“Compassion is one of the principal things that make our lives meaningful. It is the source of all lasting happiness and joy. And it is the foundation of a good heart, the heart of one who acts out of a desire to help others. . . . Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity; no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama - Ethics for the New Millenium.

The following was contributed by ILSC Member and former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, Executive Director of the High Road for Human Rights Advocacy Project.

Genocide

During the Holocaust, the American public expressed pity, but almost nothing was heard from the grassroots level regarding a change in US national policy. As a result, our nation abandoned millions of people to their horrific fate at the hands of the Nazis.

After the Holocaust, The world agreed: "Never Again" ... Never Again would we fail to act to prevent such atrocities to men, women, and children, anywhere in the world. 

Roméo Dallaire knew he could have stopped the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda. As the United Nations Military Commander in Rwanda at the time, he said he needed only 5,500 United Nations troops to stop the horrendous violence and nationwide terror. The United States could have made the difference, working with the UN to do exactly what the UN was intended to do, rather than pull UN peacekeepers out, thereby abandoning 800,000 Rwandans and their loved ones to their tragic, brutal deaths, maiming, and unspeakable horror.

“[T]he international community, through an inept UN mandate and what can only be described as indifference, self-interest and racism, aided and abetted these crimes against humanity.”

Roméo Dallaire

Dallaire is clear: the genocide could have been prevented if the UN operation had received the modest increase of troops and capabilities he requested. Could we have stopped the killings? Dallaire answers, “Yes, absolutely.”

“Could we have prevented the resumption of the civil war and the genocide? The short answer is yes. If UNAMIR had received the modest increase of troops and capabilities we requested in the first week, could we have stopped the killings? Yes, absolutely.”

Roméo Dallaire

As Dallaire explains, “There is no doubt that [the United States and France] possessed the solution to the Rwandan crisis."
 

It happened again in Bosnia, where, for several years, neither the United States nor the international community did anything to stop the brutal “ethnic cleansing” campaign of Serb nationalists. Some 200,000 Bosnians were killed and more than two million were forced to leave their homes.

Among the many long-time foreign policy experts who resigned from the State Department in protest of US complacency in the face of mass atrocities in Bosnia was Marshall Harris, the Bosnia desk officer...

“I can no longer serve in a Department of State that . . . will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it.”

Marshall Harris
Bosnia Desk Officer
US State Department

Let us learn from earlier, tragic lessons. Two weeks after the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda: National Security Advisor Anthony Lake stated that if United States officials were to support effective action to stop the mass atrocities, Americans must make it clear that’s what they want. He urged human rights advocates to “make more noise” and to change public opinion.

“If you want to make this move, you will have to change public opinion. You must make more noise.”

Anthony Lake
Former National Security Advisor

But hardly any noise was made, and the US stood by while the massacres continued. The American public expressed no interest in Rwanda. That failure on the part of the American people led US officials to inaction. Had there been a nation-wide organization like the one High Road for Human Rights will build, with thousands of people organized to demand action, the Rwandan genocide could have been stopped.

Samantha Power notes that “No group or groups in the United States made Clinton administration decision makers feel or fear that they would pay a political price for doing nothing to save Rwandans.”

“[A]s was true with previous genocides, these U.S. officials were making potent political calculations about what the U.S. public would abide. . . . [T]hey looked to op-ed pages of elite journals, popular protest, and congressional noise to gauge public interest. No group or groups in the United States made Clinton administration decisionmakers feel or fear that they would pay a political price for doing nothing to save Rwandans.”

Samantha Power
“ A Problem From Hell”

The missing link in achieving effective action to stop the atrocities was a grassroots organizing effort, like the one High Road for Human Rights is working to create. 

No organization was in place to elicit a public call for support to stop the massacres. Power notes that “although Human Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence to the U.S. government and lobbied in one-on-one meetings, it lacked the grassroots base from which it might have mobilized the crucial domestic pressure everyone agreed was missing.”

As you read this, a genocide is in its fifth year in the Darfur region of Sudan. Once again, the United States and the international community have failed to take effective action to stop the killing, raping, and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people, and the displacement of approximately two-and-a-half-million men, women, and children.

No one in Congress or in the White House should ever again be able to say that the people back home don’t care. Let us do all we can to assure that mass atrocities are never again condoned because of a perception of public apathy in the United States – and to do all we can, consistent with our moral values, to express our concern, compassion, and insistence on constructive action in the clearest, most powerful possible terms. Together, through High Road for Human Rights, we can change the wind. We can increase awareness about preventable suffering and work together, through focused organizing, to effectively push for change that will bring about a safer, kinder, more just world.

To find out what you can do to help stop Genocide, click here.

Human Trafficking
 

According to US State Department data, an "estimated 600,000 to 820,000 men, women, and children [are] trafficked across international borders each year, approximately 70 percent are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The data also illustrates that the majority of transnational victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation." Due to the illegal nature of trafficking and differences in methodology, the exact extent is unknown.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the impoverished former Eastern bloc countries such as Albania, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have been identified as major trafficking source countries for women and children.

Young women and girls are often lured to wealthier countries by the promises of money and work and then reduced to sexual slavery. It is estimated that 2/3 of women trafficked for prostitution worldwide annually come from Eastern Europe, three-quarters have never worked as prostitutes before. The major destinations are Western Europe (Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK, Greece), the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, the United Arab Emirates), Asia, Russia and the United States. An estimated 500,000 women from Central and Eastern Europe are working in prostitution in the EU alone.

An estimated 14,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year, although again because trafficking is illegal, accurate statistics are difficult. According to the Massachusetts based Trafficking Victims Outreach and Services Network (project of the nonprofit MataHari: Eye of the Day) in Massachusetts alone, there were 55 documented cases of human trafficking in 2005 and the first half of 2006 in Massachusetts. In 2004, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) estimated that 600-800 persons are trafficked into Canada annually and that additional 1,500-2,200 persons are trafficked through Canada into the United States. In Canada, foreign trafficking for prostitution is estimated to be worth $400 million annually.

In the United Kingdom, 71 women were known to have been trafficked into prostitution in 1998 and the Home Office recognized that the scale is likely greater as the problem is hidden and research estimates that the actual figure could be up to 1,420 women trafficked into the UK during the same period. Trafficking in people is increasing in Africa, South Asia and into North America.

Russia is a major source of women trafficked globally for the purpose of sexual exploitation, Russian women are in prostitution in over 50 countries. Annually, thousands of Russian women end up as prostitutes in Israel, China, Japan or South Korea. Russia is also a significant destination and transit country for persons trafficked for sexual and labor exploitation from regional and neighboring countries into Russia, and on to the Gulf states, Europe, Asia, and North America.

In poverty-stricken Moldova, where the unemployment rate for women ranges as high as 68% and one-third of the workforce live and work abroad, experts estimate that since the collapse of the Soviet Union between 200,000 and 400,000 women have been sold into prostitution abroad — perhaps up to 10% of the female population. In Ukraine, a survey conducted by the NGO La Strada Ukraine in 2001-2003, based on a sample of 106 women being trafficked out of Ukraine found that 3% were under 18, and the US State Department reported in 2004 that incidents of minors being trafficked was increasing. It is estimated that half million Ukrainian women were trafficked abroad since 1991 (80% of all unemployed in Ukraine are women).

The ILO estimates that 20 percent of the five million illegal immigrants in Russia are victims of forced labor, which is a form of trafficking. However even citizens of Russian Federation have become victims of human trafficking. They are typically kidnapped and sold by police to be used for hard labor, being regularly drugged and chained like dogs to prevent them from escaping. There were reports of trafficking of children and of child sex tourism in Russia. The Government of Russia has made some effort to combat trafficking but has also been criticized for not complying with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.

In Asia, Japan is the major destination country for trafficked women, especially from the Philippines and Thailand. The US State Department has rated Japan as either a ‘Tier 2’ or a ‘Tier 2 Watchlist’ country every year since 2001 in its annual Trafficking in Persons reports. Both these ratings implied that Japan was (to a greater or lesser extent) not fully compliant with minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking trade. There are currently an estimated 300,000 women and children involved in the sex trade throughout Southeast Asia.

It is common that Thai women are lured to Japan and sold to Yakuza-controlled brothels where they are forced to work off their price.

Many of the Iraqi women fleeing the Iraq War are turning to prostitution, while others are trafficked abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Iran. In Syria alone, an estimated 50,000 Iraqi refugee girls and women, many of them widows, are forced into prostitution. Cheap Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists. The clients come from wealthier countries in the Middle East - many are Saudi men. High prices are offered for virgins.

As many as 200,000 Nepali girls, many under 14, have been sold into the sex slavery in India. Nepalese women and girls, especially virgins, are favored in India because of their light skin.

In parts of Ghana, a family may be punished for an offense by having to turn over a virgin female to serve as a sex slave within the offended family. In this instance, the woman does not gain the title of "wife". In parts of Ghana, Togo, and Benin, shrine slavery persists, despite being illegal in Ghana since 1998. In this system of slavery of ritual servitude, sometimes called trokosi (in Ghana) or voodoosi in Togo and Benin, young virgin girls are given as slaves in traditional shrines and are used sexually by the priests in addition to providing free labor for the shrine.

Reporters have witnessed a rapid increase in prostitution in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Kosovo after UN and, in the case of the latter two, NATO peacekeeping forces moved in. Peacekeeping forces have been linked to trafficking and forced prostitution. Proponents of peacekeeping argue that the actions of a few should not incriminate the many participants in the mission, yet NATO and the UN have come under criticism for not taking the issue of forced prostitution linked to peacekeeping missions seriously enough.

In the western world, Canada in particular has a major problem with modern-day sexual slavery. In a 2006 report for the Future Group, a Canadian humanitarian organization dedicated to ending human trafficking, ranked eight industrialized nations and gave Canada an F for its "abysmal" record treating victims. The report, titled "Falling Short of the Mark: An International Study on the Treatment of Human Trafficking Victims", concluded that Canada "is an international embarrassment" when it comes to combating this form of slavery.

The report's principal author Benjamin Perrin wrote, "Canada has ignored calls for reform and continues to re-traumatize trafficking victims, with few exceptions, by subjecting them to routine deportation and fails to provide even basic support services."

In the report, the only other country to flunk was the United Kingdom, which received a D, while the United States received a B+ and Australia, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Italy all received grades of B or B-. The report criticizes former Liberal Party of Canada cabinet ministers Irwin Cotler, Joe Volpe and Pierre Pettigrew for "passing the buck" on the issue.

Commenting on the report, the then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Monte Solberg told Sun Media Corporation, "It's very damning, and if there are obvious legislative or regulatory fixes that need to be done, those have to become priorities, given especially that we're talking about very vulnerable people."

There is no universally accepted definition of trafficking for sexual exploitation. The term encompasses the organized movement of people, usually women, between countries and within countries for sex work. Such trafficking also includes coercing a migrant into a sexual act as a condition of allowing or arranging the migration. Sexual trafficking uses physical coercion, deception and bondage incurred through forced debt. Trafficked women and children, for instance, are often promised work in the domestic or service industry, but instead are usually taken to brothels where their passports and other identification papers are confiscated. They may be beaten or locked up and promised their freedom only after earning – through prostitution – their purchase price, as well as their travel and visa cost.

In Japan the prosperous entertainment market had created huge demand for commercial sexual workers, and such demand is being met by trafficking women and children from the Philippines, Colombia and Thailand. Women are forced into street prostitution, based stripping and live sex acts. Victims of human trafficking are exposed to sexually transmittable diseases including HIV/AIDS. It is believed that human trafficking and forced sex work is one of the causes for prevalence of HIV/AIDS in some countries. On one hand HIV/AIDS increases the number of children trafficked because that they are perceived to be HIV negative, and on the other hand trafficking increases HIV/AIDS transmission because of victims inability to negotiate the use and access of condoms. Multiple sexual partners and injury received during sex increase their chances of infection (MAPODE in its Research Report on Children in Prostitution, Pornography, and Trafficking for Commercial Sexual Exploitation, Labour and Crime in Zambia). In Bangladesh, there is a correlation between ages of those infected with HIV/AIDS (15-24 years) with the victims of trafficking, suggesting the linkage between human trafficking and HIV/AIDS.

Trafficking victims are also exposed to different psychological problems. They suffer social alienation in the host and home countries. Stigmatization, social exclusion and intolerance make reintegration into local communities difficult. The governments offer little assistance and social services to trafficked victims upon their return. As the victims are also pushed into drug trafficking, many of them face criminal sanctions.

The information above comes to us through the work and research of The High Road for Human Rights Advocacy Project, one of the groups with which ILSC is collaborating in our activism efforts.  To learn more, and find out how you can get involved, visit their website at www.highroadforhumanrights.org.