Friday 19 June 2015

Slave Fisherman Returns Home After 8yrs In Slavery

                                                                Lek's father doing the phone call

Another form of slavery going on in some part of Asia is 'Fishery Slavery'. A situation where someone is tricked to get on a boat, with promises of been paid, and the fellow never returns home. Most of these boats remain at sea for years. They use these 'slaves' to get fish and use another boat to transport the fish to land while the men remain permanently on sea.

One of such slave is the son of Manee Chanviset, 77, and Samarn Charoensuk, 78, a Thai couple, whose children left them behind long ago. One, their youngest, Maleenu Charoensuk -- nicknamed "Lek" -- had been missing, feared dead, for years 

He tells CNN how he was tricked onto a boat, at the very beginning of his eight-year ordeal.
"I was drunk and they took me to the boat," he recalls. "I told them I wanted to leave but they didn't let me. They hit me and forced me to board. There were so many men."

They told him he could go for a three-month trial and that he was free to leave if he didn't like it. He didn't know then that he wouldn't see his home for almost a decade.
He says he was on the boat for about seven months before it landed at a port in Indonesia.
"Some of us got off to buy some drinks for fellow workers. The captain was so angry he beat us and stabbed me. He abandoned me on an Indonesian island. "
"There, I was stuck on land carrying rocks in exchange for food," he says, eyes downcast.
Lek and some others were later rescued and united with their families.

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