Slavers on the prowl

The news of Bangladeshis recently rescued from the jungles in Thailand tells us how unwary and poor people in Bangladesh are so easily duped by the modern-day slave traders. The incident brings to our mind the bestselling book Roots by Alex Haley, a story set in 1750. Following the television release of Roots in the 1970s mass people have had a horrid impression of how young Africans used to be leashed, shackled, and shipped for marketing as slaves. Roots tells a poignant story mainly about a young boy called Kunta Kinte. Captured by slave traders in a jungle of a small African village called Juffure in Gambia, Kunta Kinte was subsequently sold as a slave worker to a plantation in America about 264 years ago.
Just in the similar fashion of enslaving Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 171 people, mostly Bangladeshi, were abducted through lure, shipped by wooden boats over the seas and dumped in a rubber plantation deep in a remote jungle in Southern Thailand. These people were beaten, abused and left with almost no food most of the time in order to adapt them to live and work like slaves under harsh conditions. The Thai authorities have fortunately discovered these victims of trafficking and hopefully would ensure their quick and safe return to Bangladesh.
This is not the first time such Bangladeshi victims have been discovered in Thailand. The Bangladesh High Commission officials in Thailand said some 700 Bangladeshi victims of human trafficking were rescued in that country this year alone.
As stated in official versions and as reported in the news media, not all the victims were kidnapped. Some Bangladeshis perhaps willingly travelled by boats on seas in the hope of getting jobs in Malaysia. But nobody can deny the fact that Bangladesh, with a huge source of poor population, has become the most lucrative hunting ground for modern-day slaves and Thailand is a convenient middle ground for international slavers to operate with the help of Bangladeshi agents who are always on the prowl to lure people with false hopes of jobs abroad. Some law enforcement agencies of some of the countries have also reportedly been involved in colluding with the human traffickers, letting things go from bad to worse.
We have read about the harrowing experiences of Bangladeshi victims as they have recalled their ordeals. We have felt pains knowing how they are now missing their homes; how an eighteen-year old man Abdur Rahim from Bogra was tied up, drugged and shipped on a journey by an wooden boat for about seven days at sea where he was repeatedly beaten and how he still hobbles from a savage blow to his knee inflicted by one of his guards after he asked for more food. We have read about the most brutal of their captors, a man they called Keke.
Their painful experiences got our attention as they are still alive and discovered by Thai law enforcement agencies. They have at least hope to come back home. We have known about tragedies of only a few. They are in one sense fortunate compared to hundreds, maybe thousands, of other Bangladeshis who have vanished without any trace, died without any message sent to their homes or who are still groaning under the cruel treatment of the traffickers and the slavers.
Human trafficking is a particularly cruel type of slavery because it removes the victims from all that is familiar to them, rendering them completely isolated and alone, often unable to speak the language of their captors. Human trafficking is a US$ 32-billion business. According to the U.N., about 2.5 million people around the world are ensnared in the web of human trafficking at any given time. There are 10-30 million modern-day slaves in the world today.
Not only young men are trafficked for enslaved labour jobs. In the slavery business young boys and girls are also sold into the commercial sex industry, i.e. prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation. The business of modern slavery flourishes in poor countries where the law enforcement is lax and human dignity is overlooked.
It may be naïve on our part to believe that traffickers lured the Bangladeshi victims only by enticement of jobs in Malaysia or Thailand. There is high probability of selling them to the black markets where blood, skin, bones, marrows, organs and tissues of live humans are traded. There are thriving black markets for human organs all over the world, especially in and around the poor countries in South East Asia and South America.
Every year more than 100,000 people join the waiting list for heart, kidney or liver transplants. A live human body, according to black marketers of human organs, is worth up to US$ 45 million.
The illegal trade in kidneys has risen to such a level that an estimated 10,000 black market operations involving purchased human organs now take place annually, World Health Organisation (WHO) experts have revealed.
Poor Bangladeshis desperate to find jobs abroad are duped by devious traffickers. Law enforcement agencies may find it pretty difficult to stop them from undertaking the perilous journey they deem as a lottery to fulfill their dreams. They need to be educated through media by way of making dramas and movies on how humans are traded for slavery and sex and, more ominously, used as guinea pigs.
There need to be massive advertising campaigns warning people about the booby traps they are likely to fall prey to if they follow people who promise them jobs abroad. In places like Cox's Bazaar and other vulnerable areas billboards may be erected with warnings like: "They are offering you jobs in Malaysia. But in fact they are going to sell your live body to the black markets of human organs.
The devilish surgeons will cut your kidneys and livers, leaving your corpse in the jungles or sea. Don't run after a mirage, leaving your home."

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