by Marie Graille
Southeast Asia is mostly seen in the Western world through heaven-like postcards, dreamy vacation destinations, and azure beaches. But this vision of the region is far from showing the whole truth. Behind those idyllic scenes, a darker truth is hidden, one that most tourists will not acknowledge when visiting the region: a massive network of human trafficking. Nothing stops the most lucrative form of organized crime in the world, generating more than 150 billion US dollars a year according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), especially not the officials of the countries. But what is hidden behind those postcards?
This transnational crime is deeply rooted within the social, economic, and political context of the Southeast Asian area. Ramping poverty, countless displaced inhabitants due to conflicts in Myanmar and the Southern part of the Philippines, as well as natural disasters forcing several millions of people to move out of their homes are weakening and exposing the populations. They thus need money, a home, stability or all of the above, which traffickers are offering to them on a silver plate. But the truth is way different than the promises. In Myanmar, Karen, Shan, Lahu, and Asha women are being forcibly sent to Thailand to serve as sexual slaves. Children are being used as soldiers involved in armed conflict by the Moro Rebels in the Philippines and in Myanmar. But one of the main issues remains the scamming compounds. Hundreds of thousands of civilians promised a better salary are being exploited day and night in all of Southeast Asia. Their role: scamming people via the Internet into paying loads of money through various ways, while also being forced to recruit new people to take on this task after them. This is one of the biggest hubs of human slavery currently active in the world. People are being exploited in awful conditions: forced to achieve unrealistic targets each month, with failure leading to being publicly tortured to set an example for others. Women are also massively being sexually assaulted. They work 19 hours a day with barely any rest or food, all without receiving any form of salary. Every day, thousands of people are being kept away and enslaved in those compounds, but what has been done by the authorities to address that issue?
Simply put, not much. Such a massive amount of human trafficking is not achievable without the complicity of officials. This is therefore the main issue regarding the eradication of trafficking: corruption. Police forces are not investigating the networks properly: they only find what they want to find. Several survivors recall seeing police officers come to the compounds to remove the corpses of the deceased but not to do anything else, despite knowing where the compounds were and what happened in them. Nothing was ever done: the police only found things when it suited the traffickers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop at the local scale. There also exists a national dynamic encouraging trafficking, leading to barely any actions being taken to take care of the issue. Displaced people are not being allocated a new house, poverty is being overlooked, and the victims of trafficking are mostly not being helped properly. A lot of them eventually get prosecuted for visa violation when they escape — as a majority of them are foreigners in the country they were being exploited in — or for the crimes they were forced to commit when being exploited. Victims end up being the abusers in the national narrative, despite international law extending the legal status of victims even to people who committed crimes in slavery conditions, as they are not deemed responsible according to the non-punishment principle of international law that states « trafficked persons should not be subject to arrest, charge, detention, prosecution, or be penalized or otherwise punished for illegal conduct that they committed as a direct consequence of being trafficked. ».
Hence, human trafficking is a dreadful issue in Southeast Asia and does not appear to be improving in any way despite some alleged efforts from the governments of Association of SouthEast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) countries alongside the United Nations, as well as several calls from Amnesty International ringing the bell on this humanitarian crisis. Hence because of the way this situation is being dealt with, the « 3P’s » established in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act « Protection, Prevention, and Prosecution » are still heavily lacking without concrete actions from the authorities as Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) can only do so much. So let’s not forget that with every day that flies more and more people see their most basic rights being denied. And the next time you visit SouthEast Asia remember that the postcard is hiding a darker truth.
