THE
Burmese slaves sat on the floor and stared through the rusty bars of their
locked cage, hidden on a tiny tropical island thousands of miles from home. Just a few yards away, other workers loaded cargo ships
with slave-caught seafood that clouds the supply networks of major
supermarkets, restaurants and even pet stores in the United States.
But the eight imprisoned men were considered flight risks
— labourers who might dare run away. They lived on a few bites of rice and
curry a day in a space barely big enough to lie down, stuck until the next
trawler forces them back to sea.
“All I did was tell my
captain I couldn’t take it anymore, that I wanted to go home,” said Kyaw Naing,
his dark eyes pleading into an Associated Press video camera sneaked in by a
sympathetic worker. “The next time we docked,” he said nervously out of earshot
of a nearby guard, “I was locked up.”