fly its flag.” The Navy didn’t respond to queries on why it wasn’t acting against trafficking ships carrying the Thai flag outside its territorial waters.
Robert Beckman, the director of the Center for International Law at the National University of Singapore, said the Thai Navy would have jurisdiction over a ship flying a Thai flag in international waters.
Under UNCLOS it had a right, not an obligation, to act against someone suspected of engaging in the slave trade, he said. The “uncertain state of the law on these matters,” Beckman added, meant that navies and coast guards were “usually very reluctant to arrest persons outside their territorial waters, especially if they are on ships flying the flag of another state.”
Interviews with two Rohingya, who in early October escaped from a Thai trafficking camp, corroborate the testimonies of the Phang Nga victims. They also suggest the slave ships have been operating for some time.
Mohamad Nobir Noor, 27, says he was living in an impoverished Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh, near the border with Myanmar, when he was taken. One September evening last year, men with knives and sticks forced him onto a small boat that sailed all night to reach a larger vessel moored at sea.
It would eventually hold 550 people, Noor estimated.
They were guarded by 11 men with guns, he said. Most were Thai speakers but one was Rakhine, the majority Buddhist ethnic group in Rakhine State, where communal violence since 2012 has killed hundreds and left 140,000 homeless, most of them Rohingya.
About 30 of those being held were women. “There was one woman who was very beautiful,” said Noor. “The guards took her upstairs. When she came back she was crying and her clothes were wet. She didn’t say anything.”
Drinking water was so scarce that Noor said he drank his own urine to survive. When someone died, a small group of men was permitted to carry the body up on deck. A quick prayer was said and then the bodies were thrown into the water. “For the sharks,” Noor said.
ESCAPE AND MUTINY
Once, Noor tried to escape by jumping overboard during a trip to the toilet. The guards dragged him back in and gave him electric shocks with wires attached to the ship’s generator, he said.
Usually, most passengers were too physically weak or terrified to confront the guards. But, on at least one occasion, desperation trumped fear.
On the morning of June 11, the Bangladesh Coast Guard arrived off the coast of St. Martin’s Island, in Bangladesh waters, to record the bloody aftermath of a high-seas firefight that followed a mutiny aboard a Thai trafficking ship. Desperate for food and water, passengers had overwhelmed the crew. But another trafficking ship quickly arrived and its crew opened fire on the mutineers, said Lieutenant Commander Mahmud of the Bangladesh Coast Guard.
Six people were killed and 30 sustained bullet injuries. Among the injured were “two Thai crew members and one Myanmar human trafficker,” according to a Bangladesh Coast Guard statement.
A record 40,000 Rohingya passed through the Thai camps in 2013, Lewa of the Arakan Project said. They are held captive until relatives pay the ransom to traffickers to release them over the border in Malaysia, she said.
By early 2014, not just Rohingya but other nationalities were also ending up in the trafficking camps. In a series of raids earlier this year, Thai police found hundreds of Bangladeshis, as well as Uighur Muslims from China’s restive northwestern province of Xinjiang.
The camps were also the likely destination of the Bangladeshis rescued in Phang Nga. But something went wrong.
They were brought ashore at the remote island in Phang Nga under cover of darkness. Phang Nga official Jadsada says he believed they were about to be transferred by road to another location, but a tip-off to the authorities compelled their captors to flee.
Local officials have yet to account for another 190 passengers they believe came on the same boat as Miae and Islam from Bangladesh via the Bay of Bengal. Jadsada said they might already be trapped in trafficking camps.
By Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Andrew R.C. Marshall
A recent report indicates that since Trudeau’s announcement of his gun buyback program four years ago, almost none of the banned firearms have been surrendered.
The federal government plans to purchase 2,063 firearm models from retailers following the enactment of Bill C-21, which amends various Acts and introduces certain consequential changes related to firearms. It was granted royal assent on December 15 of last year.
This ban immediately criminalized the actions of federally-licensed firearms owners regarding the purchase, sale, transportation, importation, exportation, or use of hundreds of thousands of rifles and shotguns that were previously legal.
The gun ban focused on what it termed ‘assault-style weapons,’ which are, in reality, traditional semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that have enjoyed popularity among hunters and sport shooters for over a century.
In May 2020, the federal government enacted an Order-in-Council that prohibited 1,500 types of “assault-style” firearms and outlined specific components of the newly banned firearms. Property owners must adhere to the law by October 2023.
Trudeau’s Buyback Hasn’t Happened
“In the announcement regarding the ban, the prime minister stated that the government would seize the prohibited firearms, assuring that their lawful owners would be ‘grandfathered’ or compensated fairly.” “That hasn’t happened,” criminologist Gary Mauser told Rebel News.
Mauser projected expenses ranging from $2.6 billion to $6.7 billion. The figure reflects the compensation costs amounting to $756 million, as outlined by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO).
“The projected expenses for gathering the illegal firearms are estimated to range from $1.6 billion to $7 billion.” “This range estimate increases to between $2.647 billion and $7 billion when compensation costs to owners are factored in,” Mauser stated.
Figures requested by Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs concerning firearms prohibited due to the May 1, 2020 Order In Council reveal that $72 million has been allocated to the firearm “buyback” program, yet not a single firearm has been confiscated to date.
In a recent revelation, Public Safety Canada disclosed that the federal government allocated a staggering $41,094,556, as prompted by an order paper question from Conservative Senator Don Plett last September, yet yielded no tangible outcomes.
An internal memo from late 2019 revealed that the Liberals projected their politically motivated harassment would incur a cost of $1.8 billion.
Enforcement efforts Questioned
By December 2023, estimates from TheGunBlog.ca indicate that the Liberals and RCMP had incurred or were responsible for approximately $30 million in personnel expenses related to the enforcement efforts. The union representing the police service previously stated that the effort to confiscate firearms is a “misdirected effort” aimed at ensuring public safety.
“This action diverts crucial personnel, resources, and funding from tackling the more pressing and escalating issue of criminal use of illegal firearms,” stated the National Police Federation (NPF).
The Canadian Sporting Arms & Ammunition Association (CSAAA), representing firearms retailers, has stated it will have “zero involvement” in the confiscation of these firearms. Even Canada Post held back from providing assistance due to safety concerns.
The consultant previously assessed that retailers are sitting on almost $1 billion worth of inventory that cannot be sold or returned to suppliers because of the Order-In-Council.
“Despite the ongoing confusion surrounding the ban, after four years, we ought to be able to address one crucial question.” Has the prohibition enhanced safety for Canadians? Mauser asks.
Illegally Obtained Firearms are the Problem
Statistics Canada reports a 10% increase in firearm-related violent crime between 2020 and 2022, rising from 12,614 incidents to 13,937 incidents. In that timeframe, the incidence of firearm-related violent crime increased from 33.7 incidents per 100,000 population in 2021 to 36.7 incidents the subsequent year.
“This marks the highest rate documented since the collection of comparable data began in 2009,” the criminologist explains.
Supplementary DataData indicates that firearm homicides have risen since 2020. “The issue lies not with lawfully-held firearms,” Mauser stated.
Firearms that have been banned under the Order-in-Council continue to be securely stored in the safes of their lawful owners. The individuals underwent a thorough vetting process by the RCMP and are subject to nightly monitoring to ensure there are no infractions that could pose a risk to public safety.
“The firearms involved in homicides were seldom legally owned weapons wielded by their rightful owners,” Mauser continues. The number of offenses linked to organized crime has surged from 4,810 in 2016 to a staggering 13,056 in 2020.
“If those in power … aim to diminish crime and enhance public safety, they ought to implement strategies that effectively focus on offenders and utilize our limited tax resources judiciously to reach these objectives,” he stated.
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Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.
According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.
Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.
Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.
Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.
To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.
Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.
On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.
Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.
Pixa Bay
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.
TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.
When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.
And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.
Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.
A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.
Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.
But today, it feels more like reality.
Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.
SOURCE | CNN
(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.
The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.
Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.
This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.
In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.
The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.
This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.
The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.
In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.
According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.
Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.
The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.
For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.
Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.
As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.
As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.
The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.
SOURCE: AP
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