Murder at sea

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Contenu de la page: Accueil > Magazine Transport international > Issue 35 - April 2009 > Murder at sea

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David Browne reports on the shocking abuses faced by Burmese fishers.

From the air, the view of Tual Island is idyllic. It is fringed by coconut trees and pearly-white beaches and set on the azure calm of Indonesia’s far eastern Banda Sea. But for many hundreds of Burmese fishermen, trapped below, Tual has become a virtual prison.

From the findings of a recent ITF mission to the island, there could be anything from 700 to 1,200 undocumented runaway Burmese seafarers on Tual and its surrounding islands, which lie almost 3,000 kilometres east of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. They have fled murder on the high seas and brutal working conditions to find relative safety in Indonesia; but they live in constant fear of arrest and deportation back to Thailand or the military dictatorship of their homeland.

Many of the abandoned seafarers, among them Soe Min and his friend Saing Winna, eek out a precarious existence by foraging or farming in the forested interior of the island. For them this remote, little-known island, thousands of kilometres from their military-ruled homeland is not a paradise.

“We stay here because we’ve got no options. We don’t want to stay in another country. Everyone wants to go back home,” said Winna.

“The Burmese here have got a lot of problems,” said Min. “Not small problems, big problems. They’re missing Burma and facing a lot of hardship. I’ve seen people break down, laughing and crying, in front of me. It’s the way they feel.”

Soe Min, who said he was faced with a stark choice: stay on his fishing boat and die, or jump ship when it docked at Tual, has emerged as a leader of the exiled fishermen; bolstered by his marriage to Popi, a local woman who owns a small house in a nearby village.

Brutality on board

We met Min and a group of eight other Burmese migrant fishers in a forest hideaway. Aged 33, of medium height and powerfully built, he deserted the Burmese army and fled the country after he was ordered to massacre innocent villagers.

“Whenever we entered a village, you could say that village had a problem,” he said. “There was fighting and shooting. The commander ordered us to kill every man in the village and burn it down. We had to follow his orders. Some people didn’t know anything at all. They were only 15-year-old boys. We killed them all.”

But at sea, working illegally aboard a Thai fishing boat, with false Thai papers and only a vague promise of wages, Min entered a world as brutal as the one he had fled.

He recalled the murder of a friend at sea.

“Ever since we’d left Thailand my friend had been seasick, and he was not familiar with the work. The skipper didn’t like him at all. My friend couldn’t speak Thai, so he couldn’t understand what the skipper told him.

“Water was running around the deck and a squid had dropped out of the basket. The captain shouted for him to pick it up, but he didn’t understand. Then, the squid was washed overboard.

“The skipper just came down and hit him with a pipe. My friend raised his hand against the first blow and his hand broke. The second blow smashed his shoulder blade.

“Then he hit the back of his head. He fell to the deck. There were other Thai workers near him. The skipper dropped the pipe, washed his hands and went back up to the wheelhouse. He ordered his people to throw him into the water. We saw he was still alive.

“When he went back to the wheelhouse, the skipper took the loudhailer and warned everyone: ‘What are you looking at. Get back to work. If you want to end up like him, then behave like him!’”

And Soe Min witnessed another horrific murder by the Thai captain.

“A guy was defecating over the side of the boat,” he said. “Some of the crew reported it to the skipper. The skipper came down, looked around, picked up a pipe then he hit him only one time. We saw he was hit. But didn’t see exactly where he’d been hit. His body fell directly into the water.

“After that whenever it was busy, everybody was terrified to shit or pee. Some people did it in their pants while they were working.”

Slaves and prisoners

Saing Winna, aged 45, is unmarried and leads a solitary life on Tual. He is a member of Burma’s ethnic minority Chin people, legendary jungle fighters who fought with Allied forces against Japan in the Second World War; he escapes periodic police and immigration department dragnets by hiding in the forest.

“I think our Burmese boatman die like dogs and pigs. I was sold into slavery by brokers, who passed me from one hand to another. Eventually I was sold to a fishing company in Mahachai, near Bangkok,” he said.

“When I was on the boat a Thai cook beat one of our Burmese guys with an iron bar in front of my eyes. The skipper asked if the guy was dead or not. I told him: ‘He hasn’t died yet, leave him alone, I’ll look after him.’

“The guy was hit at the back of his head and his brains spilled out. I grabbed him. He took an hour to die; the young guy took an hour to die.

“We can’t go back to Burma, we have no contacts. When we have contacts we don’t have money. We’ve got a lot of difficulties back in Burma, so we can’t go back.”

Tual’s abandoned fishermen are among the 3 million-strong Burmese diaspora, fleeing 60-years of civil war and, since the 1960s, a succession of brutal military regimes in their homeland. The ITF estimates there are over 250,000 Burmese migrant fishers, including female fish-processing workers, in Thailand’s billion-dollar, export-driven fishing industry. But only 70,000 are legally registered.

Like Saing Winna, the majority of workers have been trafficked across the porous Thai-Burma border and sold from agent to agent within the Thai fishing mafia.

Once onboard a Thai fishing boat they are issued with false Thai documents, and work back-breaking 14-20 hour shifts for US$50 a month. The lucky ones can get paid a US$9,000 end-of-contract bonus; but only after a three to five year voyage.

The president of the exiled, ITF-affiliated Seafarers’ Union of Burma, Aung Thu Ya, who is based in Bangkok, accompanied us on our visit to Tual Island.

He said: “Thai captains and skippers are committing inhumane abuses against our Burmese seafarers. This cruel abuse is directed not just against individuals but against the mass of our people.

“Our country’s current economic situation is very poor and much lower than Thailand’s. That’s why the Burmese people are being degraded and exploited. They are treating our Burmese boatmen in an unjust and abusive way. They torture our seamen but their wealth and prosperity is based on us.”

The ITF-affiliated Indonesian Seafarers’ Union, the KPI, is now investigating the plight of Tual’s abandoned Burmese migrant seafarers.

Passal Meli, KPI officer on Tual Island, said: “KPI is working very hard to monitor this situation. We get data and information from the harbour master; then we contact immigration, boat owners and employers and tell them to stop intimidation, beatings and crimes at sea. We are seafarers, they are seafarers.

“It’s clear these are crimes, because no-one can kill other people. He needs to think that that’s a human being and I’m a human being. We should live together. If a human murders another human, it’s against the law: Indonesian law and international law. It’s the same.”

Indonesian authorities are slowly waking up to the abuses being suffered by migrant Burmese fishers working on Thai boats. Johannes Saija, chief immigration officer on Tual, told the ITF: “In the beginning when they first come here, whether they are Burmese, Cambodian, Indian or Thai, they are all carrying Thai documents.

“Because of the violence they’ve suffered at the hands of the ship’s boss, they don’t want to go back to the ship. So they get off in Tual and make problems and local people report them to the immigration office and we arrest them and deport them.

“We feel sorry for them. Some are living in the forest; some of them are living with local people. It’s hard for them to get food, so it’s better for them if immigration take them, bring them here and send them home to their country.”

Despite its grand offices, Tual’s immigration department only has the funding and resources to hold a dozen detainees at any given time. And in a bitter irony, the department relies on the dubious goodwill of Thai maritime bosses to ship the deportees back to Thailand, only to renew the cycle of vengeance.

Interviewed in Tual immigration detention cells, Phyoe Maung Maung, aged 24, said he jumped ship and hid on Tual for four-months before being arrested.

“We will go back by Thai boat. We can’t imagine what problems we might face,” he said.

And fellow Burmese detainee Ko Yasha was clearly distraught at the prospect of being torn away from his local wife and two young daughters.

“One is two years old, the other is just over one. I have to send them to school and my wife has no job. I’m the only breadwinner,” he pleaded. “I feel so sad for my kids. I will come back if they don’t arrest me again. We don’t know whether they will beat us, kick us, or kill us on the sea. We’ll be lucky to arrive in one piece.”

David Browne is a freelance journalist and investigative reporter.

Partie Accueil:
Issue 35 - April 2009

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