Officials from three countries are traveling to remote islands in eastern Indonesia to investigate how thousands of foreign fishermen wound up there as slaves and were forced to catch seafood that could eventually end up being exported to the United States and elsewhere.
A week after The Associated Press published a yearlong investigation into the problem – including showing men locked in a company cage – delegations from Thailand and Indonesia visited the island village of Benjina. Officials from Myanmar are scheduled to visit the area next week to try to determine how many of their citizens are stuck there and what can be done to bring them home.
“No one seemed to be aware of the problem, and now that they are, they want to do something as quickly as possible,” said Steve Hamilton, deputy chief of mission at the International Organisation for Migration, or IOM, in Indonesia, which is working with authorities to assist the fishermen.
In Benjina, some officials saw a graveyard where dozens of fishermen are buried. Others talked to men who have been stranded there for months or even years after being brought to Indonesia from Thailand and forced to work under brutal conditions on boats with Thai captains.
One of the leaders of the Indonesian group, Ida Kusuma from the Fisheries Ministry, said she found the slavery reports very upsetting and that the government intends to take action.
“We (will) prove that we don’t want to let it happen anymore,” she said while visiting the neighboring island of Tual on Tuesday before traveling to Benjina yesterday. “I think the company who hired them should take full responsibility to bring them to their families.”
The IOM said last week there could be as many as 4,000 foreign men, many trafficked or enslaved, who are stranded on islands surrounding Benjina following a fishing moratorium called by the Indonesian Fisheries Ministry to crack down on poaching. Indonesia has some of the world’s richest fishing grounds, and the government estimates billions of dollars in seafood are stolen from its waters by foreign crews every year.