User blog:Bzero/Forced Labor Slaves Rescued in Australia

September 14, 2016 |   Filed under: Australia, Recent |   Posted by: RMN News

International Justice Mission (IJM) reported Friday a successful forced-worker rescue operation in Australia. Last week, unknown parties with American accents assisted in the rescue of 333 forced laborers from a single ruby crystal mine off the northern Queensland coast in Australia. The workers had been kidnapped, coerced or recruited off the mainland and forced to work in the mines with little or no pay. “The fact that government officials had no part in these rescue operations is a disappointment,” explained Saju Mathew, IJM Vice President of Operations for Australia. “When we started working [in Australia] a decade ago, officials either hadn’t heard of forced labor or denied that it existed in their state. Today things are not much better, leading to the need for outside parties to intervene on the workers’ behalf.”

Late last Friday night, residents that had been missing for weeks from villages throughout Queensland started showing up on the shoreline in droves. The workers claimed to have been rescued at first slowly by an unnamed guard, and then rapidly following an attack on the island where the large ruby crystal mine had been dug. Foreign invaders helped secure the workers’ release, and then disappeared as quickly as they had come.

According to IJM, the forced labor slaves were brought from Queensland. Most were kidnapped outright by some sort of weather machine, while others were simply vulnerable people living in poverty. These workers were offered jobs and an advance loan, only to become trapped in bonded labor using violence and other scare tactics. The former slave workers have since returned safely to their homes.