Day: September 4, 2022

Beginning in the second half of 2021, Taiwanese nationals were lured by high-paying jobs to Cambodian scam rings where they were detained, beaten, resold, and otherwise enslaved. According to a rough estimate by Taiwan’s National Police Agency, there are likely thousands of victims. 

Why are Taiwanese flocking to Cambodia in droves? How did this fantasy journey become a nightmare?

One journalist spent weeks interviewing victims who escaped after being trafficked to Cambodia. From their personal experiences, we learn how they fell prey to traffickers and scammers.

The following is part two of a four-part digest. This series was originally published in August 2022 by The Reporter, an independent investigative news outlet in Taiwan. RFA obtained the rights to republish parts of the series in English.

 

In March 2022, a young couple in Taiwan was looking for opportunities. Guan Jie, 28, and Yi An, 30, (pseudonyms) had opened a store together, but were forced to close because of the pandemic, leaving Guan Jie with tens of thousands of U.S. dollars in debt.

At that time, a friend of Guan Jie’s that he had known for 10 years introduced the couple to a job advertised on the Facebook group “Side Door Jobs,” working back-end customer service in a resort called “New MGM Phase II.” The job description read: “A monthly salary of NT$40,000-50,000 (U.S. $1,300-1600), 8 days off a month, typing personnel. Travel to Cambodia.” For many people, working abroad is a dream come true—especially for Guan Jie and Yi An, who had never been outside of Taiwan.

“I thought it would be great to be able to work abroad,” Guan Jie said in an interview. 

They took the bait. In Taiwan, the human trafficking ring first provided a sophisticated fake company profile. The couple was told that the place where they would stay included gyms, rooms for couples, and other perks. The trafficker also personally brought Guan Jie and Yi An from outside Taipei to sign a contract with a hotel in the city and the intermediary even helped Guan Jie pay off two debts of several thousand. “I thought at the time, oh my God, why are they being so good!” Guan Jie smiled wryly. 

The trafficker took them to get passports, take PCR tests, and checked them into a hotel in downtown Taipei a few nights before boarding the plane. On March 11, Guan Jie, Yi An, Guan Jie’s friend, and two other Taiwanese – a total of five people – took a flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and were sent directly to the coastal town of Sihanoukville. From the first contact with the Taiwanese trafficking group to their departure and landing, no more than a week had gone by. 

Guan Jie said he quickly learned that he had been sold to a trafficking ring after being lured to Cambodia by “pig sellers,” or victims who were forced to find new targets for the operation.

“A group of pig sellers bought us and sold us again. We were treated as animals, not people,” he said.

Guan Jie and Yi An were “assigned” similar jobs, but the target they were after was foreigners.

“We just used Google Translate to connect emotionally [to the victims]. After we talked for a while, we transferred them to senior employees to “reel them in,” Yi An said. 

She said that the company also employed foreign women who would video chat with targets to deceive them.

A chance to escape

Guan Jie and Yi An said they were “lucky” not to have been beaten during their time being held by the trafficking ring, although they saw other victims being “dealt with” by members of the ring.

Guan Jie said that sometimes the music in the office would suddenly be turned up loud.

“I knew that [next door] someone was being electrocuted again,” he said. “All I could think was, I’m about to die.”

Guan Jie said that he tried to obey his captors’ orders, but he wasn’t good at luring new victims and faced the risk of being “resold” to a new trafficking ring because of his poor performance.

“When I knew I might be resold, I started calling for help,” Guan Jie said. He knew that even if the chances were slim that he would be rescued, he had to take a chance. 

Most of those held at trafficking rings in the Sihanoukville industrial park still have access to social media. The ring that detained Guan Jie only required people to hand over their cell phones during work hours, so during his off-hours, he searched the internet for ways to escape from Cambodia. At first, he called the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vietnam – Taiwan’s de facto embassy in the country – for emergency assistance and wrote a petition to the Taiwanese government, but to no avail.

Later, Guan Jie contacted Taiwan’s National Police Agency, and an officer he spoke with provided him with the Facebook profile of the governor of Sihanoukville. After confirming their exact location and “company” through the special assistant of the provincial governor, local police rescued Guan Jie and Yi An and sent the couple to immigration.

Even at the immigration office, Guan Jie and Yi An remained in danger. The couple learned that even the authorities were unable to resist the chance to make tens of thousands of dollars “selling” victims to local trafficking rings, and they were repeatedly asked if they wanted to accept “work” opportunities instead of returning home.

In the end, the couple paid a U.S. $3,000 “ransom” to the local contacts of a Taiwanese gang and were allowed to board a flight back to Taiwan after more than three months of being trapped at the industrial park in Sihanoukville.

“I felt reborn,” Yi An said of the relief she experienced after arriving in Taipei. “Fortunately, I didn’t die there. I really didn’t think I would ever return to Taiwan.” 

A trip to an Asian grocery store in the U.S. is like a tour of the Orient. Pickled mustard greens from Thailand, instant noodles from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, and packets of dried fungus and fruits — pack the shelves of any given Asian supermarket.

Some of these stores have come to the attention of human rights researchers.

A report released this week by Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, found markets in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and some online retailers in the U.S. continue to sell more than 70 brands of red dates grown and processed in Xinjiang, a region in China that’s been the focus of a U.S. law on forced labor.

In December, President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) into law. Enforcement of the law began in June. U.S. products wholly or partially produced in China’s northwest region of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) are prohibited from entering the U.S. unless the importer can prove with evidence, they weren’t made by forced labor.

“This includes goods produced in other parts of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] or in other countries that incorporate goods that were mined, produced, or manufactured in the XUAR or by entities on the UFLPA Entity List,” a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) representative told VOA.

Report on findings

The report, titled Fruits of Uyghur Forced Labor: Sanctioned Products on American Grocery Store Shelves, said that “U.S. food retailers and consumers risk complicity in forced labor and other atrocities” as long as red dates from Xinjiang remain on the shelves of U.S. stores.

“Between February and August 2022, we investigated a dozen international grocery stores in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and identified red date products sourced from East Turkistan at seven stores,” the report said. “We also examined online international grocery stores that ship red date products from the Uyghur Region to the D.C. area.”

Most Uyghurs prefer to call the Uyghur region East Turkistan instead of Xinjiang, the name given by the Chinese.

According to the report, U.S. online retailers including Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, sell red dates from Xinjiang.

“At least 15 U.S. companies import red date products for wholesale distribution to retailers, including Bloomington Import, Growland Inc., H&C Food Inc., OCM Globe Inc., and Tristar Food Wholesale Co., Inc,” the report said.

VOA reached out to companies including H&C Food Inc. and OCM Globe Inc., mentioned in the report, but has not received any responses.

The report’s authors said they tried to contact the stores and distributors named in the report but some of the emails bounced back. Others either did not respond directly or only confirmed receiving the correspondence.

Mukta Islam, a consumer in the state of Virginia which borders Washington, told VOA any business should be vigilant about whether the products are free of forced labor.

“Every business [is] supposed to support this law and do not sell … and return them (Xinjing dates),” Islam said.

The report’s author, Nuzigum Setiwaldi, used global, U.S., and China trade data to trace the red dates’ global supply chain.

“Twenty percent of the world’s red dates come from the Uyghur Region and are likely the products of forced labor,” Setiwaldi said. “Ten percent of the world’s red dates are directly tied to the XPCC (The Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps) and forced labor practices.”

The XPCC is a Chinese Communist Party corporate and paramilitary organization in Xinjiang. In 2020, the U.S. sanctioned the XPCC and other Chinese officials for their “connection to serious rights abuses against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang,” including forced labor.

The cotton connection

According to the Uyghur Human Rights Project’s report, growing red dates in Xinjiang is directly linked to cotton production through the practice of intercropping, a method of agricultural production where two crops are grown simultaneously in the same field.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act specifically identifies cotton, tomatoes, and polysilicon from Xinjiang as high-priority sectors.

“The direct link between red date(s) and cotton production increases the likelihood that red date production is being tainted by Uyghur forced labor,” the report said.

The report continued, 2018 XPCC data showed “red date-cotton intercropping is the primary form of fruit-cotton intercropping with nearly 80% (1.6 million tons) of red dates produced on cotton farms in 2019.”

The U.S. accuses China of mistreating its Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim ethnic communities in Xinjiang, including the arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs in re-education camps, forced labor, forced sterilization of women and torture.

On Wednesday, a U.N. report about human rights stated that Beijing’s labor schemes “involve elements of coercion” in Xinjiang, requiring clarification by Chinese authorities.

China’s response

Beijing has repeatedly denied the accusations and described the facilities as “vocational training schools” aimed to root out terrorist, extremist and separatist thoughts in people’s minds. China vehemently denies Uyghurs are forced into labor and said that the Chinese government implemented poverty alleviation programs to help Uyghurs.

“Some forces manipulate Xinjiang-related issues and fabricated the disinformation on ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang. In essence, they are using human rights as a pretext to undermine Xinjiang’s prosperity and stability and contain China’s development and revitalization,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin at an August news conference.

Navigating US law

Setiwaldi said companies importing goods from Xinjiang, in order to comply with the UFLPA, should understand which products are at high risk of being made with Uyghur forced labor.

“U.S. companies have not fully mapped out their supply chains which makes it difficult for CBP to identify and trace goods made with Uyghur forced labor. Many products may be exported from mainland China or by intermediary suppliers outside of China that seem to have no links to the XPCC or even the Uyghur Region,” Setiwaldi told VOA.

According to CBP, the agency receives numerous allegations of forced labor from a variety of sources, including government partners, non-government organizations’ reports, media coverage, firsthand accounts and the general public.

“We will continue to use the resources at our disposal to evaluate these allegations and to identify and prevent goods made with forced labor from entering the U.S. commerce,” a CBP representative told VOA.

Source: Voice of America

Three bottlenose dolphins were released into the open sea in Indonesia Saturday after years of being confined for the amusement of tourists who would touch and swim with them.

As red and white Indonesian flags fluttered, underwater gates opened off the island of Bali to allow Johnny, Rocky and Rambo to swim free.

The trio were rescued three years ago from their tiny pool in a resort hotel to which they had been sold after spending years performing in a traveling circus.

They regained their health and strength at the Bali sanctuary, a floating pen in a bay that provided a gentler, more natural environment.

Lincoln O’Barry, who worked with the Indonesian government to set up the Umah Lumba Rehabilitation, Release and Retirement Center, said dolphins are wild animals that should live free.

“It was an incredibly emotional experience to see them go,” O’Barrry said.

The center was initiated in 2019 by the Bali Forestry Department and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry. “Umah lumba” means “dolphin” in Indonesian.

For some time after the gates opened, the dolphins looked at the opening, uncertain of their next move. But after about an hour, they were on their way, sometimes jumping over choppy waves.

The Associated Press watched their release through an online livestream. O’Barry is documenting the release with drones and underwater footage for a film.

The Indonesian government supported the dolphins’ rescue, working with Dolphin Project, founded by Lincoln’s father Ric O’Barry, who was also at the release.

Ric O’Barry had been the dolphin trainer for the 1960s TV show “Flipper,” but later came to see the toll exacted on the animals. He has since devoted his life to returning dolphins to the wild.

Center workers clapped as the dolphins swam out. Wahyu Lestari, rehabilitation coordinator at the center, said she was a bit sad to see them go.

“I’m happy they are free, and they are going back to their family,” she said. “They should be in the wild because they are born in the wild.”

The freed dolphins will be monitored out at sea with GPS tracking for a year. They can return for visits to the sanctuary, although it’s unclear what they will do. They may join another pod, stay together, or go their separate ways.

Dolphins in captivity are carted from town to town, kept in chlorinated water, held in isolation or forced to interact with tourists, often leading to injuries.

Johnny, the oldest dolphin, had teeth that were worn down to below the gum line when he was rescued in 2019. Earlier this year, dentists provided him with dolphin-style dental crowns so that he can now clamp down on live fish.

Johnny was the first of the three dolphins to swim out to sea.

Ric and Lincoln O’Barry have spent half a century working on saving dolphins from captivity in locations from Brazil to South Korea and the United States. Saturday’s release was their first in Indonesia.

The Indonesian government’s decision to rescue the dolphins followed a decade-long public education campaign that included billboards, artwork, school programs and a drive asking people not to buy tickets to dolphin shows.

A government minister was at hand to raise the gate at the sanctuary Saturday.

Lincoln O’Barry said the Indonesian sanctuary will continue to be used for other captive dolphins. Similar sanctuaries are in the works in North America and Europe, as more dolphin shows close. With virtual reality and other technology, appreciation of nature doesn’t have to involve a zoo or a dolphin show, he said.

Yet dolphin shows are still popular in China, the Middle East and Japan.

In Japan, the father and son have drawn attention to the dolphin hunt in the town of Taiji, documented in the 2010 Oscar-winning film “The Cove.” Every year, fishermen frighten and corral dolphins into a cove, capture some to sell to dolphin shows and kill others for food.

Whale and dolphin meat is considered a delicacy in Japanese culinary tradition. But Taiji has prompted protests by conservationists for years, including some Japanese.

The three dolphins released in Indonesia were soon kilometers away in the waters. But before their departure, they circled around the sanctuary.

“They turned back around and came back to us one more time, almost to say thank you and good-bye. And then they headed straight out to open ocean and disappeared,” Lincoln O’Barry said.

“Where they head next, we don’t know. But we wish them a good long life.”

Source: Voice of America

Cities in eastern China suspended ferry services and classes and flights were canceled in Japan on Sunday as Typhoon Hinnamnor, the strongest global storm this year, blew its way past Taiwan and the Koreas with fierce winds and heavy rains.

Shanghai grounded ferry services and deployed more than 50,000 police officers to aid with rescues and guide traffic away from danger areas. The eastern business hub of Wenzhou ordered all classes suspended on Monday.

Hinnamnor is forecasted to move gradually northward into the East China Sea with maximum sustained winds of 175 kilometers per hour, according to the Hong Kong Observatory.

Evacuations and flight cancellations have been ordered in Japan’s southern Okinawa Island. The typhoon is also expected to bring intense rainfall to the Korean Peninsula, bringing the possibility of flooding.

China’s National Meteorological Center issued a yellow typhoon warning at 10 a.m. Sunday, and warned of heavy rains in northeastern Zhejiang, Shanghai and self-governing Taiwan.

Ships were told to return to port to take shelter from the wind, and the center also urged people against large gatherings both indoors and outdoors.

In Japan, the typhoon lashed Okinawa and nearby islands with heavy rain and fierce winds, threatening flooding and grounding more than 100 flights connecting the islands and parts of the main southern island of Kyushu.

Footage on Japan’s NHK national television showed trees violently shaken by the storm, with fierce rainfall hitting the pavement. A greenhouse for mangoes on Ishigaki Island was knocked down. On the main Okinawa island, two elderly people fell down and were slightly injured, according to media reports.

Officials said the slow-moving typhoon could add to rainfall and risks of flooding in the southern region where dense rain clouds have been stuck.

In Taiwan, over 600 residents in New Taipei, Taoyuan and Hsinchu counties were evacuated to shelters on Saturday amid the heavy rain and strong winds, according to the island’s Central News Agency.

The typhoon caused a landslide in Miaoli county and blew over some 100 roadside trees. About 40 flights and more than 100 ferry services across Taiwan were also canceled Saturday.

Source: Voice of America