Human Trafficking Fuelled by Ignorance

The Tajik government could better protect its citizens from human trafficking by making them fully aware of the dangers in store when going abroad to seek work, say NBCentralAsia observers.



At a seminar in Dushanbe last week hosted by the cross-government commission on human trafficking, members of the Tajik parliament and NGO representatives stressed that there was a correlation between the heavy stream of migrant workers leaving Tajikistan and human trafficking.



According to the Tajik government, 72 people have fallen victim to human trafficking in the past 18 months, but some NGOs estimate that the real figure is more like 3,000 a year.



The US State Department’s report on international human trafficking for 2006 described Tajikistan as a source country for human trafficking. Women and children are sold to a number of eastern countries for sexual exploitation while men are sold in Russia as labour slaves.



Rajabmurod Tolibov, secretary of the inter-agency commission, told NBCentralAsia that the government has made considerable efforts to fight human trafficking over the past few years, signing 25 treaties on the issue with members of the Commonwealth of Independent States and other countries.



But while the government is stepping up cooperation on an international level, it is still not spending enough money on tackling the problem at home, he says. There is a shortage of funds for victim support programmes, awareness raising campaigns and basic technical equipment for anti-trafficking centres.



NBCentralAsia experts say there are so many migrant workers leaving Tajikistan who are ignorant of the dangers of human trafficking that government and NGO efforts are insufficient.



Gulchehra Mirzoeva, director of Modar, an NGO that works on human trafficking, says most migrants do not have the knowledge that they need to defend themselves abroad. Most of the million migrant workers who leave Tajikistan every year do not know the language of the country they end up in or its laws, she explains.



That leaves them wide open to exploitation, and the young are particularly at risk.



Mirzoeva believes that not enough is being done to raise awareness among young people of the dangers of human trafficking.



Criminal gangs are well aware of this ignorance, and use it to “lure young people into slavery”, said Firuz Saidov, an independent expert on social affairs.





Valikhon Mulloev of the interior ministry’s human trafficking division agrees that a widespread awareness-raising campaign would improve the situation drastically, especially in the more remote regions.



“As much information as possible on this issue needs to be put out in the villages, not just the town. People there have no idea about the problem, and there’s no information on the TV or radio,” he said.



Delivering harsher punishments for anyone involved in human trafficking would also act as a deterrent, he adds.



The Tajik parliament has recently passed laws on human trafficking and smuggling and adopted a 2006-2010 national strategy to combat the crime. The government is also planning to amend the criminal code and toughen the penalties for those found guilty.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)