Global Plan Urged Against 'Slave Trade'

Published in The Foreign Post

MANILA – The United States has called for a global plan of action to combat the multi billion-dollar slave trade of women and children for the sex industry or bonded labor, which officials say snares at least one million victims every year.

“Trafficking in human beings is an urgent, increasing and devastating problem, which we must recognize clearly and address firmly,” US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in a satellite television address to a regional meeting in Manila.

“After drugs and guns,” human trafficking is now the “third largest source of profits for organized crime,” US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Ralph Boyce told the conference, jointly organized by the US and Philippine governments.

Women and minors are moved across international borders through force, fraud, deception or coercion for purposes of forced labor including prostitution, domestic servitude, bonded sweatshop labor or other debt bondage, organizers.

“Close to a quarter of a million” people in Southeast Asia are “bought and sold” like slaves every year for about 6,000 to 10,000 dollars each, said Anita Botti, principal deputy director of US President Bill Clinton’s inter-agency council on women. Between 150,000 and 200,000 more are trafficked from the countries that made up the former Soviet Union with victims selling for between US$15,000 and 30,000 dollars each, and the problem is also serious in South Asia and Latin America, Botti said.

The US government estimates that 50,000 victims from the former Soviet states, Southeast Asia and Latin America entered the United States every year.

Prominent cases there have involved Mexican immigrants who were brought to New York and enslaved, beaten and forced to peddle trinkets, captive Thai women workers forced to work in the garment trade in California, Latvians forced into prostitution in Chicago, and Asian children brought into Miami by way of Europe by Japanese or Chinese gangs.

The most conservative global estimates puts the annual turnover at least US$6 billion, but Botti said the US estimate of one million victims is 11 very conservative’s and the actual figure may well be double.

Boyce said the crime is spreading very quickly because “it requires relatively little capital investment and the risks of prosecution and punishment are still fairly low.

Botti said the Asian economic crisis, the breakup of the former Soviet Union which opened borders but also brought along economic hardship, and increased inter-Asian migration are the other factors that boosted illegal human traffic.

“Trafficking is a very difficult crime to track. It camouflages itself within the context of increased migration; it evades complex immigration rules, cleverly taking advantage of its victims’ personal vulnerabilities,” said Philippine Foreign Secretary Domingo Siazon.

By Cecil Morella