Horrifying modern-day slave trade

THE horrific report that an unspecified number of job-seeking Bangladeshi youths are being enslaved under inhuman conditions in a remote island in Thailand for ransom following their capture by human traffickers has jolted us.

Unlike in the usual cases where job hungry people voluntarily cooperate with human traffickers' design, the victims here were first entrapped by traffickers and then forcibly taken to boats to be finally shipped to an unknown destination. More than 130 such victims, most of them Bangladeshis, have recently been found on the Phang Nga island of Thailand, according to Thai authorities.

Individual accounts of how these hapless people landed themselves in such a tragic situation reveal a thriving modern-day slave trade operated by a powerful human-trafficking underworld right under our coast guards' nose. According to Bangladesh Coast Guard, despite their knowledge of the ongoing illicit smuggling of people from the coastal areas by small fishing boats to traffickers' ships, they cannot challenge those ships as they remain outside our territorial waters. The Thai marine police, too, have more or less the same position.

Evidently, the human traffickers are making the most of this lack of policing on the high seas. Given the scale of the ongoing slave trade, as reported, and the enormity of the savagery it involves, the international community must act with urgency to stop it. In particular, Bangladesh should devise a strategy to counter it regionally in cooperation with neighbouring India, Myanmar as well as Thailand, Malaysia and other Southeast Asian nations.