Myanmar bans book on modern slave trade in which Girls from Africa and Asia are victims

The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center is reporting that Myanmar has outlawed the book about The Kafala System which documents the trafficking of African workers into cyber-scam compounds in the Middle-East.

The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center said it has received reports that The Kafala System book has been banned in Myanmar, formerly Burma.

“The book examines the sponsorship-based labor regime that governs migrant workers across the Gulf states, Jordan, and Lebanon, and extends that analysis to the forced-labor conditions inside compounds concentrated in Myawaddy, on the border with Thailand, and in Shan State along the Chinese frontier,” a statement from the center claims.

The publication argues that both systems, distinct as they are in geography and legal form, share a common root …

… They are migrant workers stripped of the ability to leave an employer, control their movement, or seek help, with devastating consequences for people who often travelled abroad in search of nothing more than an honest wage.

The reported ban fits a documented pattern.

Independent researchers have found that publicity and international pressure have repeatedly preceded the relocation, rather than the closure, of scam operations in the region, and Myanmar’s authorities, who maintain tight control over information relating to the compounds, have consistently resisted external scrutiny even as the industry continues to expand.

The book’s examination of Myanmar addresses one of the gravest ongoing forced-labor crises in the world.

The compounds hold thousands of trafficked workers compelled to run online fraud operations under threat of violence.

Victims recovered from them have included nationals of Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and other African states, alongside workers from the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia, many recruited with the promise of legitimate employment before being trafficked across the border and held against their will.

Survivors have described beatings, electric shocks, and workers suspended by their wrists for failing to meet fraud quotas.

The book draws a direct line from the legal architecture of Kafala, which ties a worker’s legal status to a single employer, to the even more extreme, extralegal captivity of the scam compounds, arguing that both function by removing a worker’s power to leave.

The Center regards the ban as beside the central point.

“The purpose of the book is to document what has happened to people who left home in search of work and found captivity instead, and to draw the connection between a legal system that ties workers to employers and an illegal one that ties them to compounds by force,” says the center.

According to publishers, suppressing that account does not alter the testimony it contains or the urgency of the response it calls for.

Saad Kassis-Mohamed, Chairman of the Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center, said their reporting on the treatment of African migrants in Myanmar has led to the book being suppressed.

“That only confirms how urgently this account needed to be told. We wrote it because the workers trafficked into Myanmar’s scam compounds and the workers bound to a single employer under Kafala are, in the end, victims of the same principle: that a person’s right to leave can be taken from them for someone else’s profit.”

“A book can be banned. What survivors of these compounds experienced cannot be undone by banning the account of it. Our responsibility is to keep telling their story until the people with the power to stop this do so.”

Marcine Graham, the Executive Director, Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center calls on Myanmar’s authorities to permit independent investigation of the scam compounds and to cooperate fully with international efforts to identify, rescue, and repatriate trafficked workers, regardless of their nationality.

Graham further calls on the governments of African states and the Philippines with citizens known to be held in these compounds to expand consular support and safe-return pathways for survivors, and on Gulf states, Jordan, and Lebanon to accelerate reform of the Kafala system so that migrant workers’ legal status no longer depends on the goodwill of a single employer.

The Kafala System book is available through Hugendubel and other booksellers.

The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center is an independent, non-partisan research and advocacy organization based in Cape Town and supported by the WeCare Foundation.