By: Maya *)
Officials from three countries are traveling to remote islands in eastern Indonesia to investigate how thousands of foreign fishermen were abused and forced into catching seafood that could end up in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
A week after The Associated Press published a story about slavery in the seafood industry — including video of men locked in a cage — delegations from Thailand and Indonesia visited the island village of Benjina. A government team from Myanmar, otherwise known as Burma, is also scheduled to tour the area next week to try to determine how many of its citizens are stuck there and what can be done to bring them home.
Based on what Harold Huwae (Aru Islands Police Chief) said that, slavery allegations are not true. It recognizes there are about 1,600’s of people foreigners from Thailand and Myanmar are accommodated in the company, but they are the crew who cannot work after the moratorium for foreign fishing vessels. During accommodated due to the moratorium, the crew are garrisoned in the company and paid Rp. 300,000 per 10 days, but the conditions that make minimal wages of the crew became uneasy, so complained to the security forces that they have been tortured in order to be repatriated back to their home countries without personal cost. Aru Islands Police party check into locations explained that the crew who reported themselves have persecuted amounted to 5 people. The fifth person has been admitted that the purpose of their report, and expressed their desire to return to their country.
In different place, Indonesia strongly rejects any kind of slavery in the form of exploitation of workers in the maritime and fishery sector as it may be categorized as a crime against humanity, a fishery official has said.
“The Indonesian ministry of fishery and marine resources rejects slavery in the fishery industry,” the director general of processing and marketing of fishery products, Saut Hutagalung, said here Friday.
He made the statement in connection with a recent investigative report from the Associated Press about slavery of crew carried out in Thai ships operated by a company located in Benjina, Maluku province.
The ships conduct fishing in the Indonesian territory for a company in Thailand, he said but he feared the case would hurt Indonesia’s reputation.
Such a practice was intolerable as it could be categorized as a crime against humanity and so it clearly hurts the country, the director general said.
“Slavery is not only about economy but also about human dignity. Although it is profitable in economic terms it denies human status,” he said.
Based on AP reports fish caught by the ships were brought to Thailand to meet raw materials needs of industries, he said.
The Indonesian ministry of fishery and marine resources rejected the practice of slavery, he said.
“With regard to the issue the Indonesian government would stand firmly against it. The ships reported by AP are not Indonesian ships,” he said.
The move by his office to issue a ministerial regulation number 56/2014 to stop temporarily (a moratorium) the fishing business in the Indonesian territory had proven correct and effective, he said.
Indonesia would remain firm in eradicating IUU (illegal, unreported, unregulated) fishing practices or poaching of fish.
*) The Author Is Maluku Contributor
