The Innocents for Sale |
humantrafficking.com Every year, a million children are sold or kidnapped and taken to a life of slavery and misery, writes Natasha BitaMUSTAFA and Shabir, aged six and seven, are known as camel kids to the Arab oil sheikhs who patronise the raucous desert camel races. The little boys were taken from their families in Pakistan, smuggled into the United Arab Emirates and forced to work for years as lightweight jockeys. "Children are used as jockeys because they're light, they're controllable, and they shriek to speed up the camels," explains Anti-Slavery International spokeswoman Beth Herzfeld. "They have to be tied on, otherwise they fall off. They're kept in brutal conditions, and they're terrified." Mustafa and Shabir told their rescuers how they lived in an iron lean-to, ate one meal a day, were beaten and forced to train twice daily in the searing desert heat. During one training session, another tiny boy fell from his camel and was trampled to death. A Pakistani charity, the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust International, is still searching for the boys' families. Mustafa and Shabir have long forgotten who their parents are. "They are slaves," despairs Ansar Burney, the charity's founder who brought the boys back to Pakistan last month. "Some of the jockeys are three years old. They are treated worse than animals. They are treated very badly because if they are treated well they gain weight [trainers prefer jockeys weighing 20kg]." Burney's organisation has freed 2000 children from jockey-smuggling rackets in the past four years, yet not all the children make it back alive. Last month, he recovered the battered bodies of two boys killed when they fell off their camels. The charity estimates another 2000 boys remain in jockey camps in the UAE. Some camps contain hundreds of children aged three to 14, kidnapped or bought from impoverished families in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The Centre for Women's and Children's Studies in Dhaka estimates 1683 Bangladeshi boys under 10 were trafficked to the Gulf countries in the 1990s. Smugglers may pay parents as little as $200 for their sons, then sell them to Arabian camel trainers for $10,000 to $40,000. "Some parents are selling their children because they are hungry," Burney tells The Australian. "But sometimes gangsters abduct the children and take them out of the country with fake parents, using fake passports and birth certificates." Prospects for the camel kids brightened this week when the UAE brought in a law to ban the use of jockeys younger than 15 or lighter than 45kg. Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed al-Nahyan -- who happens to be chairman of the Emirates Camel Racing Federation -- has decreed that camel trainers who use younger jockeys risk $10,000 fines and racing bans. There are jail terms for repeat offenders. But Anti-Slavery International has heard it all before, noting that the racing federation technically banned child jockeys 20 years ago. "There has to be close scrutiny that they enforce the law," Herzfeld says. "There should be unannounced inspections to ensure children aren't used in this way." The image of skinny little boys clinging precariously to their camels is one that tugs the heart strings, but it is a mere drop in the ocean of child slavery. The International Labor Organisation estimates that 8.4 million children work as slave labourers, prostitutes or soldiers worldwide. Of these, 1.2 million children are kidnapped, sold or smuggled each year. These child slaves may end up on the other side of the world, working in sweatshops to make cheap clothing, in underground mines to salvage precious stones for jewellery, prostituting themselves to tourists at tropical resorts, picking the cocoa and coffee beans to feed Western cravings, or scrubbing floors as housemaids. The UN children's charity, UNICEF, cites unconfirmed reports that children have been sold for their organs -- a human spare parts business for rich patients desperate for donor kidneys. UNICEF describes people-smuggling as the world's third-largest criminal industry, after drug-trafficking and weapons-smuggling. The ILO estimates that of the 5.7 million children in forced or bonded labour working in factories, farms and houses, 5.5 million are on Australia's doorstep, in the Asia-Pacific region. Of the 1.8 million children entrapped into prostitution and pornography, a quarter live in rich countries. Nearly half the children caught up in smuggling rings originate from Latin America and the Caribbean. The rest are split fairly evenly between the Asia-Pacific, Africa and developing countries in eastern Europe. "There are children who are trafficked from Bangladesh to India to make bangles and beads, and children used in South Asia to make carpets as slaves," says Herzfeld. "Trafficking usually takes place in areas where the economy is very, very poor. A typical method is someone offering a better situation for the children -- an education, or good work. This is deception. The children see no opportunity at home, so they go. But in many cases it's abduction. We know of cases where a child was playing in his neighbourhood and just taken up and trafficked." A preliminary ILO report on child trafficking says children become victims by "force, persuasion, coercion, trickery, the administration of drugs, family and other complicity, or through their own initiative and ignorance about what really awaits them at their destination". UNICEF says parents in Asian countries including India, Pakistan and Thailand sell their daughters into debt bondage as prostitutes, in deals that may be thinly disguised as dowry payments for sham marriages. The girls have to work to pay back the smugglers for the money given to their parents. In Lithuania, according to the UNICEF report Profiting from Abuse, up to half the prostitutes are under-aged and children as young as 11 have been discovered in brothels. Thousands of Nigerian teenagers are smuggled to work as prostitutes in Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands each year. In Africa, armies often recruit boys not only to fight wars, but to sexually service the soldiers. A quarter of Indonesia's 1.3 million domestic workers are aged 10 to 18. In West Africa, children are trafficked to work in mines and on plantations. An investigation by Anti-Slavery International concluded that 2500 children working in West Africa's cocoa industry, which supplies 70 per cent of the world's crop, probably had been trafficked from other parts of Africa. Even children begging, or hawking souvenirs on the streets of Athens or Rome may be the slaves of child-smugglers and their Mafia bosses. Aid workers estimate 2000 Albanian children -- many from the ethnic minority of Roma, or gypsies -- have been trafficked from Albania to Greece. Burney has higher aspirations for his rescued camel kids. "If they are homeless then we will arrange rehabilitation through our trust, and give them food and education," he says. "These are children who we would like to see become educated people, like engineers or doctors. They are so happy when they are rescued. They act like we are their father or mother." Press Back on your browser to Return
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