Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 12, 1993 TAG: 9309120295
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN BARBOUR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This is almost the 21st century and yet uncounted millions of the world's people live in some form of slavery.
From Bangkok to New York, from Brazil to Kuwait, from Africa to Europe.
They are mostly women and children who have been sold into servitude, prisoners of debt, doomed to lifetimes of bondage.
Some are among the 2 million illegal aliens in the United States, where at least 100,000 illegals slip across the borders each year.
Authorities expect an estimated 13,000 Chinese to attempt illegal entry into the United States by the end of the year. Of those who succeed, many will spend the rest of their lives fruitlessly trying to pay off the price of transportation and keep.
White slavery is rampant.
Women from the former Soviet bloc are lured to Western Europe by the thousands with promises of jobs and then are forcibly kept in brothels and red light districts in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy and Greece.
One sex shop window in Antwerp advertises, "We have new girls every week."
Even Great Britain has its share of the trade in bondage. A new report says some 4,500 domestics, mostly women from as far away as the Philippines, are held in debt bondage by employers who often beat them, lock them up, even rape them, while paying them $190 a month.
"Princesses, diplomats, doctors of medicine and other normally respectable people keep bonded, indentured domestics in virtual slavery, and all too often their misdeeds go unchecked," said a recent report by Anti-Slavery International.
In some ways, the new slavery is even more brutal than the old.
Slavery predates the Babylonian Empire of the 18th century B.C., but even under the Babylonian King Hammurabi, who forged a famous code of laws, slaves had rights and could even buy their freedom. The ancient Hebrews granted freedom for any Hebraic slave after six years.
The Romans routinely freed their slaves, who frequently then tutored Roman children in algebra, geometry and poetry. Terence, one of Rome's most famous comic playwrights, was a slave who was educated by his master then freed. Also, the offspring of a slave woman and her Roman master was born free.
Today's slaves pass their bondage on to their children who are born to work off the debts of their parents.
The new slavery is contrary to the laws of almost all countries and to international law.
That's the view of human rights workers who have traveled all over the world interviewing slaves who have managed to escape, some hiding out in foreign embassies to avoid more physical and sexual abuse.
Following a recent Congressional Human Rights Caucus forum, Rep. Joseph Kennedy, D-Mass., said, "We heard testimony from one witness of villages in India that lost literally 25,000 children to the slave trade which took these youngsters as maids to places like Kuwait and other Persian Gulf nations. . . . The No. 1 provider of foreign exchange in some countries is illegal and illicit prostitution that uses minors."
The slave trade is such an economic force that authorities wink at the perpetrators. In Thailand, for example, the nation depends so much on its sex industry, that while it is breaking up illegal brothels and arresting the women and children who work there, they rarely arrest the brothel owners or the network of pimps, agents and smugglers that keep the industry going. Nor the local police who aid and abet their activities.
There are now an estimated 2 million prostitutes in Thailand, which imports teen-age women from China and Burma. But Thailand is also an exporter. Thai prostitutes are found in most major cities from Baghdad to Zurich.
Chinese women are smuggled at night from the south Thai coast into Malaysia where they are said to be in great demand. A Chinese girl, called a "Green Dragon," can be bought for anything from $2,000 to $4,000. Once at work, she is called a "Golden Dragon." Sometimes men use the women as stakes in gambling.
The Thai Foreign Ministry estimates that some 70,000 Thai women work in Japan's thriving flesh trade, some willingly, since the rewards are so lucrative.
Dorothy Thomas, director of the Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch, says the Thai sex industry lures some 10,000 Burmese girls a month, many recruited in remote villages with promises of jobs as domestics or waitresses.
"And when I say girls, I mean girls," Thomas says. "The average age of the women we interviewed was 16. One was 12 years old."
"The women and girls never see any money," Thomas says. "They keep only the tips they get from their clients and the rest of the money they are told is going against their debt.
"They serve anywhere between seven and 15 clients a day. They work 12 to 18 hours a day except when they are menstruating.
"And between 50 percent and 70 percent of the girls we interviewed were HIV positive. Ultimately they die."
Anti-Slavery International of London documents hundreds of cases where men, women and children of South America are lured thousands of miles from home with promises of work and good wages, only to work under the overseer's gun. The latest estimate puts some 10,000 in Brazil alone.
Hired gunmen keep the slaves in tow. Murder is frequent. Sometimes the slave workers are exterminated to avoid paying them altogether.
In 1991, Brazilian authorities heard of one case where workers, having completed the nut harvest, were led to a ranch house, paid, and then gunned down. "This kind of ambush happened three or four times," says Alison Sutton in Anti-Slavery's "Reporter."
Human rights organizations and nongovernmental agencies try to keep track of the numbers, but they can only tally those that surface.
The instrument of servitude is usually money, then bondage, otherwise intimidation and force.
There are several forces of poverty and culture that build the market:
There is an almost insatiable appetite for domestic help in the Middle East and among the nabobs of Asia. Once in that employ, the domestics soon learn that they have no rights in their new resident country, nor minimum wages nor the right to negotiate their own contracts. Rape and beatings are routine.
The sex trade is blurred. Some women know full well what the future holds and are willing to barter their bodies for the promise of a better future. But many do not. The ratio of those willing to those unwilling are hidden by the illegal nature of the trade itself.
Nations like Kuwait, India, Pakistan and others agree to United Nations mandates and the anti-slavery conventions dating to the mid-1950s, but there is little enforcement of the laws.
The lack of enforcement leads to the capricious use of children. Mideastern countries import young boys as camel jockeys because they are lightweight and can be driven almost as hard as the camels. Other youngsters are an important source of cheap labor to the carpet industries of Nepal, Morocco, India and Pakistan, where children as young as 4 work the looms.
In Latin America, whole families (children as soon as they are strong enough to wield a knife) cut acacia for the tanning industry, tap rubber trees, cut sugar cane. They share shelter with pigs and other farm animals.
In Pakistan, Bengali women are sometimes sold into marriage and then prostituted by their husbands even though that is against both national and Islamic law.
In the Dominican Republic, some 500,000 Haitians live illegally, some under forced labor. One 24-year-old described his arrival: "The recruiter sold me. He sold me to a boss with a gun. I saw him give the recruiter money." Then they were led to a corral surrounded by armed guards. They slept on the ground.
Anne Marie Sharman, spokeswoman for Anti-Slavery International, points out that child labor is almost necessary in Third World countries, but there is a difference between regulated work and bondage.
"In many cases children are farmed out as apprentices, but are really bonded," she says.
Human rights workers interviewed thousands of Filipino, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi women in prisons, in asylum in embassies, in various states of desperate rescue from abuse.
"In Kuwait," says Thomas of Human Rights Watch, "it is very difficult to estimate numbers in bondage because the government has failed largely to look at this practice in any way and to provide the women and girls any protection under the law."
Kuwait estimates it has some 150,000 to 200,000 foreign laborers in a country of 2 million. Real numbers are likely higher. Oil-rich Kuwait is a large market for immigrant labor, because its citizens, pampered with social and economic privileges, shun menial labor.
While it provides legal protection for most immigrant laborers, domestic help is excluded.
That sets the stage for widespread abuse.
"You can't say that every domestic worker in the country is being abused," Thomas says. "But there is a very serious problem of women workers being sold or traded into a domestic service situation. . . . The women are lured into it by economic desperation."
During the Iraqi invasion, more than 2,000 maids took advantage of the civil chaos to flee their so-called employers and take refuge in their respective embassies, where human rights workers interviewed them. They still bore the physical scars of their employment.
Thomas describes what she calls "horrendous" working conditions, "18-hour days, seven-day weeks, no relief, no visiting church, no communicating with friends. Nothing.
"The girls report that they get into these situations and the employers don't pay them. They say, `Well you owe us for your transport, you owe us for your food, you owe us for your board. Consequently, we're not going to pay you.' "
This is all clearly prohibited by international slavery conventions, now more than 35 years old.
"They take the girls' passports , which violates both international law and Kuwaiti law," Thomas says. "However, under Kuwaiti law, if you don't have your passport, you can be arrested. So, not only is the girl not getting paid, she cannot get out."
by CNB