Oh, and Bernie, just use Tor and you can access anything and everything on the Net from Thailand. I’m surprised in 2015 that anyone wouldn’t know that.
Yes, there is a wealth of material available through Google, giving the broad brush tales of slavery horror in the Thai fisheries industry.
I was trying to find out whether the impounded Silver Sea 2 was still impounded and. if not, who let it go and under what legal conditions.
That sort of specific concrete information about one of the ships you mentioned seeing coming into dock in Thailand after its impoundment is not available.
One thing I did notice, and maybe as someone with obvious interest in the issue you can comment on, is that since the coup approximately 300K pages come up on a Google search for “Thailand & slavery”. Before that time, only something under 300 come up.
One could easily get the impression that this is a problem that is either directly related to the military coup or one that is only interesting to international media when a military government is in charge in Thailand.
No leader or press in one asean country is going to refer to another head of state as “The honorable scoundrel”, regardless of how that leader came to power.
I think anyone interested in why the investigation was suddenly wrapped up, the Police General in charge of it suddenly posted to the same province as the Thai compamy involved, should read this Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Union_Group and see what fish brands are involved and what the various NGO’s have to say about its operation.
Unless there is intervention by both the EU and US this company is aiming for new hieghts in slave labour and illegal fishing.
I said earlier there were seven refrigerated ships involved, but checking the records I find there are actually nine and all of them have changed their name a number of times and flown under whatever flag they chose at the time.
It’s all fine and dandy saying that the Thai trawlers are banned from leaving port unless they are certified by Thai authorities, but one must ask oneself about the thirty or forty Thai trawlers feeding these motherships and why they haven’t been boarded and searched by International Navies when operating in a limited area just off the New Guinea coastline. The claims that the waters are too shallow doesn’t stand up when even the MV Steve Irvin is equipped with inflatable boats, as are the navies of all countries in the region.
These people should be classified as pirates and treated as such.
Brookings Institute’s Lex Rieffel suggested in his March 2013 report:
“A first step in managing foreign aid and asserting country ownership is to put in place a respectable national planning process.”
He went on in September 2014:
“Many foreign “friends of Myanmar” seem to believe that the administration should have been able to achieve a high standard of good governance within three years. The reality is that Myanmar’s transition is more chaotic this year than last year. One of the main causes is the flood of foreigners who continue to swarm into Myanmar like locusts: politicians angling for a selfie with Suu Kyi, aid officials pressing ministers to sign project agreements they do not understand, foreign investors promising jobs but interested only in profits, international nongovernmental organizations convinced that they hold the key to Myanmar’s future well-being, reporters fishing for a scandal that will please their editors and many more.
The greatest harm from this flood of outside interest is that it takes up time that Myanmar officials should be spending to formulate and implement the policies required for a successful transition. Like most premodern countries, Myanmar has a bureaucratic culture in which delegation of authority is minimized. Astonishingly small issues get shunted up to Thein Sein and his cabinet ministers, who appear to spend much of each day receiving foreign visitors. Little time is left for the vital business of assessing policy options, and almost none for implementing policy choices. The ultimate tragedy would be seeing the transition derailed because Myanmar had received too much foreign attention.”
As to the urban rural divide he had this to say three years ago:
“There is much talk about Myanmar again become a leading exporter of rice, but setting this as an objective is not a smart way to improve the livelihoods of farming and non-farming rural households, representing more than 60 percent of the nation’s population. A better approach is to allow farmers to choose their crops freely and then work to lower their costs by improving infrastructure (roads and ports), making available high-yielding varieties of seed, providing credit on reasonable terms, etc.
What is important for Myanmar’s economic success is raising rural household incomes, not achieving some arbitrary export target.”
It makes better sense than tipping the rural population onto the cities’ sweat shops in the new SEZs, introducing at the same time industrial scale farming on confiscated land up and down the country in partnership with the cronies and foreign corporations. This well trodden ‘road map’ would lead to a modern but irreversibly skewed economy and demographic change, and worse, reliance on food aid and imports driving the country into the hands of the global chettiars IMF and the World Bank cap in hand in next to no time.
There you go. It’s regional cooperation among ruling elites in a trading bloc like any other. Hence accommodating Myanmar was only a matter of time and not a real problem. From chairing ASEAN to joining the New World Order has been a perfectly natural progression for the nation formerly known as a pariah state. Everything happens for a reason,right?
This is a very vague article as specifics to Asean failures are never really mentioned.
Integration into the Asean Community is defined by the Asean Blueprints and not anything else. The AEC alone has more than 500 objectives with most being already accomplished.
Over the lifetime of Asean there have been thousands of agreements between its members which have solved or improved just as many problems. Asean places these agreements online on its website which makes this easy to confirm.
Every agreement has a “flash to bang” time between when agreements are signed and when they are actually implemented. Some countries move faster than others but eventually they do implement the agreement at a national level.
I think Asean is a great success and the Asean community, after nearly 50 years of existence, is off to a great start in 2015. Its not perfect but considering its rocky start its doing quite well.
[…] executive branch in organizing Jokowi’s presidential visit to Washington. (Note: I’m on the record supporting his research as responsible.) This seems to be a window on cabinet disfunction, and a […]
Einstein. Hang on! Wasn’t he an atheist? Anyway, to claim that I am arrogant or insolent hardly discredits the point I raised. Agreed?
I rather like to think Einstein might have flagged me up a ‘like.’
Ne Win managed to get away with murder more lightly than his protégé vis-├а-vis the West… quite comfortable, thank you very much. Even the pariah state ‘done good’ in the end, easing into the New World Order once they got their ironclad constitution up and running.
Emjay,
There is a wealth of material on Google, one just has to know where to look and be allowed to look. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/13/indonesian-navy-busts-thai-cargo-ship-filled-with-suspected-slave-caught-fish and be able to access it from inside Thailand, which is where my problem is. There are updates after Oct and Nov on http://www.andrew-drummond.com that I’m far too young, or not allowed to read from Thailand because it’s just another banned website because it reveals scams.
Silver Seas 2 is one of, I believe, seven refrigerated ships that operate in other country’s waters and the only one captured so far by a foreign country. There was another that was held in Phuket (see Andrew Drummond) but it “escaped”.
I believe the MV Steve Irwin is about to go chase these slave labour ships out of New Guinea territory for the next three months, so we should hear a lot more about it when the private citizens take action, as it would appear the Australian Navy is out chasing illegal immigrants, if they have any money left to do that, or are allowed to by the Australian Government.
All these wonderful names of companies that change their names all the time and also their ships’ names must originate from somewhere: the ships have to dock somewhere to refuel and so far the only place they have been photographed is Thailand along with her sister ships http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/shipid:734135/mmsi:567183000/imo:7727097/vessel:SILVER_SEA_2 which will give you her exact location as of a few hours ago. As I said if ever there was a case against the Thai companies involved all it would take is someone with a death wish to go and make enquiries in the wrong provinces in Thailand…. like the retired Thai Police General did.
I just wonder if the Americans know their pet and cat food is processed in Thailand using slave labour and that seals and dolphins are regarded as part of the catch, which may convince some of them to stop buying it.
Having a small fishing boat equipped with sonar and GPS in Thailand I can tell you that it’s business as usual with illegal netting and undersized fish being the norm and you have to go to remote locations near reefs and islands to even see a fish on the sonar and all those fishing vessels that are supposed to be in port are actually out there a mile off shore doing their illegal stuff and the beaches are littered with their discarded filth.
It’s business as usual in Thailand and after the Andy Hall fiasco and the http://www.phuketwan.com case few people are willing to say anything at all.
Ron – I never said Thailand had no oil at all [ though I think you will find most of it is recent discoveries, and disputed with Cambodia). I merely pointed out that even to this day Thailand does not have enough to export, and certainly not enough to make the Thai monarchy richer than the Saudis, or Brunei.
But Thailand DOES have oil. I have seen a lot of them and also heard about others. The oil is all controlled by the RTA, and seems to never come on the grid of public knowledge. The black tanked tanker trucks you see on the main highways are the army”s oil going south.
Interesting questions, Bernie. And Google is not all that useful in getting at answers.
One of the most recent reports relating to the seizure and impounding of Silver Sea 2 raises questions as to the nationality of the ships actual operators at the time of the alleged crimes:
“It was caught flying a Thai flag despite having obtained now-expired permits from Indonesian officials in June last year.
The 2,300 gross-ton vessel was accused of taking cargo out of the country without proper documentation, committing illicit transshipments and operating without a functioning vessel monitoring system (VMS).
Its operator, PT Pacific Glory Lestari, part of the Mabiru Group fleet in Ambon that had been flagged for infringements in a compliance audit, recently tried and failed to push through a pretrial motion claiming that the arrest was unlawful.”
Another report from October has the Thai owner of the ship, Silver Sea Fishery, intending to go to court to sue the Indonesians.
Nowhere can I find any indication that the ship has been set free, so maybe what you are seeing is one of the frequent name-changes you refer to and so not that ship at all.
Malaysians are so entrapped in their own advancement, it is not possible to engender anything close to a democracy. The almost fawning praise that Mahathir received when he crashed the Bersih 4.0 protest, indicates just how long the half-life of Malaysian memories are. Those that cursed Mahathir six months ago are near desperate for his satanic salvation and Mahathir 5.0 now declares himself a friend of all Malaysians, including Chinese and Indians (no comment on Orang Asli whom he helped to extirpate), forgetting all the rotten things he said. But the global status of Malaysia has not changed, sadly, as the West ignores the abuses of Kassim Ahmad, unknown even to Malaysians, while the Daw Suu Kyi of Malaysian, Anwar Ibrahim, revels in the adoration of sycophants, near and far. Malaysians are simply, for the better part, not mature enough to sacrifice personal pain for long-term gain and this is not strictly and affliction of PM Najib and UMNO, but a cancer that has invaded the entire body politic of Malaysia. What is needed is not just a new generation of narcissists; that Malaysia has been doing for 30 years, but a new generation of altruists or, at least, competent and honest micromanagers. Malaysia has very few, and probably most are women, barred from the highest office in the land, by archaic and silly Shari’a Laws.
There are too many reasons why Asean can’t be an integrated region, regardless of all the pomp and ceremonious meetings..
1. corruption ridden govt in all except one country
2. Feudal mindset of several countries – no need for names
3. disregard for welfare of the disadvantaged citizens – just take a look at the so called “maids and foreign workers” situation.
4. the idea in all but two Asean country – getting a passport is seen as a privilege not a right! This alone shows the immaturity of the govt and civil mindset!
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading anthropology lately but this article reeks of linear Western “progress” -oriented thinking. Even the title ironically misses the point that Buddhism (which many Southeast Asians adhere to) is all about Samsara, the continuous cycle of life, death, and rebirth. “Moving in circles” is probably how many Southeast Asian citizens prefer to move.
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Turning the tide on Thailand’s human trafficking
Oh, and Bernie, just use Tor and you can access anything and everything on the Net from Thailand. I’m surprised in 2015 that anyone wouldn’t know that.
Turning the tide on Thailand’s human trafficking
Yes, there is a wealth of material available through Google, giving the broad brush tales of slavery horror in the Thai fisheries industry.
I was trying to find out whether the impounded Silver Sea 2 was still impounded and. if not, who let it go and under what legal conditions.
That sort of specific concrete information about one of the ships you mentioned seeing coming into dock in Thailand after its impoundment is not available.
One thing I did notice, and maybe as someone with obvious interest in the issue you can comment on, is that since the coup approximately 300K pages come up on a Google search for “Thailand & slavery”. Before that time, only something under 300 come up.
One could easily get the impression that this is a problem that is either directly related to the military coup or one that is only interesting to international media when a military government is in charge in Thailand.
ASEAN’s community moving in circles
No leader or press in one asean country is going to refer to another head of state as “The honorable scoundrel”, regardless of how that leader came to power.
Turning the tide on Thailand’s human trafficking
I think anyone interested in why the investigation was suddenly wrapped up, the Police General in charge of it suddenly posted to the same province as the Thai compamy involved, should read this Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Union_Group and see what fish brands are involved and what the various NGO’s have to say about its operation.
Unless there is intervention by both the EU and US this company is aiming for new hieghts in slave labour and illegal fishing.
I said earlier there were seven refrigerated ships involved, but checking the records I find there are actually nine and all of them have changed their name a number of times and flown under whatever flag they chose at the time.
It’s all fine and dandy saying that the Thai trawlers are banned from leaving port unless they are certified by Thai authorities, but one must ask oneself about the thirty or forty Thai trawlers feeding these motherships and why they haven’t been boarded and searched by International Navies when operating in a limited area just off the New Guinea coastline. The claims that the waters are too shallow doesn’t stand up when even the MV Steve Irvin is equipped with inflatable boats, as are the navies of all countries in the region.
These people should be classified as pirates and treated as such.
Waking up to Myanmar’s new normal
Brookings Institute’s Lex Rieffel suggested in his March 2013 report:
“A first step in managing foreign aid and asserting country ownership is to put in place a respectable national planning process.”
He went on in September 2014:
“Many foreign “friends of Myanmar” seem to believe that the administration should have been able to achieve a high standard of good governance within three years. The reality is that Myanmar’s transition is more chaotic this year than last year. One of the main causes is the flood of foreigners who continue to swarm into Myanmar like locusts: politicians angling for a selfie with Suu Kyi, aid officials pressing ministers to sign project agreements they do not understand, foreign investors promising jobs but interested only in profits, international nongovernmental organizations convinced that they hold the key to Myanmar’s future well-being, reporters fishing for a scandal that will please their editors and many more.
The greatest harm from this flood of outside interest is that it takes up time that Myanmar officials should be spending to formulate and implement the policies required for a successful transition. Like most premodern countries, Myanmar has a bureaucratic culture in which delegation of authority is minimized. Astonishingly small issues get shunted up to Thein Sein and his cabinet ministers, who appear to spend much of each day receiving foreign visitors. Little time is left for the vital business of assessing policy options, and almost none for implementing policy choices. The ultimate tragedy would be seeing the transition derailed because Myanmar had received too much foreign attention.”
As to the urban rural divide he had this to say three years ago:
“There is much talk about Myanmar again become a leading exporter of rice, but setting this as an objective is not a smart way to improve the livelihoods of farming and non-farming rural households, representing more than 60 percent of the nation’s population. A better approach is to allow farmers to choose their crops freely and then work to lower their costs by improving infrastructure (roads and ports), making available high-yielding varieties of seed, providing credit on reasonable terms, etc.
What is important for Myanmar’s economic success is raising rural household incomes, not achieving some arbitrary export target.”
It makes better sense than tipping the rural population onto the cities’ sweat shops in the new SEZs, introducing at the same time industrial scale farming on confiscated land up and down the country in partnership with the cronies and foreign corporations. This well trodden ‘road map’ would lead to a modern but irreversibly skewed economy and demographic change, and worse, reliance on food aid and imports driving the country into the hands of the global chettiars IMF and the World Bank cap in hand in next to no time.
ASEAN’s community moving in circles
There you go. It’s regional cooperation among ruling elites in a trading bloc like any other. Hence accommodating Myanmar was only a matter of time and not a real problem. From chairing ASEAN to joining the New World Order has been a perfectly natural progression for the nation formerly known as a pariah state. Everything happens for a reason,right?
ASEAN’s community moving in circles
This is a very vague article as specifics to Asean failures are never really mentioned.
Integration into the Asean Community is defined by the Asean Blueprints and not anything else. The AEC alone has more than 500 objectives with most being already accomplished.
Over the lifetime of Asean there have been thousands of agreements between its members which have solved or improved just as many problems. Asean places these agreements online on its website which makes this easy to confirm.
Every agreement has a “flash to bang” time between when agreements are signed and when they are actually implemented. Some countries move faster than others but eventually they do implement the agreement at a national level.
I think Asean is a great success and the Asean community, after nearly 50 years of existence, is off to a great start in 2015. Its not perfect but considering its rocky start its doing quite well.
Statement of support for Michael Buehler
[…] executive branch in organizing Jokowi’s presidential visit to Washington. (Note: I’m on the record supporting his research as responsible.) This seems to be a window on cabinet disfunction, and a […]
What is “Islamism”?
Einstein. Hang on! Wasn’t he an atheist? Anyway, to claim that I am arrogant or insolent hardly discredits the point I raised. Agreed?
I rather like to think Einstein might have flagged me up a ‘like.’
ASEAN adjusts to a new democratic phenomenon
Ne Win managed to get away with murder more lightly than his protégé vis-├а-vis the West… quite comfortable, thank you very much. Even the pariah state ‘done good’ in the end, easing into the New World Order once they got their ironclad constitution up and running.
So long as they don’t turn recidivist since everyone is watching and they’ve gone too deep into the ‘system’ now. The puppet master knows it and has moved to ensure his family’s security and their ill gotten gains, the Lady quite obliging on her part by the look of it. .
Turning the tide on Thailand’s human trafficking
Emjay,
There is a wealth of material on Google, one just has to know where to look and be allowed to look. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/13/indonesian-navy-busts-thai-cargo-ship-filled-with-suspected-slave-caught-fish and be able to access it from inside Thailand, which is where my problem is. There are updates after Oct and Nov on http://www.andrew-drummond.com that I’m far too young, or not allowed to read from Thailand because it’s just another banned website because it reveals scams.
Silver Seas 2 is one of, I believe, seven refrigerated ships that operate in other country’s waters and the only one captured so far by a foreign country. There was another that was held in Phuket (see Andrew Drummond) but it “escaped”.
I believe the MV Steve Irwin is about to go chase these slave labour ships out of New Guinea territory for the next three months, so we should hear a lot more about it when the private citizens take action, as it would appear the Australian Navy is out chasing illegal immigrants, if they have any money left to do that, or are allowed to by the Australian Government.
All these wonderful names of companies that change their names all the time and also their ships’ names must originate from somewhere: the ships have to dock somewhere to refuel and so far the only place they have been photographed is Thailand along with her sister ships http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/shipid:734135/mmsi:567183000/imo:7727097/vessel:SILVER_SEA_2 which will give you her exact location as of a few hours ago. As I said if ever there was a case against the Thai companies involved all it would take is someone with a death wish to go and make enquiries in the wrong provinces in Thailand…. like the retired Thai Police General did.
I just wonder if the Americans know their pet and cat food is processed in Thailand using slave labour and that seals and dolphins are regarded as part of the catch, which may convince some of them to stop buying it.
Having a small fishing boat equipped with sonar and GPS in Thailand I can tell you that it’s business as usual with illegal netting and undersized fish being the norm and you have to go to remote locations near reefs and islands to even see a fish on the sonar and all those fishing vessels that are supposed to be in port are actually out there a mile off shore doing their illegal stuff and the beaches are littered with their discarded filth.
It’s business as usual in Thailand and after the Andy Hall fiasco and the http://www.phuketwan.com case few people are willing to say anything at all.
The last king of Thailand?
Ron – I never said Thailand had no oil at all [ though I think you will find most of it is recent discoveries, and disputed with Cambodia). I merely pointed out that even to this day Thailand does not have enough to export, and certainly not enough to make the Thai monarchy richer than the Saudis, or Brunei.
The last king of Thailand?
But Thailand DOES have oil. I have seen a lot of them and also heard about others. The oil is all controlled by the RTA, and seems to never come on the grid of public knowledge. The black tanked tanker trucks you see on the main highways are the army”s oil going south.
ASEAN adjusts to a new democratic phenomenon
Good article. Might the triple negative (“not been unduly uncomfortable”) have been avoided?
Turning the tide on Thailand’s human trafficking
Interesting questions, Bernie. And Google is not all that useful in getting at answers.
One of the most recent reports relating to the seizure and impounding of Silver Sea 2 raises questions as to the nationality of the ships actual operators at the time of the alleged crimes:
“It was caught flying a Thai flag despite having obtained now-expired permits from Indonesian officials in June last year.
The 2,300 gross-ton vessel was accused of taking cargo out of the country without proper documentation, committing illicit transshipments and operating without a functioning vessel monitoring system (VMS).
Its operator, PT Pacific Glory Lestari, part of the Mabiru Group fleet in Ambon that had been flagged for infringements in a compliance audit, recently tried and failed to push through a pretrial motion claiming that the arrest was unlawful.”
http://tinyurl.com/o5ydold
Another report from October has the Thai owner of the ship, Silver Sea Fishery, intending to go to court to sue the Indonesians.
Nowhere can I find any indication that the ship has been set free, so maybe what you are seeing is one of the frequent name-changes you refer to and so not that ship at all.
Malaysia’s slide into the UMNO abyss
Malaysians are so entrapped in their own advancement, it is not possible to engender anything close to a democracy. The almost fawning praise that Mahathir received when he crashed the Bersih 4.0 protest, indicates just how long the half-life of Malaysian memories are. Those that cursed Mahathir six months ago are near desperate for his satanic salvation and Mahathir 5.0 now declares himself a friend of all Malaysians, including Chinese and Indians (no comment on Orang Asli whom he helped to extirpate), forgetting all the rotten things he said. But the global status of Malaysia has not changed, sadly, as the West ignores the abuses of Kassim Ahmad, unknown even to Malaysians, while the Daw Suu Kyi of Malaysian, Anwar Ibrahim, revels in the adoration of sycophants, near and far. Malaysians are simply, for the better part, not mature enough to sacrifice personal pain for long-term gain and this is not strictly and affliction of PM Najib and UMNO, but a cancer that has invaded the entire body politic of Malaysia. What is needed is not just a new generation of narcissists; that Malaysia has been doing for 30 years, but a new generation of altruists or, at least, competent and honest micromanagers. Malaysia has very few, and probably most are women, barred from the highest office in the land, by archaic and silly Shari’a Laws.
ASEAN’s community moving in circles
There are too many reasons why Asean can’t be an integrated region, regardless of all the pomp and ceremonious meetings..
1. corruption ridden govt in all except one country
2. Feudal mindset of several countries – no need for names
3. disregard for welfare of the disadvantaged citizens – just take a look at the so called “maids and foreign workers” situation.
4. the idea in all but two Asean country – getting a passport is seen as a privilege not a right! This alone shows the immaturity of the govt and civil mindset!
ASEAN’s community moving in circles
Especially in Malaysia, where 62 % aren’t Buddhist but love circles, whether on Umrah or at home.
ASEAN’s community moving in circles
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading anthropology lately but this article reeks of linear Western “progress” -oriented thinking. Even the title ironically misses the point that Buddhism (which many Southeast Asians adhere to) is all about Samsara, the continuous cycle of life, death, and rebirth. “Moving in circles” is probably how many Southeast Asian citizens prefer to move.
The last king of Thailand?
Weak & unprincipled, or a co-conspirator.
It didn’t have to be that way.