Just the other day I was traveling with a friend of mine, young Tanzanian professional, when accidentally, upon seeing police checkpoint and traffic officers going through papers of a lorry driver, I enquired if they (police officers) check routinely also the cargo against the manifest, if it says the truth? As I rarely see them doing this, mainly ordering to offload and check at random luggage on passenger buses. But I don’t remember witnessing traffic officers going through the cargo on trucks and lorries or semitrailers or even checking if fuel tankers are hauling fuel in fact and not some other stuff. Perhaps it is not easy to do this.
My friend’s response startled me as he told me that just recently police impounded at Musoma Police Central Station a fuel tanker with Somalis inside! They were stuffed inside the tanker with air opening cut through the roof of the tanker to allow them breathe. I was shocked! Well, they were not human slaves, so to speak, as they apparently paid people dealing with trafficking for this service to smuggle them from Kenya-Tanzania border to Tanzania-Zambia border (where allegedly their accomplices on the other side help them cross to Zambia and further on to Namibia, Botswana and South Africa) while the Tanzanian driver, hired to do the transit job, gets a decent chunk of money for getting them across the country (you speak of millions of Tanzanian shillings – my friend said it’s around 10+ thousand US dollars per trip if it is successful and they do not get caught). This time though police were tipped (it happens rarely it seems, and when it happens it is mainly because of angry drivers angry after losing deals to others and taking revenge by reporting the 'lucky winner' to the police) and Somalis were impounded in Musoma. What happened next, I do not know. It looks like it causes Tanzanian government a lot of logistical and diplomatic headache – what to do with them and how to get rid of them and send them back to their country of origin (surely these operations cost a lot of money!). Read more on this here.
This story sparked my interest in digging deeper into human trafficking in Tanzania and East Africa at large. I heard a lot of stories already, but it was mainly about young people escaping from Tanzania to other countries, boarding ships in Dar es Salaam illegally, then being thrown out into the sea once caught on board (never knew if it was true or just rumors). Heard about women going to South Africa, Botswana, Middle East to allegedly look for better life and jobs. Heard about children kidnapped to be offered as sacrifice in gold mines and elsewhere due to witchcraft beliefs. But my immediate concern – as it was present in my community in Kiabakari and the region - was always domestic human trafficking, house girls abused in masters’ households, exploited, underpaid, or being forced to work for relatives for free, under pretence that they help to raise their little cousins etc. In Kiabakari an average house girl would get 3 to 5 US dollars per month as her salary! People hiring them would argue that it is just a pocket money as the domestic servants were treated equally as members of their family, sleeping in the same house, eating the same food, using electricity and water for free, watching TV with them and justifying the ridiculously low salary by blaming government that they themselves are paid very little – that time when I made those enquires few years ago – the government monthly salary was around 50-100 US dollars (depending on type of job of the civil servant). But even if these explanations were true in many cases, and the girls were desperate to get any money in their miserable futureless lives, still, you cannot call it life. But rather a depressing, sometimes hopeless, survival mode.
I searched and found some disturbing facts, shocking to be honest. The trafficking of human beings is the third largest source of profit for international organized crime, after drugs and arms, with revenue amounting to billions of dollars each year. Then, the article on Zenit I read on last Sunday (read it here; by the way, Archbishop Agostino Marchetto mentioned in the article blessed Kiabakari mission headquarters on July 28, 1992. Back then he was an Apostolic Nuncio to Tanzania; see pictures of the his visit to Diocese of Musoma here and of the blessing of the Kiabakari mission here) and going through the US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2010 (which was commented upon in the article) made me to share these findings with you in this post. I hope you DON’T enjoy reading it...
Some of the shocking findings of the 2010 report are the following:
-- 12.3 million adults and children are in forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution around the world, with 56% of these victims being women and girls.
-- The value for traffickers of this trade is estimated at $32 billion annually.
-- The prevalence of trafficking victims in the world is calculated to be at the level of 1.8 per 1,000 inhabitants. This varies by region with it reaching 3 per 1,000 in Asia and the Pacific.
-- There were 4,166 successful trafficking prosecutions in 2009, a 40% increase over 2008.
-- There are still 62 countries that have yet to convict a trafficker under laws in compliance with the Palermo Protocol (a document adopted by the United Nations on human trafficking).
- No less than 104 countries are without laws, policies, or regulations to prevent victims' deportation.
I have shortlisted below few links worth visiting to broaden your perspective of this grave matter, with a focus on East Africa, the area where I live:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5
Link 6
Link 7
Link 8
Link 9
Link 10
One story I want to share with you in full. We are fooled by statistics and numbers. Once the number gets big, like in the excerpt of US Report I quote above, we lose touch with real life and look at those masses of human beings involved as something unreal, as - mere statistics! But when the human trafficking arrives to your town, to your community, to your own house, it is becoming a completely different story. Read this touching story carefully and thank God if your own kids are safe and sound. But be vigilant at home and in your community! Open your eyes wide, sharpen all senses! Notice things happening around you! Take steps, report culprits, do not get fooled things are under control in your area! And take necessary precautions to make sure humanely possible that your beloved ones and your community stays safe and well protected.
Tanzania's Missing Girls Rarely Raise a Murmur
By Zoe Alsop (original story here)
WeNews correspondent
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Poverty and tradition help fuel a potent business in human trafficking in East Africa, where a girl can sell for $20. Most kidnapped children are not as lucky as Saffi, who returned after her mother bought TV ads. Many disappear without much notice.
(WOMENSENEWS)--For five months last year Kim Kitchen, a Canadian expert on sexual violence and community development, lived in a crowded shantytown on the outskirts of the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam while she set up a women's safety program. She began to notice that nightfall was an anxious time for mothers.
"One of the startling realities for me was as the sun started to set I observed the women would start calling in their daughters," said Kitchen. "As the sun set more and more, and daughters hadn't come, the urgency in their calls grew. It was just a matter of fact that every girl has to be in their home after dark."
Across East Africa--once a corridor for merchants trading slaves from the continent's interior for fine cloth, frankincense and spices from the Middle East--conditions are in place for a boom market in the traffic of human beings. Poverty and instability in the region mean many are desperate enough to trade themselves or their children for a ticket out. Tanzania is no exception.
At the same time, some traditional practices--such as witchcraft and child marriage--are implicated in the disappearances of many young girls.
Kitchen is a trainer with the San Francisco-based organization Girls Speak Out. Its organizers in the United States, Australia, Kenya and Tanzania arrange workshops for girls and women to talk about what it means to be female in their communities. They are meant to give girls a chance to discuss their bodies and traditions in the light of their legal rights.
Kitchen collaborated with local groups based out of the slums who are fed up with watching helplessly as their children vanish.
"They are just groundbreaking kind of people," said Kitchen, referring to their willingness to challenge some time-honored practices that can sometimes be deadly, particularly for women and children. "The majority would say, 'Why would you do that? This is going against tradition.'"
Vital Work
"If you went to a witch maybe to be wealthy, you take a small baby, a boy or a girl, to offer," said Rutta Thobias, a project coordinator for Dar es Salaam's Mass Development Association, known as MaDeA, an antipoverty program focused on women and children.
This kind of witchcraft is suspected in the case of a 4-year-old girl, Salome Yohana. Security guards found her severed head in the bags of a boy on his way to visit his aunt at the hospital in late April. The girl's body was found at a public latrine across town, where someone had apparently tried to dispose of it. Her parents had not reported her missing to police or the press.
"The issue of killing children, especially girls, needs to be taken more seriously," said Thobias, who just days earlier had been drawn into the kidnapping case of his neighbor's 5-year-old daughter, Saffi.
Saffi's story was unique and shows the impact work like that of Kitchen and Thobias can have in Tanzania.
Early on the morning of April 1, the little girl said goodbye to her mother and set out for kindergarten, just 600 meters along a dirt path through her neighborhood. Saffi's family didn't see her again until seven days later, when she turned up at a bus stop in another part of town, terrified and shivering with malaria. She said she'd been raped.
Extraordinary Return
For her mother and neighbors, the extraordinary thing was not that she'd disappeared but that she'd turned up again at all.
"On the first day we think maybe she was raped and killed," said Thobias. "On the second we think maybe she has been taken into trafficking."
A girl like Saffi is a liquid asset as far as kidnappers are concerned. They can sell her to families eager for cheap house servants, pimps, witch doctors and men seeking virginal brides. In 2003, a girl could be bought for as little as $20 in Dar es Salaam, according to the United Nations.
Children's parents are often complicit in the deal; sometimes they must sell one child to afford meals for younger siblings during especially difficult economic times such as when crops fail. But even when they aren't, they rarely go to the police or publicize the case, particularly when the child is a girl and rape may be involved, said Thobias. "Most of the people, after the same incidents happen to them, they believe more in magic power, that if you campaign the kidnappers may kill the child."
A Determined Mother
But Saffi's mother, who's employed by the Tanzanian military to train cadets, was different. She helped Kitchen meet women in Mbagala. She made as much noise as she could, including going to mosques around the city to ask that the muezzins include a description of Saffi in their calls to prayer, and then to local government offices to report her daughter missing. She spent what little savings she had on advertisements and then went to Thobias to ask for more. Within days, Saffi's face was in newspapers and on television screens.
The media attention made Saffi's kidnappers decide she was more trouble than she was worth. They put her on a bus. By chance a family friend spotted her, slumped at a busy bus stop miles from her home and called her mother.
The odds that the men who kidnapped Saffi will be found are very low. Because her mother did not report to the police on the night her daughter was found, they say she has no case number and they cannot investigate.
But Thobias has taken the case into his own hands.
"We are fighting to collect information from different people," he said. "But we are trying our very best to look for some way because we see so many issues with children here. There are abuses from all sides. Raping is too much nowadays."
So far, he's discovered two things. No. 1: the house where Saffi was held was near the airport; she knew because she could hear the sound of planes coming and going. No. 2: She says there were other small children at the house with her. As far as anyone knows, they are still there today.
Zoe Alsop is a freelance writer based in Kenya.
Prayer to End Trafficking
O God, our words cannot express what our minds can barely comprehend and our hearts feel when we hear of women and girls deceived and transported to unknown places for purposes of sexual exploitation and abuse because of human greed and profit at this time in our world. Our hearts are saddened and our spirits angry that their dignity and rights are being transgressed through threats, deception, and force. We cry out against the degrading practice of trafficking and pray for it to end. Strengthen the fragile-spirited and broken-hearted. Make real your promises to fill these our sisters with a love that is tender and good and send the exploiters away empty handed. Give us the wisdom and courage to stand in solidarity with them, that together we will find ways to the freedom that is your gift to all of us. Amen.
Prayer by S. Gen Cassani, SSND
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