Skip to comments.

Posted on 09/08/2001 2:18:40 PM PDT by Clive

It is the dark underbelly of globalisation, a trade in human misery and despair that has gone largely unnoticed. Beginning a major Herald series, Mark Riley reports on 21st century slavery.

Nearly 150 years since slavery was officially abolished, about 27 million people around the world remain physically or economically shackled - the highest number ever, and it is growing.

Yet world leaders have been either unable or unwilling to focus on the issue, leaving aid agencies and advocacy groups fighting a losing battle against what many consider to be the greatest threat to future international liberty.

"Recognition of the problem by governments and by the people is our single greatest challenge," the head of UNICEF, Ms Carol Bellamy, said in an interview with the Herald.

"We as a society have all wanted to look away - or not look at all."

While the world turns its head, human lives are routinely being bought and sold for less than the price of a pair of shoes.

It is a trade that prospers with the help of corrupt officials and the unofficial sanction of governments which consider it too difficult, too expensive or too dangerous to stop.

The frantic pursuit of a rusting "slave ship" along the coast of West Africa several weeks ago captured the world's attention briefly.

The 200 child slaves rumoured to be on board turned out to just a handful, but the voyage of this small vessel shed a rare light on a much larger problem.

Between 1.5 million and 2 million children are bought and sold every year into lives of sexual and physical exploitation. Tens of millions more are held in bonded labour, working long hours as domestic servants, farm workers and in factories to repay family debts.

"Whether it is Bangladeshi toddlers trafficked into the United Arab Emirates or Chinese children smuggled into Los Angeles by snakehead criminal gangs, there is a lucrative trade in human beings," a spokesman for the American Anti-Slavery Group, Mr Jesse Sage, said recently. "Our global economy creates demand for cheap goods and there is no cheaper labour than slave labour."

The United Nations says that trafficking people across borders is now the fastest growing arm of international organised crime, and worth up to $18 billion a year. It is the bleak by-product of a modern world of porous borders, inadequate laws and an insatiable demand for cheap, menial and degrading labour.

The traffickers are preying mostly on women and children, the most vulnerable victims of economic despair, luring them with promises of jobs and education and then selling them into lives of degradation and servitude as prostitutes or domestic servants.

"This is a truly global problem," says a report on forced labour issued last week by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). "Most countries of the world are 'sending countries', 'transit countries' or 'receiving countries', or a combination of all these." Governments, the United Nations and human rights groups are accused of not doing enough, but the leaders of efforts against slavery say the greatest problem is a lack of public awareness.

Mr Charles Jacobs, co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which concentrates on Sudan and Mauritania, says the mainstream human rights movement deserves much of the blame.

"Amnesty International talks about prisoners of conscience," he said. "Well, slaves are prisoners of commerce. And to me there is an intellectually fascinating question as to why slavery has become the step-child of the human rights movement."

He says human rights advocates are mostly "well-intentioned white people" who get enraged when they see evil done by fellow whites, but "choke when they see non-whites do the same things because they don't want to be seen as hypocrites, or as being insensitive to other races and religions."

Others see the absence of suitable laws and effective policing as the greatest failure in the international response.

Few of the kingpins of human trafficking rings are ever brought to justice, and on the rare occasions they are, the penalties are absurdly inadequate.

"Trafficking in human beings is a moral outrage, yet criminal penalties for engaging in it are often less stringent than trafficking in drugs," the ILO report says.

Ms Bellamy said she has seen encouraging signals over the past two years that governments were beginning to accept responsibility for the problem.

"But there is no question that most countries still need national criminal legislation that actually defines acts of trafficking and provides the grounds for prosecution as well as harsh penalties."

Ms Bellamy concedes that one of her challenges is to negotiate the complex politics of the UN to get things done.

The UN has many critics who believe that it is more interested in politics than human rights.

Mr Jacobs said that the recent move to vote the United States off the UN Human Rights Commission proved the dominance of politics, effectively leaving "the thugs in charge".

"Now, for there to be a report on Sudan, the Sudanese have to sign off on it first - it is outrageous," he said.

Although no precise figures can be placed on the global slave trade because of its clandestine nature, international authorities agree that the dimension of the problem is staggering - and getting worse.

As many as 10 million children are believed to be working in bondage in India, including about 300,000 in rug factories.

About 50,000 girls and boys aged between 10 and 14 have been taken from the streets of Nepal to work as prostitutes in Mumbai.

In Pakistan, about 7.5 million of the country's estimated 20 million bonded labourers are said to be children and in Bangladesh more than 500,000 children are enslaved in factories and in the fields.

Thousands of children smuggled from countries such as Benin, Mali and Burkina Faso are sold to the owners of coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations in better-off countries.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 children are enslaved on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast, helping to make the ingredients for half the world's chocolate. As well, thousands of women have been trafficked by organised crime groups from the former Soviet Union to the streets of central and western Europe to be forced into work as prostitutes.

Even larger numbers of men have been caught up in a lesser-known trade to man sweatshops and work on farms.

The ILO report says that 80 per cent of migrants trafficked into Ukraine are male, most aged between 20 and 40. In Poland, it is 90 per cent, and the great majority are in their 20s.

Organisations such as UNICEF are co-ordinating small local programs that are slowly chipping away at the problem.

Outreach workers look for girls from poor families in Thailand and Burma who are at risk of ending up in the sex trade and redirect them into jobs offered by hotel chains.

Former sex workers act as counsellors on the Thai-Laos border, talking to women headed for the same fate and opening their eyes to the horrors ahead.

In Benin, UNICEF is using women elders as watchdogs to identify traffickers when they come into the villages and to talk to families about what will really happen to their children.

UNICEF estimates that this program has saved between 3,000 and 4,000 children from slavery.

Advocates are split on the issue of buying back slaves from their masters.

Some say that it is the only practical way of securing freedom; others believe that it is the equivalent of paying ransoms to hostage takers and will only encourage the owners to take more slaves.

The American Anti-Slavery Group and the Zurich-based group Christian Solidarity International have spent more than $170,000 buying back 35,000 slaves in Sudan and Mauritania.

"What's the alternative?" Mr Jacobs says. "What the others are effectively saying is we should leave these people in the hands of monsters until the war is won. Isn't that what we said to the Jews of Europe?"

UNICEF is against buying back slaves, but has supported the Indian Government in a scheme to free children from bonded labour by offering low-cost loans to pay off their debts.

Ms Bellamy says the organisation would like to see other governments take the lead of a few in South America which are granting scholarships to families to keep their children in schools and away from the clutches of the traders. "Education is the answer," she says.

It is not just the education of children that is needed, but the schooling of governments and the general public on the extent of the problem and the risks that it presents.

"It is growing and it is robbing our kids of a future," Ms Bellamy says.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.