Posted on 03/05/2004 10:50:45 AM PST by Destro
NATO urged to ban troops from brothels
Fri 5 March, 2004 13:06
By John Chalmers
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Western troops abroad should be banned from brothels and sex clubs which fuel an illegal trade in women forced into prostitution, the United States and Norway have urged their NATO allies.
The two nations urged the Western defence alliance to mount a coordinated clampdown on the human trafficking that sends women to work as "modern-day slaves" in bars frequented by troops on missions overseas.
"Trafficking in human beings is part of the dark side of globalisation," said U.S. ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns on Thursday. "We don't have the luxury of turning away from this problem because tens of thousands of lives are being ruined."
"We want NATO to have a common policy to combat trafficking...by April," he told a news conference with his Norwegian counterpart, Kai Eide.
The envoys were speaking on the sidelines of a one-day conference on NATO's potential role in tackling what they described as a "dark and shameful" crime that could destabilise emerging democracies, especially in the Western Balkans.
The United States estimates that each year as many as 800,000 men, women and children are bought, sold, transported across national borders and held against their will for sexual exploitation or forced labour.
It has taken the issue seriously since an undercover investigation in South Korea two years ago exposed the involvement of U.S. troops in paying for sex with women who had been trafficked from the Philippines and former Soviet states into forced prostitution in bars near a military installation.
U.S. President George W. Bush has since set a zero-tolerance policy with respect to human trafficking for all American military personnel, including peacekeepers in the Balkans.
PASSPORTS TAKEN AWAY
Burns, quoting a U.N. estimate, said that up to 90 percent of sex workers in Bosnia were acting against their will.
"They would typically be told they were going to be a waitress or a dancer, taken down to Bosnia, their passports taken away and then sold from one guy to the next," he said.
Eide, whose country has prohibited government employees and military personnel abroad from purchasing or accepting sexual services, said traffickers are so sophisticated they move in tandem with concentrations of international security forces.
The ambassadors said it was now time for a NATO-wide policy to coordinate the efforts of the 46 countries in the alliance's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, whose reach stretches from Canada to Central Asia.
"NATO has a special responsibility to ensure that our forces do not contribute to this problem," they wrote in the International Herald Tribune, calling on partnership members to:
-- educate military personnel overseas about trafficking;
-- step up efforts to pursue evidence of trafficking in persons in clubs and other places frequented by NATO military personnel, placing them off-limits, and help host countries to investigate human trafficking;
-- incorporate provisions in overseas civilian service contracts that prohibit participation in activities supporting or promoting human trafficking, and impose penalties on contractors who fail to monitor their employees' conduct.
Thank G-d for President George W. (and First Lady Laura) Bush !
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