NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
I'm guessing that President Bush's foreign policy will stand up about as well to the assessments of future historians as a baby gazelle to a pack of cheetahs.
Yet there is one area where Bush is making a historic contribution: He is devoting much more money and attention to human trafficking than his predecessors. Just as one of Jimmy Carter's great legacies was putting human rights squarely on the international agenda, Bush is doing the same for slave labor.
We don't tend to think of trafficking as a top concern, so Bush hasn't gotten much credit. But it's difficult to think of a human rights issue that could be more important than sex trafficking and the other kinds of neo-slavery that engulf millions of people around the world, leaving many of them dead of AIDS by their early 20s.
My own epiphany came in 1989, when my wife and I lived in China and covered the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Arrests of dissidents were front-page news, but no one paid any attention as many tens of thousands of Chinese women and girls were kidnapped and sold each year by traffickers to become the unwilling wives of peasants.
Since then, I've seen the peddling of humans in many countries: the 8-year-old Filipino girl whose mother used to pull her out of school to rent to pedophiles; the terrified 14-year-old Vietnamese girl imprisoned in a brothel pending the sale of her virginity; the Pakistani teenager whose brothel's owner dealt with her resistance by drugging her into a stupor. The U.N. has estimated that 12.3 million people worldwide are caught in forced labor of one kind or another.
In an age of HIV, sex trafficking is particularly lethal. And for every political dissident who is locked up in a prison cell, hundreds of girls are locked up in brothels and, in effect, sentenced to death by AIDS.
In 2000, Congress passed landmark anti-trafficking legislation.
But the heaviest lifting has been done by the State Department's tiny office on trafficking, led by a former Republican congressman, John Miller.
Miller and his office wield their spotlight shrewdly. With backing from the White House (Bush made Miller an ambassador partly to help him in his bureaucratic battles), the office puts out an annual report that shames and bullies foreign governments into taking action against forced labor of all kinds.
Under pressure from the report, Cambodia prosecuted some traffickers (albeit while protecting brothels owned by government officials) and largely closed down the Svay Pak red-light district, where 10-year-olds used to be openly sold. Ecuador stepped up arrests of pimps and started a national public awareness campaign. Israel trained police to go after traffickers and worked with victims' home countries, like Belarus and Ukraine. And so on, country by country.
The backdrop is a ridiculously divisive debate among anti-trafficking activists about whether prostitution should be legalized. Whatever one thinks of that question, it's peripheral to the central challenge: Vast numbers of underage girls are forced into brothels against their will, and many die of AIDS. On that crucial issue, Bush is leaving a legacy that he and America can be proud of.
Leave e-mails for Kristof, a New York Times columnist, at editorial@nytimes.com.
Yet there is one area where Bush is making a historic contribution: He is devoting much more money and attention to human trafficking than his predecessors. Just as one of Jimmy Carter's great legacies was putting human rights squarely on the international agenda, Bush is doing the same for slave labor.
We don't tend to think of trafficking as a top concern, so Bush hasn't gotten much credit. But it's difficult to think of a human rights issue that could be more important than sex trafficking and the other kinds of neo-slavery that engulf millions of people around the world, leaving many of them dead of AIDS by their early 20s.
My own epiphany came in 1989, when my wife and I lived in China and covered the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Arrests of dissidents were front-page news, but no one paid any attention as many tens of thousands of Chinese women and girls were kidnapped and sold each year by traffickers to become the unwilling wives of peasants.
Since then, I've seen the peddling of humans in many countries: the 8-year-old Filipino girl whose mother used to pull her out of school to rent to pedophiles; the terrified 14-year-old Vietnamese girl imprisoned in a brothel pending the sale of her virginity; the Pakistani teenager whose brothel's owner dealt with her resistance by drugging her into a stupor. The U.N. has estimated that 12.3 million people worldwide are caught in forced labor of one kind or another.
In an age of HIV, sex trafficking is particularly lethal. And for every political dissident who is locked up in a prison cell, hundreds of girls are locked up in brothels and, in effect, sentenced to death by AIDS.
In 2000, Congress passed landmark anti-trafficking legislation.
But the heaviest lifting has been done by the State Department's tiny office on trafficking, led by a former Republican congressman, John Miller.
Miller and his office wield their spotlight shrewdly. With backing from the White House (Bush made Miller an ambassador partly to help him in his bureaucratic battles), the office puts out an annual report that shames and bullies foreign governments into taking action against forced labor of all kinds.
Under pressure from the report, Cambodia prosecuted some traffickers (albeit while protecting brothels owned by government officials) and largely closed down the Svay Pak red-light district, where 10-year-olds used to be openly sold. Ecuador stepped up arrests of pimps and started a national public awareness campaign. Israel trained police to go after traffickers and worked with victims' home countries, like Belarus and Ukraine. And so on, country by country.
The backdrop is a ridiculously divisive debate among anti-trafficking activists about whether prostitution should be legalized. Whatever one thinks of that question, it's peripheral to the central challenge: Vast numbers of underage girls are forced into brothels against their will, and many die of AIDS. On that crucial issue, Bush is leaving a legacy that he and America can be proud of.
Leave e-mails for Kristof, a New York Times columnist, at editorial@nytimes.com.
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