The trafficking trap persists in border towns

By Win Naing
December 27, 2004

Ranong - A Burmese woman sits on the wooden floor of a small room in Ranong, a Thai town bordering southern-most Burma. Over the sound of a whirring fan, the 18-year-old who is just over four feet tall recounts her past.

''I was sold twice to brothel houses," says Mi Kay (not her real name). She lowers her head and is silent for a while.

Mi Kay ran away from her hometown, Rangoon, more than a year ago. She had eloped with her boyfriend after passing her matriculation exam, but their families forced the couple apart after two days together.

Unhappy and restricted by her family, Mi Kay fled to the southern port town of Kaw Thaung, along the Thai-Burmese border. It was not an unknown place to her, having visited the town as a child.

However, Mi Kay did not know that Kaw Thaung - like many Burmese border towns - was a centre for human trafficking. She worked as a waitress at a local teashop for more than a month before she became a target for human traffickers.

An older schoolmate from Rangoon came and struck up a conversation one day. The woman lived in Ranong, a Thai border town three kilometres from Kaw Thaung. She told Mi Kay that there were good jobs across the border. After a few visits from her schoolmate, Mi Kay decided to move.

But Mi Kay’s old acquaintance turned out to be a trafficker and sold Mi Kay for 6,000 baht (154 U.S. dollars) to a brothel in Ranong.

Mi Kay at first refused to work, so the brothel owner physically abused and tortured her, breaking her spirit. Finally, she became a sex worker. "It was painful. I was also really afraid as well," she recalls.

Mi Kay works in a well-known red-light area called Pauk Khaung in southern Ranong province, a major fishing industry town in Thailand.

Each evening, the sounds of Burmese karaoke fill the streets in Pauk Khaung. Over 100,000 Burmese migrant workers live in Ranong district. There are about 150 Burmese sex workers at 40 karaoke bars and brothels in Ranong, locals here say. They receive half the 200 to 500 baht (five to 12.80 dollars) paid to the owner for each customer.

Mi Kay described as hell the first four months she spent in isolation at the brothel. ''I always thought to run away, but they locked me in during daytime,'' she says.

Mi Kay once tried to escape, was caught as she waited for a boat back to Burma. ''They beat me several times. Both of my hands were swollen,'' she says, holding up her tiny hands.

Eventually, her brothel owner sold her to another brothel for 10,000 baht (256 dollars).

It was a turning point for Mi Kay. The new brothel owner assured her that if she paid off her purchase price, he would let her go. "Sometimes I slept with ten customers in one day to pay the debt,'' she says. It was repaid in just over a month.

Mi Kay is free to go now, but after all this time of being in the sex industry, she says she cannot. She thinks that being a sex worker is a means of survival and of earning more money for her return home.

The sale of women to brothels is not an unusual story amidst the Burmese community in Ranong, says Thiri, a friend of Mi Kay’s. Trafficked Burmese women almost never gain their freedom as they are continuously sold between brothels, she adds.

Thiri, 33, has been a sex worker for five years. She has HIV, but cannot stop working. ''I have to work for income," she explains.

HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are but some of the vulnerabilities that Burmese sex workers face in Ranong, says health worker Hla Hla Win, who runs a private medical clinic.

She says local authorities from the Burmese side in Kaw Thaung ignore the activities of human trafficking networks, while the Burmese government’s actions to eliminate human trafficking are just "window dressing".

Of the newcomers to the sex industry in Ranong this year, almost half of the Burmese entering brothels were trafficked, says Hla Hla Win, also a member of exiled Burmese Women’s Union.

Chaw Chaw, anti-trafficking coordinator for the World Vision non-governmental organisation in Rangoon, says the root causes of migration to Thailand are economic, social and political problems in Burma. "Lack ... of education and general knowledge of travel process (are) part of the main reasons for human trafficking," she says.

Despite international scepticism about the Burmese government's efforts against trafficking, Chaw Chaw says the military regime, called the State Peace and Development Council, made this issue part of its national agenda in the last year.

A member of the Myanmar National Committee for Women’s Affairs, an SPDC-controlled organisation, recently expressed concern over Burma's human trafficking situation. However the official, who declined to be named, said that trafficking could not just be stopped: "It is a long process. We can only reduce it."

For months, Burmese state television has been running a campaign encouraging people not to go to neighbouring countries and offering suggestions to women on how to avoid traffickers.

Burma’s Home Affairs Ministry says the government has "taken action against offenders in 412 cases" of human trafficking between July 2002 and June 2004. It claims to have rescued 1,047 women from being sold abroad in the same period.

Meantime, Mi Kay blames herself for her nightmare. ''It was a big mistake to come here," she says, taking a deep breath. "If I did not run away from home, I would not be like this.''

Mi Kay says she still loves her boyfriend but has given up on her love because "I have a dirty body."

She still has dreams of returning to Rangoon and to her family. For now, though, she continues working in Ranong. "I do not have enough money yet," she says.

(Win Naing of Amyinthit news agency, based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, wrote this story under the ‘Our Mekong: A Vision amid Globalisation’ fellowship programme, run by Inter Press Service Asia-Pacific with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.)

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