Alex Au (Yawningbread) takes up the issue of human trafficking, in particular those by so-called “marriage brokers” and how the local press and the Singapore government may be complicit in this.
I hope the Vietnamese police track down the identities of the Singaporean counterparts to the so-called marriage brokers, and when these Singaporeans step into Vietnam again, they are arrested and thrown into a rat-hole of a Vietnamese prison. It shouldn’t be hard to trace them; just look up the old editions of the Sunday Times whose stories gave them free publicity. In fact, while they’re at it, the Vietnamese might want to arrest the Sunday Times writers and editors responsible for promoting the said business.
All of them conspired to present a purchase of females after (a) a flesh parade in the broker’s shop and (b) a cursory date with an interpreter interposed between the couple, as some kind of romance. A quickly-organised wedding follows and then the woman is brought to Singapore as a life-long serf, either to be a baby factory, or a handmaiden to aged parents, or an assistant in some hawker stall. More likely, all three.
The baby factory part is key to the scheme. The Singapore government probably likes the idea of more babies being produced; the Sunday Times probably thinks it has a “nation-building” duty to talk it up in the hope that more unmarried male Singaporeans would follow the example.
Nobody stops to think about the moral depravity and criminality of the whole thing.
Read the rest of the article on Yawning Bread.
Picture from Foreign Policy Blog.
