Posted on 09/10/2001 6:40:23 PM PDT by sickandtired
Indian Express Expressindia Financial Express Screen Web NEWS Top Stories National Network Business International Sports Editorials & Analysis Op-Ed Letters to the Editor Columnists GROUP SITES Expressindia The Financial Express Screen Latest News Kashmir Live Loksatta Express Computer COMMUNITY Instant Messenger SUBSCRIPTIONS Express North American Edition INTERNATIONAL Tuesday, September 11, 2001 Sex slavery alive and kicking in the Holy Land MEGAN GOLDIN NEVE TIRZA PRISON, ISRAEL, SEPTEMBER 10: CHRISTINA, an 18-year-old student from Moldova, has been bought and sold so many times she has lost count. Christina, who declined to give her real name, studied classics and anthropology and played basketball before she was lured from a rural town in one of Europe’s poorest countries to sex slavery in Israel. She is not alone. Hundreds of thousands of ‘‘Christinas’’ have been bought like merchandise, beaten, raped and chained in Western brothels. Christina received top marks in her anthropology studies but couldn’t scrape together enough money to pay for photocopies, let alone buy textbooks. Her dire situation made her fair game for women hired by criminal gangs to lure young, naive girls from Moldova and other financially-strapped Eastern European countries into prostitution with promises of large sums of money. ‘‘I never thought I would actually have to do it,’’ Christina said in bewilderment. ‘‘I thought once I arrived I would find a way to escape and find other work,’’ Christina was flown to Egypt where along with 20 other Moldovan and Russian women aged between about 18 to 24, she was escorted across the Sinai desert into southern Israel by a bedouin smuggler. They walked over dunes, eventually crawling under a barbed-wire border fence at night. Rolls of money changed hands between the bedouin and the Russian-speaking men who bought the women. Christina doesn’t know how much they paid, but the market price for a woman like her in Israel is around $8,000. Frightened, an illegal alien, unfamiliar with Hebrew or Israeli geography, she had no hope of escaping. Instead she was taken to a brothel in north Israel where she was forced to have sex with 15 men every day, raped, beaten and threatened with death if she ran away. Eventually she did and is now a witness in a court case against the pimp who bought and mistreated her under a new Israeli law that makes human trafficking punishable by up to 16 years in prison. ‘‘It’s very easy. You just put them on a planes, walk them through the desert and you have slaves,’’ said lawyer Nomi Levenkron, who represents women like Christina who are locked in a special wing of the Neve Tirza prison near Tel Aviv while they wait to testify or to be deported for entering Israel illegally. Sex slavery, or white slavery as it was called in the 19th century, is almost as old as prostitution itself. But it has had a sudden resurgence since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 devastated many eastern European economies. Women who earn around $20 a month in Moldova are promised $1,000 a month abroad to work as prostitutes. It is a tempting offer for young women with bleak futures in their home countries. Sometimes the women don’t know they are being sent to work as prostitutes and are told they will be waitresses or secretaries. Others are simply kidnapped. ‘‘They come from a place with no money, a very poor family in a poor village, looking for a better future,’’ said Levenkron, a legal adviser to the Hotline for Migrant Workers, the only organisation in Israel that helps former sex-slaves. Israel is a popular destination for the human trade. It is not difficult to smuggle and hide Russian-speaking women in a country where almost a million people originate from the former Soviet Union. A recent US State Department report on human trafficking put Israel on a list of countries where the phenomenon is rampant. It has until 2003 to implement ‘‘minimum standards for elimination of trafficking’’ or face stiff sanctions. According to Zahava Gal-On, who heads an Israeli parliamentary committee on trafficking, that means deterring traffickers with hefty prison sentence instead of a few months in jail, the usual punishment handed down by Israeli courts. It also means putting women like Christina in safe houses instead of jail, thereby encouraging them to testify. In the past the victim has been locked up, while the pimp is let off with a small fine or a brief stay in jail although it is the brothel owner who has committed a crime. Like most former sex-slaves, Christina is penniless. Those lucky enough to be paid a paltry sum, usually a few dollars, by their pimps save the money to buy themselves freedom. Often they are sold before they can do so. (Reuters) Write to the Editor Mail this story Print this story Top About Us | Advertise With Us | Feedback © 2001: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world.
Why? It bombed well enough on its own.
This is from the U.S. Department of State web site, you can find it here or if that doesn't work then try http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/global/traffic/crs0510.htm
This is the heading of the document, and a relevant paragraph.
Congressional Research Service Report 98-649 C
Trafficking in Women and Children: The U.S. and International Response
May 10, 2000
Francis T. Miko Specialist in International Relations Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division
With the Assistance of Grace (Jea-Hyun) Park Research Associate, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division
(End of heading, beginning relevant paragraph.)
Middle East. The sexual exploitation of women and children in the Middle East tends to involve the import of women from other regions. The exploitation of Middle Eastern women tends to have less of a commercial dimension.(17)
Women and children, mostly from Asia (Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia), are trafficked as prostitutes or brides to the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates). Women from the former Soviet Republics are sent to Israel. According to the Israel Women's Network, every year several hundred to 2000 women from Russia and the former Soviet Union are brought to Israel by well-organized criminal groups. Israel has no specific law against trafficking and prostitution is not illegal.(18)
Now, this is the US Department of State talking here. This document is dated May 10, 2000. Now I understand that Israel is doing something about this problem. Good. About damn time. However, it does seem like it took international arm twisting to do it, and it appears that Israel was less than eager to do anything about the problem.
If you want, I can go to google and find some stories from the Jerusalem Post about the sex trade in Israel, but I trust that this official document from the Department of State might help to make my point?
Here is an excerpt from the article.
"Particularly troubling has been the growth in recent years of international trafficking. Women are taken across borders - often unaware of the real purpose of their trip - and end up virtual slaves to the pimps who have purchased them. About 1,000 of the 8,000 or 9,000 estimated prostitutes in the center of the country are victims of such trafficking, according to Amnesty International's Israel section director Yael Weisz-Rind, a figure she established from interviews with women awaiting deportation in Neveh Tirtza prison.
While many were recruited in bars and pubs abroad and knew of their fate, about a third did not realize they were being hired to work as prostitutes or were misinformed of the conditions that awaited them, Eilam says. Some are brought with phony immigrant visas. Others come as tourists and stay on illegally, and some are even smuggled over the Egyptian border on camels.
The women have to work for months to pay off their "debts" to traders who buy and sell them for about $10,000 each, Weisz-Rind says. Often the women are beaten or raped by their pimps or the pimps' friends, and their passports are confiscated to ensure they do not flee the country.
They are let out of the brothels in groups for short walks, under guard. An Amnesty report on the situation here, released in May, sparked an international outcry.
It also prompted law-enforcement authorities, who until now have jailed and expelled the women while largely ignoring the role of the traders, to take the matter more seriously, Weisz-Rind says. A move to toughen sentences for trafficking passed a first reading this spring, and a comprehensive law on the issue is in the pipeline at the Justice Ministry, according to Weisz-Rand."
This is the story as reported by the Jerusalem Post. Just thought you might find it interesting. There's lots and lots more out there, just go to google and enter "Israel" and "slavery".
And todays date is? Defense rests your honor...
Anyone who works is a prostitute, in one way or another.
I knew personally of an operation which brought British bar girls to Germany in the 1970's, to service the GI's.
They officially abolished slavery in Saudi Arabia in 1964, I think. I met a girl in Jordan in the 70's, who had just escaped, after 4 years of Saudi (concubinage)?, and slipped across the border to Jordan. She was awaiting the arrival of her parents from the US to bring her home, and check about a local lawyer.
Shame on you for pretending the trade in Israel is any different than in most nations. If you want a better ourlet for all that SHAME you're slinging, go look at Japan which only recently (in the last few years) outlawed child pornography.
The "slave trade" in Israel has ALWAYS been illegal, they have just now started stepping up enforcement and adding harsher criminal penalties.
Israel has murders, rapes, robberies, and even organized crime. All it means is that Israel is like every other nation on the face of the earth.
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