Asia witnesses one of the largest drug trafficking events in history

Judah Tana is the Australian founder-director of Global Advance Projects, which has rescued hundreds of trafficking victims who arrived in Myanmar from more than 60 countries as far afield as Uganda and Morocco.

June 12, 2024

By Luke Hunt
Judah Tana is the Australian founder-director of Global Advance Projects, which has rescued hundreds of trafficking victims who arrived in Myanmar from more than 60 countries as far afield as Uganda and Morocco.

He spent two decades working on the Thai-Myanmar border, where criminal syndicates turned human trafficking into a billion-dollar global industry.

Tana spoke with UCA News in Mae Sot, on the Thai border, about the horrific realities and difficult choices facing hundreds of thousands of victims of human trafficking along the Thai-Thailand border. Myanmar. The following are excerpts from the interview.

Criminal networks have taken human trafficking and turned it into an industry. Can you give us an idea of ​​the scale of this project?

It's incredible. Most people, even those in the enclosure, don't realize how big they are because they aren't able to move around. We have people who study these compounds and then come and stand in front of them at the Moei River (which divides Myanmar and Thailand) and they are silenced by their size.

See as far as the eye can see, from east to west, these megacities which were built in a minimum of time – three years – and which occupied hundreds of acres of land. There are only skyscrapers and buildings housing tens of thousands of people, whose sole job is to defraud.

It blows your mind. And there isn't just one. There aren't two. There are not 10. There are not 20. There are not 30. There are — even in our region — more than 40 centers and all of them are only growing. It's right along our river system.

Then you have Cambodia, Laos, China border, Myanmar and Thailand. And now we see them moving into the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

What are the worst examples of torture that you have witnessed when it comes to victims of these organized crime gangs?

Most scam centers, when they start, start with such trauma and abuse. So you say, “Which is worse?” » I mean, you imagine the worst and it's even worse than that.

Often they have this dark room. You will be put in this prison, which is a dark room, without light. And you will be hung from the ceiling with handcuffs around your wrists. For four or five days, your arms are never lowered. You will not be allowed to fall asleep.

If you fall asleep, you end up getting tasered. So these men and women are coming out with just scars all over their bodies from being tasered for days to keep them awake. And then they take scalpels and cut off their legs. Then the blood begins to flow down their legs.

From there, they receive no food or water. And when they finally beg for it, they pee in a cup and offer it for them to drink. These guys might be able to handle a day without water, they might even go 48 hours. But at some point they lose hope and the only substantial thing they can get is urine in a cup.

So they choose to drink it. They come away with such trauma and shame from this particular situation. But it goes beyond that. We have women who are just beaten black and blue from top to bottom. We have men who tried to jump for freedom.

They break their legs on the ground. They are captured. Then they are beaten so badly that their pelvises are broken. Their arms are broken. Then they are thrown somewhere. This is where our team comes in, the other partners with whom I work in the field. We help them to be hospitalized, to recover, and then to be repatriated.

I had a victim, she was used in particular to develop AI technologies. To keep her working, as a control, they would bring people into her room and even beat them to death to keep her working. She would wake up one morning and just say, “I don't want to do this. You have to let me go.” And it brings someone onto his team and they beat him to death and say, it's your fault. Now keep working 16 hour days or it will happen to the next person.

And it became his duty to keep them alive.

I think you were saying in a previous conversation that a guy, after being hanged, chained with handcuffs, lost the use of both his arms.

He was just a young man in his twenties who thought he was coming to work in a call center and found himself hanging in a dark room. And when he was finally cut off, he couldn't feel his arms. The family paid, I think, US$7,000 to have him cut off that roof.

We rushed him to the hospital. They referred him to a specialist. Unfortunately, he had been there too long for him to ever recover. He is completely paralyzed from the shoulders down. It was terribly sad.

What is the situation now? And how is it evolving? Looking forward?

I think the system that is at play along this Thai-Myanmar border region and the wider Mekong region boggles our imagination. We consider this to be one of the largest events of human trafficking in history, with more than 400,000 people displaced from over 60 countries to this region to be forced to commit scams.

What advice would you give to victims of trafficking in Myanmar, which is completely engulfed in civil war?

I speak to victims daily inside the center. I spoke to them and gave them hope. I stopped them from jumping off buildings, killing themselves, swallowing razor blades, and basically talking them off the ledge.

When they sit there, they really only have one choice. And it's a life or death choice. And that’s what I want your readers to understand.

It's not that they could just stop working. They stop working, they die. They are in fact murdered or tortured as badly as they wish they were. Their only choice is to continue working. They show up for work and continue to work. It keeps them alive.

Only if they manage to raise enough money to pay the ransom can they be released. These are the options. They have to show up and go to work to stay alive and beg their families to find a way to pay their captors to let them go.–ucanews.com