In 2006, a young Cambodian sculptor, Vannak Anan Prum, left his village to look for labouring work. He needed to earn enough money to pay for his wife Sokun’s impending hospital stay to give birth to their first child. He intended to be away for two months.
He would not see his wife again for five years. After a middleman on the Thai-Cambodian border promised he could earn a lot of money drying fish, Prum was sold into slave labour, sent to sea on a fishing trawler. He was forced to work around the clock and through storms, allowed a maximum two hours’ sleep by day and two hours at night.
Violence happened on the boat every day for the next four years as a way of keeping those enslaved in line, Prum tells Guardian Australia through a translator. He says people would disappear off the boats without warning, and were assumed to have been killed and thrown into the sea. One night, Prum says he saw one Thai worker cut another man’s head off with a cleaver.
Prum writes about and explicitly draws these horrific experiences in his new graphic memoir of modern slavery, The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea. The story includes his experience of jumping ship to attempt to swim to his escape, only to be sold by his rescuers into slavery on a palm oil plantation on the Malaysian coast.
The rest of the world is implicated in this slavery. Some of the trash fish caught by enforced labour on these boats gets used as pet food sold in supermarkets, as well as used as a cheap protein feed in prawn farming. An estimated 200,000 migrant workers from Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos are prone to such exploitation by the $6.5bn Thai fishing industry, according to the Raks Thai Foundation. But the figures are hard to confirm, says Kate Kennedy, a former executive officer of Hagar Australia, part of an international organisation dedicated to restoring the lives of people broken by human trafficking.
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