Fred Rosen | Ground realities of human trafficking in Malaysia
Malaysia has recently been condemned for human trafficking in a damning report by the United States government.
I am not going to argue here the pros and cons of the points raised by the report, especially as this document certainly has its merits (incidentally, Thailand, not Malaysia, has been singled out as the greatest culprit in the region). Instead, I prefer to concentrate on the actual lives of people who arrived here and are now struggling.
Kyaw (not his real name) is one of a dozen workers, practically all from Myanmar (there is one single Indonesian), who toil and live in a large restaurant where they do everything under the sun, from waiting on tables, to cooking, chopping vegetables, cleaning, doing the accounts, and so on and so forth.
For instance, the other night I noticed that they were struggling to set up an Astro antenna (they eventually managed it). They were at one point also charged with the task of breaking down a large partition wall so that two dining rooms could be joined together into a single large one.
Read more here: http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/273370
