U.S. Faults 4 Allies Over Forced Labor

By JOEL BRINKLEY
Published: June 4, 2005 – New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 3 – The United States criticized four of its closest allies in the Middle East on Friday, saying Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are doing little if anything to stop forced labor and other forms of “modern slavery” within their borders.

The four countries are among 14 “Tier III” nations that the State Department said had a serious problem with trafficking in persons and made little or no effort to control it, despite prodding from the United States. Citation as a Tier III country can trigger economic penalties.

“Trafficking in human beings is nothing less than a modern form of slavery,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking at a news conference introducing the government’s fifth annual Trafficking in Persons Report.

None of the four Middle Eastern countries were on the government’s list of problem nations last year – though Saudi Arabia was listed in 2001 and 2002. The government decided this year to focus its attention on forced labor, the primary problem in the four Middle Eastern states.

In Saudi Arabia, said John R. Miller, the State Department’s senior adviser on trafficking, “We have domestic workers being brought in from many countries into domestic servitude, child beggars, a lot of beatings, reports of beatings and rape – very difficult to get shelter, no convictions.”

Slave trafficking burst onto the world stage in the mid-1990’s, when thousands of women from the former Soviet Union, attracted by job offers in Europe, were forced to work as prostitutes once they arrived. These Russian women began working the streets of major European capitals.

In the United States during the late 1990’s, several notorious farm-labor servitude cases in Florida and forced prostitution cases involving hundreds of Mexican and Thai women caught the attention of the Clinton administration, just as Europe was urging Washington to get involved.

In 2000, Congress passed the Trafficking Victim Protection Act, which set out new penalties for slave traffickers and required the State Department to publish an annual report on slave trafficking worldwide. The department vigorously opposed the report provision. Officials said they did not want to do research for another annual report, on top of the human rights and drug trafficking reports, and did not believe nations found to be out of compliance should be penalized automatically.

The bill was amended to make the sanctions subject to the president’s discretion. And since 2003, when the sanction provision took effect, only two countries – Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea – have been cited. Under the law, no decisions on whether to sanction the 14 nations cited this year can be made before September – to give the nations time to improve their records, Mr. Miller said.

The other nations include Bolivia, Cambodia, Ecuador, Jamaica, Sudan, Togo and Venezuela. Also listed were Cuba, Myanmar and North Korea, nations that are mentioned in almost every government list of problem states. Last year, the department listed only 10 problem states. But the first report, in 2001, listed 23.

Saudi Arabia is a key American ally and oil supplier whose leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, visited President Bush at his Texas ranch in April. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, along with Qatar, are also allies, and the United States maintains an important military base in Qatar.

The criticisms of the four countries were similar. All four nations, the report says, imported workers from the region, from the Middle East and Asia and then effectively enslaved them.

“Some foreign women who migrate legally to Kuwait as domestic workers,” the report says, “are subsequently abused by their employers or coerced into situations of debt bondage or involuntary servitude,” the legal term for slavery. In the United Arab Emirates, “women are trafficked” from many nations “for the purpose of sexual exploitation.”

Saudi Arabia, the report adds, discourages victims from complaining. “The government offers no legal aid to foreign workers,” the report says, “and does not otherwise assist them in using the Saudi criminal justice system to bring exploiters to justice. If a victim chooses to file a complaint, he or she is not allowed to work.”

None of the embassies of the four countries responded to requests for comment.

The government was particularly critical of Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for allowing young children to be held in captivity and used as jockeys in camel races, “a multi-million dollar activity” in the Persian Gulf states. Tiny children, some 3 or 4 years old, are prized, and they are underfed to keep their weight down, the report notes.

“Some boys as young as 6 months old were reported kidnapped and sold to traffickers and raised to become camel jockeys.” Others, it adds, “were sold by their parents to traffickers.” Recently, it adds, one fell off his camel and was trampled to death.

In Kuwait, it says, “some have been thrown from the camels they rode and suffered serious neurological damage. Most no longer remember where they came from.”

The United States estimates that about 800,000 people are trafficked against their will between nations each year, and that many hundreds of thousands more are enslaved within their own nations.

The government also estimates that about 15,000 people are trafficked to the United States each year. That estimate has fallen since the Central Intelligence Agency issued the first one in 2000. Then it was estimated that as many as 50,000 people were trafficked to the United States from a dozen foreign countries each year.