Slave Trade Endures In the 21st Century

Sunday, July 2, 2000
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/07/02/ED96982.DTL


MOST AMERICANS have no idea that slavery still exists and sends workers and women into bondage. Yet just last week, the United Nations reported that the traffic in people, now the fastest-growing business of organized crime, is only exceeded by the smuggling of drugs and weapons. Pino Arlacchi, director general of the U.N. Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention, estimates that some 200 million people may now be in the hands of traffickers.

How people are attracted, recruited and exploited is not a mystery. The global economy has lifted many of the world's workers into the middle class. But it has also widened the gulf between the rich and the poor, particularly in Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Southeast Asia and India. As local economies race to join the global economy, industrial development draws rural peasants into pollution-choked cities.

Regions that suffer flooding or desertification -- often the result of giant hydroelectric projects, the destruction of forests and natural disasters -- create desperate migrants willing go anywhere to survive. With the collapse of communism, the transition to market economies has turned millions into casualties of rapid economic change.

What traffickers offer is the promise of salvation. But those who seek a better life have no idea they will end up as virtual slaves -- if, that is, they survive the passage. The recent deaths of 58 Chinese migrants trying to reach Britain is just the latest example of the many people who have died in their attemqà°to escape grinding poverty.

Make no mistake; this is real slavery. When ships filled with human cargo arrive in the United States, people are sold into sweatshop labor until they are able to repay the debt -- sometimes as high as $20,000 -- they owe for transportation. Meanwhile, they are crammed into company-owned housing and, like sharecroppers in the post-slavery American South, forever in debt to their owners for everything they need. As illegal immigrants, moreover, they have no rights and rarely risk deportation by contacting local officials.

The traffic in women and girls, also fueled by the poverty and despair of the dispossessed, often involves prostitution. Traffickers prey upon starving families, particularly in Asia, who are unable to feed or provide a dowry for a daughter. According to a recent CIA report, they buy a female child from unwitting families -- for less than the price of a toaster -- by promising to educate the child in a distant city. Like workers, the girls are held captive, permanently in debt to their owners. Even when a girl manages to escape, she cannot return to her village and dishonor her family. By then, her best chance is to sell herself as a prostitute.

Within the last decade, more than 30 million women and children have been sold within and from Southeast Asia for sweatshop labor or sexual purposes. In Nepal, a land devastated by ecological and economic catastrophe, thousand of girls have been kidnapped and sold to brothels in India.

Many traffickers also target young women from Russia and Eastern Europe who are lured by promises of marriage or a job in a Western city. In Ukraine and Russia, for example, pimps prey upon teenagers who are released from orphanages at age 16. Selma Gasi, an activist in Bosnia, describes how pimps scour war-devastated villages, pretending to look for maids or baby sitters. Yasmina Dimiskovska of the Union of Women in Macedonia confirms that traffickers routinely bring Russian and Ukranian women through her country on their way to Italy. When they arrive, traffickers seize their pass ports, sell them to brothels and threaten them with violence. Without money, official identity papers, knowledge of the language or the region, the young women are trapped. Without shelters, they have no place to go. And if they do escape, they are shipped home, where they often face retribution from the men who sent them abroad.

Two years ago, Attorney General Janet Reno created an interagency task force that documented the widespread traffic of women to the United States. In April, a CIA report verified that as many as 50,000 women and children from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are brought to the United States every year under false pretenses.

International awareness also grows. In early June, at the Beijing Plus Five meetings at the United Nations, which assessed the status of women and girls around the globe, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called trafficking, ``A worldwide plague.'' Hillary Clinton described how the spread of AIDS is creating a generation of orphans, who are becoming easy targets for those who traffic in children. Just a few weeks ago, the British Home Office admitted for the first time that hundreds of women from the former Yugoslavia have been sold into sexual slavery after answering phony job advertisements.

Closer to home, Bay Area residents recently witnessed a classic case of sexual slavery. Lakireddi Bali Reddy, 62, and his son, Vijay Reddy, owners of the Berkeley restaurant Pasand and a small empire of 1,000 rental units, had been allegedly smuggling young women from India. Only when one of the young women died from carbon dioxide poisoning in November 1999 -- the result of a faulty heater -- did federal officials suspect that Reddy had been trafficking in women.

Although the new slavery evokes universal condemnation, the tangle of current international and domestic laws and overlapping jurisdictions makes it difficult to prosecute slave-runners, even when they are identified. Most traffickers receive light sentences. A federal law that forbids any ``sale into involuntary servitude'' carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Yet last year, after 70 Thai laborers were held against their will -- and forced to work 20-hour shifts in a sweatshop -- seven defendants received sentences of four to seven years. One spent only seven months in prison.

That slavery still exists in the 21st century is an international disgrace. True, the problems that give rise to the new slavery are global. But those who would run for president have a rare opportunity to prove their political leadership by focusing global attention on what the U.N. report calls ``the biggest human rights violation in the world.''

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle Page 8