M A L A Y S I A
It's Tough to Keep up with Traffickers
by Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR — Government agencies are often no match — in organisation, money and coercive power — to international syndicates that traffic in people, especially women and young girls, for Malaysia's sex industry.
The case of 21-year-old Yu Han (not her real name) from a small and impoverished village in China's south-western Yunnan province is an example.
Yu wanted to earn some extra money to help her aged farmer parents. One day, she was told she could get a job as a tailor in a Malaysian factory and be paid 6,000 yuan (723 U.S. dollars) a month a princely sum. She agreed.
Soon after, a Thai man turned up and offered to take her to Malaysia. With three other young women, they travelled in a car for nine days, from Yunnan down south to the Thai capital Bangkok.
Her travelling colleagues disappeared into Bangkok. Yu, who had no passport and did not speak a word of English or Malay, was taken to Thailand's southern border with Malaysia and 'given' an entry permit into this country. She legally entered Malaysia on Jan 21.
She did not know where she was, the name of the road or town or even the hotels she had stayed. "On the first day I was brought to a karaoke centre 'somewhere in Malaysia' and ordered to have sex with a old man...I kept crying and crying and the client just left," Yu told reporters recently.
But eventually, Yu was "sold" to another client for 2,000 Malaysian ringgit (526 U.S. dollars) and forced to have sex. This second client forced himself on her one night and raped her, she says.
"After that I was forced to have sex with other men — sometimes as many as 10 men in a day," Yu said. She became known as the "Little Virgin" to clients.
Early in April, Yu escaped and was brought to an opposition member of parliament. Only then did Yu realise that the syndicate had brought her to Malacca town in central Malaysia.
Yu eventually returned home — bruised and battered, but lucky to be alive. But for thousands of other trafficked women and children, there is no such happy ending.
The coercive power of these syndicates has expanded far beyond the protective capacity of Malaysian laws or government agencies, participants at a recent seminar on human trafficking pointed out.
The seminar, organised by the National Human Rights Commission, concluded that enforcement agencies - police, immigration and local authorities, even if they work together — are no match for the syndicates that keep a powerful and pervasive presence across the globe because of the reach of their network, huge profits in trafficking and coercive power.
Take Yu's case. Neither the Thai trafficker nor his colleagues down the inter-connected chain of links that brought Yu from Yunnan in China to Malacca in Malaysia would ever be arrested or prosecuted, activists say, because they have all disappeared.
The best the authorities can do under existing laws and practices is to charge the brothel owner with masquerading as a karaoke joint and employing a foreign national without a valid work permit. But later, he will be back in business.
"A real setback is the lack of a coordinated effort both among agencies within the country and between countries to combat the syndicates. While the syndicates are well-organised with money, communication and influence, government officials are really walking blind," a senior police officer told IPS.
"Our men are not even sensitive to human trafficking as an issue and most of our investigative abilities are already bogged down with crime prevention," he said.
"Usually, the trafficked people have valid entry documents as students or visitors but later engage in other activities," an immigration official said in an interview. "The syndicates have enough money to exploit legal loopholes and even hire top lawyers to defend them."
Even the statistics do not fully represent the magnitude of the problem of trafficking of women into Malaysia. The number of foreign women arrested rose from 1,666 in 1993 to 5,878 in 2003 a jump of 352 percent in 10 years. In 2000, 3,607 foreign women were arrested for prostitution, 4,132 in 2001 and 5,149 in 2002.
According to the U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2002, Malaysia is both a source and a destination country for the trafficking of women from Indonesia, China, Thailand and the Philippines.
"About half of the undocumented foreign women detained in detention camps and awaiting deportation are victims of trafficking," said rights commission chairman Abdul Talib. "Some of them narrated how they were suffered brutal beatings by agents and syndicate bosses for refusing to follow orders."
Malaysian law does not discriminate between foreign workers and women who are cheated, smuggled and forced into prostitution. "The public could not differentiate between trafficked persons and undocumented workers," human rights lawyer Ragunath Kesavan told IPS.
"The sorry state of trafficking victim reflects poorly on the Malaysian government...these women are victims of international trafficking and yet they are detained for up to a year and merely deported," said rights activist Eric Paulson.
Activists said Malaysia can learn from countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal and India, which have agreements requiring intelligence exchange and joint action against traffickers. (END/Copyright IPS)
