World's newest slave trade -- Ascending Light

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Date Posted: 02:19:49 12/07/04 Tue
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 172.151.244.108
Subject: World's newest slave trade

2 new books detail the sale of women and children into slavery as prostitutes
October 24, 2004

BY MARTA SALIJ
FREE PRESS BOOKS WRITER

"Every 10 minutes, a woman or child is trafficked into the United States for forced labor,'" begins Gilbert King's incendiary book, "Woman, Child for Sale: The New Slave Trade in the 21st Century."

Yes, into the United States. Every 10 minutes.

About 50,000 slaves are brought into the United States each year, the CIA estimated in 1999. Worldwide, about 27 million people are enslaved -- twice the number that were victimized by the African slave trade.

The slaves are usually young women and children. They come from Asia, Africa, Central America -- and in a fourth wave that began about a decade ago -- from the former republics of the Soviet Union. Some are enslaved to work in factories or as domestics.

But a large and growing number are sex slaves, forced to work as prostitutes in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East -- and in the United States.

They are young women trapped in nations devastated by economic collapse or war. Some are orphans. Then a seeming godsend appears: A job in a foreign country as a nanny, maid or waitress. Maybe the job is offered by a neighbor or an administrator at the orphanage. The girls sign up, sure that they can save themselves and their families.

But once they are past their borders, they discover that they have been sold into the sex industry. They are taken to apartments in Germany, Israel and elsewhere. They are raped, beaten, burned, starved. They are locked in cellars or attics and warned that they will be killed if they try to escape.

Then they are turned out to work bars and brothels and roadsides. Some are forced to service UN peacekeeping forces or U.S. contractors in various hotspots. Some are bought and sold yet again.

If they try to go to the police, they are not believed. The police are often their clients or chums of the thugs who hold them.

If they somehow escape, they are chased down and murdered -- sometimes even months after, when they've made it home.

Some die of disease or of abortions or in childbirth. Some, of course, kill themselves.

In this day and age
This is all very hard to believe, I know. We are civilized people. Aren't we? This is the 21st Century. Isn't it?

That is what I believed, until I read King's book and the even more furious work by Canadian journalist Victor Malarek, "The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade."

No other books that I've read in my five years as a critic have demoralized me so much or have given me so little hope for humankind. The victimization is so complete that I despair at what can be done.

But it is precisely books like King's and Malarek's that we civilized and free people must read and act upon because the evil is so great.

Begin with Malarek's book, "The Natashas" because it is more visceral. Malarek concentrates on the trafficking of women from the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. His title comes from what the Israeli johns call the new prostitutes: Natasha the Russian.

What makes Malarek's book a first must-read is the heartbreaking detail he gives. He has traveled throughout the Middle East and Europe, talking to the women, as well as to officials who are trying to stop the traffic -- and sometimes to officials who are not trying.

In a chapter that will turn your stomach, Malarek describes his October 2001 visit to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. He accompanied members of the UN Trafficking in Prostitution Investigation Unit on raids through the U.S.-controlled sector.

Malarek meets a Texas lawman, John Randolph, who works for DynCorp, the U.S. firm that recruits American police officers to work as international cops for the United Nations. Randolph tells Malarek about a raid the week before that rescued seven teenage sex slaves in a nearby town, all of whom told him that Americans had been their customers.

Then Randolph's bosses at DynCorp learn about Malarek and things turn strange. A series of secret UN raids on other bars is suddenly scrapped by the U.S. military commander. Then, a UN internal affairs investigation into the aborted raids goes nowhere. Coincidence? Malarek can find out no more.

Lucrative commodities
Humans are now the third most lucrative commodity traded illegally, after drugs and guns, international law enforcement officials estimate. King's book, "Woman, Child for Sale,"' includes all the statistics and background you could wish to have, including a catalog of what the world has tried, with little success, to do about it.

How does the trade flourish? The basic fuel is the essential wickedness of people to persist in seeing other people as not human.

Sexism and racism factor in, too. Malarek interviews the pimps and customers who argue that men cannot be expected to control their sex drives, so prostitution -- even using slaves -- is a social good. Others argue that if it weren't for the foreign slaves -- who are, by definition, subhuman -- men would brutalize their own women. Better theirs than ours, in other words.

And -- I can barely type this -- some argue that they are helping the slaves by giving them food and shelter they couldn't get at home.

There is plenty of money to be made, so greed is another fuel. And whatever greed cannot sustain, the well-machined brutality of the purveyors can. And who are these purveyors? The Russian mob, the Italian Mafia, Colombian drug cartels, the Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuza -- as well as gangs from the United States, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Serbia, Israel and Albania.

Another fuel is the persistent belief by otherwise enlightened people that prostitution and other sex industries involve consenting adults. This is the fuel that proves most dangerous to the enslaved women.

"To the casual observer," Malarek writes, "they blend in seamlessly with the women who have chosen to exchange money for sex. In their cheap makeup, sleazy outfits and stiletto heels, they walk the same walk and talk the same talk. They smile, they wink, they pose and they strut, but they do it because they know what will happen if they don't."

And now, we civilized and free people have no excuse for not knowing, too.

MARTA SALIJ is the books writer for the Free Press. Contact her at 313-223-4530 or salij@freepress.com.

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