Bully for Those Combating Worldwide Slave Trade
[Note: John Miller is the immediate past chairman of the board of directors at Discovery Institute. He left the Institute to take his position mentioned below.]
From the In the Northwest column
On a trip to Europe in more innocent times, four Seattle buddies walked wide-eyed through Amsterdam’s red light district. We made out the shapes of ladies of the night in dimly lighted rooms, and bent over laughing when one of us rebuffed a drug dealer’s offer of contraband with schoolboy politeness:
“No thank you, we already have some.”
The district remains a tourist draw — I forget whether Rick Steves’ guidebook gives it one star or two — but a conversation with Secretary of State Colin Powell’s senior adviser on international slavery puts the red lights in a much dimmer light.
Visiting the Netherlands, former Rep. John Miller of Seattle sat down with a young Czech woman named Sacha who was lured to Amsterdam with the promise of a job but was forced into prostitution.
“The traffickers made it clear: ‘Do this or your 2-year-old daughter back in the Czech Republic is dead,’ ” Miller related. “Other girls were regularly beaten.
“If you walk through the red light district, watch for young toughs gathered together on bridges. They are the ‘owners.’ Many of the young women — from Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America — are slaves.”
How many? Eighty percent of the women, representatives of private relief organizations told Miller. A senior police official in Amsterdam pegged the percentage of coerced at 40 percent.
The bloodiest conflict of American history, with more than 600,000 deaths, was fought over slavery. A great president, Abraham Lincoln, pronounced its abolition in a great document, the Emancipation Proclamation.
“If you talk to a typical American, even in the news media, the response you hear is ‘Slavery? I thought we got rid of that in the Civil War,’ ” said Miller. “What we don’t see is what a dangerous world it is out there.”
The State Department’s recent Trafficking in Persons Report estimated that 800,000 to 900,000 people annually are trafficked worldwide for purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor.
A surprising 18,000 to 20,000 of those victims are trafficked into the United States.
One sex-slave ring in the Seattle area was broken up a year ago. Many Chinese illegals trafficked through Vancouver, B.C., are bound for New York-area sweatshops to “work off” the tariff paid to people smuggling rings. About 200 Vietnamese were trafficked last year to factories in American Samoa.
“It is the top human rights issue of this new century,” Miller maintains.
The problem is one shared by the developed world, the developing world and the Third World.
On a trip to Thailand, Miller met a 14-year-old girl named Lord in a government shelter. She was taken by traffickers from Laos and put to work 14 hours a day at an embroidery factory in Bangkok.
The young girl was repeatedly beaten. The factory owner’s son shot a BB into her cheek at one point and doused her with chemicals when the spirit of rebellion persisted.
At a Catholic-run shelter in India, Miller spoke with a young girl named Sapna. She was taken to Bombay at age 11 and deposited in a brothel. She was raped while, in another room, her stepmother and uncle negotiated a sale price. It came to $300.
The two appalling stories did see justice done. The factory owner in Bangkok is now in jail. The stepmother of the young girl in India was prosecuted.
Human trafficking is one of the few spots where the gridlock of American politics has recently been broken.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was masterminded by a conservative Republican, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, and a liberal Democrat, the late Sen. Paul Wellstone from Minnesota.
It set up the State Department bureau headed by Miller, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. A new law, signed this year, makes it a crime for any person to enter the United States — or travel abroad — for the purpose of sex tourism involving children.
Still, the United States’ chief weapon against human trafficking remains the bully pulpit.
The Bush administration has been fairly aggressive. In its report in June, 15 countries were listed as Tier 3 offenders — places where slavery is so widespread as to invite withholding of non-humanitarian, non-trade-related U.S. assistance.
The list included a pair of European countries, Greece and Bosnia-Herzegovina; odious tyrannies such as Myanmar (the former Burma) and Sudan; a key U.S. ally, Turkey; and the former Soviet republics of Kazakstan and Uzbekistan, whose dictators are scrambling for U.S. aid and investment dollars.
“The report has made me a believer in the threat of sanctions,” Miller said.
About two-thirds of the countries took action (or made the appearance of action) immediately. Turkey enacted tougher penalties and procedures for victim treatment. Ukraine (a Tier 2 listee) created special police units. The foreign minister of Uzbekistan gave a televised speech to the nation.
Nigeria (Tier 2) has just rescued 74 child workers — as young as age 4 — who were kidnapped from their native Benin and forced to work in granite pits. Thirteen children in the group had reportedly died.
Human trafficking remains huge — about 6,000 children remain at work in Nigeria’s granite pits.
While Miller’s office is trying to combat sex tourism worldwide, the cause has recently found an influential champion.
TV networks cut away from President Bush’s recent United Nations speech after his remarks on Iraq. Later in the address, however, Bush took out after what he called “the commerce in human life” and in particular the global sex trade.
“There’s a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable,” the president said.
Critics have charged Bush with a “bullying” foreign policy. If he takes tough action against human trafficking and governments that countenance it, however, we should all say, “Bully, bully!”
P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com