Slavery con game in SE Asia

By Anthony C. LoBaido

LUANG PRABANG, Laos — When 13-year-old Deem Lye was promised she could make 2,000 Thai Baht per month — about $50 — working as a maid in Thailand, she thought she was holding the dream ticket in the lottery sweepstakes.

But before long, her dream turned into a nightmare of human slavery, beatings and privation.

Since the latter part of the 1990s, many young, poverty-stricken Laotian girls have been lured and abducted by Thai-Lao gangs operating on the border shared by the two countries. The young women are then brought to work in servitude in Bangkok.

The problem has grown so pervasive that Thailand’s government — struggling to come to grips with rampant pedophilia, an amphetamine epidemic and other social ills — has now been forced to take action.

Recently the Thai National Project Committee on Trafficking in Women and Children in the Mekong Sub-Region was set up in Bangkok. Nations like Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and China have signed onto the project.

“Of course, the fact that these nations are some of the worst offenders of human smuggling on the planet will be overlooked. In fact, it is laughable. It is a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop,” said Felicity Wasdin, an American NGO (non-government organization) volunteer who works with runaways in Bangkok.

However, the Thai government is serious about its commitment to stopping the human slave trade. The aforementioned project was personally commissioned by Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai. Korn Dabaransi, the deputy prime minister, has been tagged personally to implement it.

Most of the women have been smuggled out of Laos and into the Khemraj district in western Thailand.

One of the gangs engaged in smuggling girls is led by Ya Ma, a thirty-something Thai woman whose name literally means “Crazy Horse.”

Ya Ma told WorldNetDaily that she had sent over 30 young Laotian girls to work in Bangkok since February of this year. All of the girls were promised jobs as housemaids. She said that the workers themselves were not paid, but rather, their Thai bosses would “pay their families.”

“Yeah, and monkeys will fly out my ears,” Wasdin retorted. “Exactly how do these Thai slave masters get the money to rural families in Laos? It’s absurd.”

For her part, Deem told WorldNetDaily that she was routinely beaten, sexually assaulted, denied food and denied compensation.

“In two years of servitude I was paid only 100 Baht,” she said. One hundred Baht is about $2.50 in U.S. currency.

Deem also claimed that a plethora of women and younger girls, aged no more than 35 and no less than 10, were encouraged by unscrupulous human smugglers like Ya Ma to come to Thailand, where they were promised fabulous pay and job opportunities.

Deem and her childhood friend Khao, meaning “White,” managed to escape from their employers.

“We worked in two houses side by side. One night, at the same time we tricked our bosses into getting drunk. They thought they were finally going to have sex with us. When they passed out, we ran away,” said Khao in an interview with WorldNetDaily.

“But we have nowhere to go, and we just walked and walked around the streets in the city [Bangkok] until finally we were rescued.”

As for the rescuers, they came in the benevolent form of the Thai Public Welfare Department. The department recently rescued a large number of foreigners involved in slavery in Thailand. This past March, the department found 18 children from Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in bondage in Bangkok and its suburbs.

Less benevolent is the fact that Deem and Khao have now been dumped into a Hmong refugee camp and will be deported back to Laos by the United Nations and Thai military — at gunpoint.

Since both girls are ethnic Hmong, it is understandable that they are afraid of

what will happen to them when they return to Laos.

“We are Hmong, and some of the people in the refugee camps fought the government in the past. But we had no part in the war. But how can we prove that to the government soldiers when they come to interrogate us at our villages?” asked Deem.

Thai military intelligence officials interviewed by WorldNetDaily said they uncovered evidence that Laotian children are recruited by seedy Thais for a 10,000 Baht ($270) “finder’s fee.” Middlemen in the operation get another 5,000 Baht.

Additionally, the officials said the young girls are rarely stopped en route from Laos to Bangkok, and that they don’t carry national identity cards.

The number of slaves — including children — in the region is in the thousands, according to United Nations and NGO officials operating in the area.

“Trafficking in women and children is an international problem,” said Anusorn Wongwan, Thailand’s deputy labor minister. “Thailand can’t stop it alone.”

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Anthony C. LoBaido

Anthony C. LoBaido is a journalist, ghostwriter and photographer. He has published 404 articles on WND from 53 countries around the world. Read more of Anthony C. LoBaido's articles here.