EDITORIAL

Tackling human trade forcefully

With appropriate fanfare, the United Nations this week launched a global initiative to highlight the horrors of human trafficking and end a vile trade it said had reached epidemic proportions in the last decade. The campaign, grandly titled ''The Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking'', brings together a host of UN agencies, member governments and NGOs, and came as Britain was marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Goals are to raise awareness among potential victims and those who buy services or products resulting from such coercion, and to get governments to toughen legislation and prosecute those responsible.

Spearheaded by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the official launch in London produced some startling facts and figures. Some 2.5 million people throughout the world are, at any given time, the victims of human trafficking, which accounts for more than US$31 billion a year in illicit profits _ half of it in industrialised nations.

Thailand once again found itself on a long list of countries named as both trafficking sources and destinations. This failed to acknowledge our efforts to stamp out the trade and the draconian prison terms our courts have been giving those traffickers police have actually managed to catch and convict. Possibly that was because such arrests have been few in number.

What did come as a surprise in the aftermath of the campaign launch was the apparent naivety of certain members of participating NGOs, who clearly believe human trafficking to be a new phenomenon born out of globalisation and nourished by the growth industry that is the internet. While these might have changed the logistics of human trafficking and broadened the customer base, the scourge itself has been around for centuries. If anything, globalisation and the resulting international pressure has increased awareness, forcing governments to share information and databases, seek to cut supply and demand, tighten border controls, beef up legislation and penalties and warn gullible citizens not to trust strangers.

This evil is neither local nor confined to sexual slavery. Royal Thai consulates throughout the world are accustomed to pleas for assistance from victims who have managed to elude their traffickers, with those in Bahrain and South Africa coming under the most recent pressure. Back home, poor people in the provinces find themselves indebted to ruthless loan sharks. And job descriptions that dishonest and manipulative brokers give for overseas work are not always the same on arrival as they were on departure.

Although women and girls abducted into forced prostitution undergo one of the most horrific of human experiences, their plight is frequently ignored because of the power of the coercive forces behind this trafficking.

Twenty-three years have passed since five girls were burned alive in a brothel fire in Phuket because they were unable to escape from the beds to which they had been shackled. Six years ago, a police raid in northern Bangkok freed 30 women who had been forced into the flesh trade. Their treatment had been so barbaric that one girl was still in the iron shackles which enslaved her. A year ago, police rescued 47 Lao girls from the brothel in Chachoengsao province into which they had been sold. And these cases are thought to represent the tip of the iceberg because all too often there is no proper investigation or prosecution of those responsible, including the authorities who had turned a blind eye, because of the influence of the local mafia.

Our priority must be to eliminate the mindset which gives rise to sexual slavery and tacitly condones it by ignoring it. So long as human traffickers and customers see themselves as being immune from punishment, and there remains the lack of a strong political will or public outcry, this evil will persist.

The campaign launched by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and participating agencies must receive our full support. At the same time, we must put our own house in order.

Bangkok Post

Saturday March 31, 2007