Dana Milbank: Obama’s ill-advised visit to Tanzania - The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-obamas-ill-advised-visit-to-tanzania/2013/06/07/397b00fa-cf88-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

Source: The Washington Post

By Dana Milbank, Published: June 9

When President Obama goes to Africa at month’s end, the first African American president will have a rare opportunity to spread U.S. values to that continent. It would be a shame if his trip instead validated slavery.

By selecting Tanzania as one of the three countries that will receive a presidential visit on that trip, the Obama administration is honoring a government that has been in a multiyear diplomatic dispute with the United States over human trafficking.

Specifically, a U.S. court in 2008 issued a $1 million judgment against a Tanzanian diplomat stationed in Washington because he and his wife held a young woman against her will as a domestic servant at their Bethesda home, refusing to pay her and abusing her for four years until she escaped. The diplomat, Alan Mzengi, didn’t contest the civil lawsuit and, instead of paying the default judgment, returned to Tanzania, where at last report he served as an adviser to President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete — the very person Obama will meet with.

The State Department has tried to pressure Kikwete’s government to get the judgment paid and to sanction diplomats who engage in human trafficking. But the efforts have produced nothing but a derisory settlement offer, and the State Department has not moved to punish Tanzania.

Now Obama is rewarding Tanzania with a presidential trip. “An official visit from the U.S. president is a gift that is utterly inappropriate after a Tanzanian government official committed horrifying human rights violations just a few miles from the White House,” said Martina Vandenberg, a human rights lawyer who represented the victim, Zipora Mazengo, pro bono. Vandenberg, a Washington lawyer I’ve known for years, said Obama “would undermine all credibility on trafficking.”

A spokeswoman for the State Department’s African Affairs bureau said that the case “continues to be of significant concern” and that “we are again engaging the government of Tanzania to do what is necessary to see that this matter is addressed.”

Obama has made human trafficking a centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda, saying in a speech to the Clinton Global Initiative last year that “it is a debasement of our common humanity” that “must be called by its true name, modern slavery. . . . When a woman is locked in a sweatshop, or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and abused and incapable of leaving — that’s slavery.”

Unfortunately, the administration’s actions haven’t always matched its high-minded words, as has been the case with targeted assassinations, Chinese dissidents, Guantanamo Bay, domestic surveillance and other challenges to human rights and civil liberties. The Tanzania case appears to be an instance of business interests trumping human rights. The Chinese president visited the East African country a few months ago, and U.S. businesses are eager to get in on the region’s petroleum supplies and other natural resources before China becomes dominant there.

Beyond that calculation, the administration has been reluctant to use the few tools it has to combat human trafficking by diplomats, who are protected from some prosecutions. After federal authorities said they were investigating a possible case of human trafficking in McLean by a Saudi diplomat, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry, citing the Mzengi case and questioning why State seldom seeks waivers of diplomatic immunity for offenders and has not used its power to block visas for servants of diplomats from offending countries.

In the Mzengi case, a federal judge found that the diplomat and his wife confiscated Mazengo’s passport and forced her to work 17-hour days. They refused her medical care (she couldn’t wear shoes because of an untreated ingrown toenail and was once forced to shovel snow barefoot) and wouldn’t let her leave the house without an escort. After the $1,059,349 judgment, the woman said she would accept a settlement that included only her back wages of $170,000; the Tanzanians eventually offered $22,000 with an iffy promise of small future payments from Mzengi.

Mzengi returned to Tanzania a few months after the judgment and got a position advising Kikwete, according to a 2010 Time magazine report, citing an academic adviser of Mzengi. Embassy officials didn’t return my phone calls.

According to cables released by WikiLeaks, U.S. officials formally told the Tanzanians that diplomats such as Mzengi should “face appropriate sanction.” The Tanzanians were also told the matter could call into question Tanzania’s “commitment to combating human trafficking.”

The U.S. officials wrote that they made it clear “that the Tanzanian government cannot ignore our requests for information and assistance.”

Or can it?

Britain opts in to EU rules on human trafficking

(AFP)

22 March 2011,

LONDON — Britain said Tuesday it would opt in a European Union directive on human trafficking, days after the country saw its first case of “modern-day slavery” involving a woman trafficked from Tanzania.

The government had been waiting to see the final draft of the directive before signing up, and one day after the rules came into effect, Home Office Minister Damian Green said London would play its part.

“Opting in would send a powerful message to traffickers that Britain is not a soft touch and that we remain world leaders in fighting this terrible crime,” Green said in a statement.

Lawmakers will now be consulted on the decision and the government will publish a strategy on human trafficking in the coming months, he said, adding that the issue was a “priority”.

More than 700 suspected cases of human trafficking were referred to the UK Human Trafficking Centre, a multi-agency body, in the year to March 2010.

Three-quarters of victims were women and almost half the cases involved sexual exploitation. The largest number, 123, came from Nigeria.

Last week Saaeda Khan, 68, was found guilty of trafficking Mwanahanisi Mruke into Britain from Tanzania for exploitation, after prosecutors said she had kept the woman in conditions akin to “modern-day slavery”.

Khan was ordered to pay 49-year-old Mruke £25,000 ($40,000, 28,750 euros) but was spared jail because of her own ill health and the fact she had two adult disabled children, the judge said.

The new EU rules will broaden out the definition of the crime — from sexual exploitation and slave labour to forced begging and removal of organs — which is estimated to rake in 2.5 billion euros a year, and set harsher penalties.

Source:khaleejtimes.com/
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'Modern day slave' was exploited by Harrow pensioner Saeeda Khan, Southwark Crown Court hears (From Harrow Times)

5:24pm Monday 7th March 2011

By Jack Royston »


A HARROW pensioner deprived a Tanzanian woman of food, liberty and her rights, turning her into a “modern day slave”, a court heard today.

Saeeda Khan, 68, of Whitmore Road, made Mwanahanisi Mruke sleep on a thin mattress in the cold of her kitchen, at times getting by on just two slices of bread, and summoned her by ringing a bell, prosecutors say.

Mrs Khan is accused of stopping her leaving the house, listening in on phone calls to relatives and even preventing the 47-year-old returning home to see her parents in their dying days or attend their funerals.

But even the £10 monthly allowance she had promised her employee was only paid for the first handful of months of her four-year stay and cash supposed to be given to her daughter was never transferred, it has been claimed.

Caroline Haughey, prosecuting, told Southwark Crown Court: “Deprived of her passport, deprived of free communication with her family, deprived of her income, deprived of her liberty, deprived of her food, it is only right that her conditions when working under Saeeda Khan be described as modern day slavery.”

Eventually Ms Mruke, who was supposed to work six hours a day but allegedly did shifts three times as long, became so desperate she was left simply waiting for her visa to run out, the court heard.

She was forced to work even when ill but it was her need for medical help that left her alone with a doctor and translator and it was then she first told of her treatment in February last year, Ms Haughey said.

She was at the Shaftesbury Medical Centre, in South Harrow, when she confided in the pair and Mrs Khan, who was made to wait outside, was seen shouting at Ms Mruke both inside and outside the clinic, the court heard.

When confronted by officers about the lack of payment to Ms Mruke, the defendant said “who will help me now”, it is claimed.

Ms Haughey said: “She was given a mattress and a blanket and told to sleep on the floor in the kitchen. She says herself she had one blanket and she was very cold.”

Mrs Khan does not deny bringing Ms Mruke into Britain to work as a domestic servant but claimed in police interviews the 47-year-old wanted to sleep on a mattress and had been offered alternatives.

She denies exploiting her employee.

The trial continues.
Modern day slave' was exploited by Harrow pensioner Saeeda Khan, Southwark Crown Court hears (From Harrow Times)

Women, Children, Men: All Victims of Human Trafficking in East Africa | East Africa | English

12 October 2010

“In Kenya we found women and children being subjected to sexual exploitation."

The International Organization for Migration says there’s an urgent need for tougher action against human trafficking in East Africa. The IOM has released a new assessment of the problem, saying men, women and children of all ages are being exploited.

Human trafficking often begins with the basic desire to seek a better life in another country. However, the IOM says that dream often turns into tragedy with exploitation by family members, religious acquaintances, businessmen and retired prostitutes.

Alice Kimani, the organization’s counter-trafficking program officer in Nairobi, says, “In East Africa, all the countries have been identified as sources, transit and destination countries for human trafficking.”

Although it affects both genders and all ages, Kimani says some are more attractive targets for traffickers.

“You find that children and young people are more vulnerable. But we also see a trend of men being trafficked, even older men for purposes of forced labor, though not in large numbers,” she says.

Many types of exploitation

“For example,” she says, “in Kenya we found women and children being subjected to sexual exploitation. We have found them exploited for domestic work. We’ve recently found some children from Tanzania trafficked to Kenya for street begging. We’ve also come across children who are trafficked to work in the agricultural sector. They are employed in farms and they are subjected to hard labor, forced labor.”

The assessment also found a lot of internal trafficking within Tanzania. Children from rural areas are lured by the promise of going to school. The tempting offer often comes from relatives or friends of their parents. They never make it to school. Instead, they are forced to do domestic labor.

It’s difficult for the IOM to give a good estimate as to how many people in East Africa are victims of human traffickers. “Because of lack of identification techniques or a centralized way of collecting data, a lot of this information gets lost in the way. So the victims may get assisted or they may not get assisted and we’ll never know their numbers,” Kimani says.

Organizing against traffickers

Some 50 senior East African government officials, civil society members and international experts reviewed the IOM’s assessment at a recent meeting. As a result, they proposed the organization take steps to help establish a regional network to share information on trafficking. That could eventually lead to a centralized database that could be shared with law enforcement agencies.

The organization says, currently, Rwanda is the only country in the region where the government has established both shelter and hotline services to assist victims of gender violence and trafficking.

Alice Kimani says they also called for implementation of a region-wide 116 emergency hotline number to report possible cases of human trafficking.

“It was recognized that 116 [is] a number that has been adopted by many countries in the region. For example, Mozambique and Zimbabwe already have 116. Kenya also has a 116. And 116 is a number that has been used in other countries as a very child-friendly line. So the participants were recommending for this number to actually be adopted by all the countries in East Africa,” she says.

Many victims are afraid to talk about their experiences. They say if they go public, traffickers could hurt their families or they could be stigmatized if they returned to their homes.

Kimani says, “It is only through counseling and assisting them that we can actually assist them to come out of that sort of hibernation.

Besides counseling, the International Organization for Migration also offers adult education or business classes to help them find jobs.

Continued violence in the Eastern DRC is contributing to the human trafficking problem. Buses and lorries carry war-weary Congolese to Uganda in hopes of finding a better life, but they often become prey of traffickers.

Women, Children, Men: All Victims of Human Trafficking in East Africa | East Africa | English

Source: VOANews.com

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BBC News - Kenyan arrested by Tanzania police over 'albino sale'

17 August 2010 Last updated at 09:25 ET

By Will Ross East Africa correspondent

The Tanzanian government has promised action to protect albinos

Police in Tanzania say they have arrested a Kenyan national who was attempting to sell an albino man.

The arrest was made in a sting operation as police pretended to be businessmen buying albino body parts.

Police say they struck a deal equivalent to more than $250,000 (£159,000) for the 20-year-old man.

Albino body parts are prized in parts of Africa, with witchdoctors claiming they have special powers. The Tanzanian government has promised to take action.

According to the Tanzanian police a 28-year-old Kenyan man, Nathan Mutei, was arrested just outside the town of Mwanza as he attempted to sell an albino man.

The regional police commander, Simon Siro, told the BBC that Mr Mutei had tricked a fellow Kenyan into believing he would secure a job in Tanzania as a truck driver's assistant.

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But the police said Mr Mutei had secretly tried to find businessmen willing to buy 20-year-old Robinson Mkwama. The police commander said they had posed as potential buyers in order to make the arrest.

Mr Mutei is due in court on Wednesday accused of human trafficking.

In Tanzania, the body parts of people living with albinism are used by witchdoctors for potions which they tell clients will help make them rich or healthy.

Over the last three years more than 50 albino adults and children have been killed. The Tanzanian government promised to take action, and there have been some court cases.

But justice is slow. So far, just seven men have been given death sentences.

The number of albino killings has fallen, but the fear is still strong. African albinos are also under threat from skin cancer and for that reason they rarely live beyond the age of 40.

BBC News - Kenyan arrested by Tanzania police over 'albino sale'

Tanzania quizzed over maid's YK enslavement

The suspect reportedly brought the 45-year old woman to Britain from Tanzania in 2006

By Freddy Macha, London

British police have questioned a London-based Tanzanian of Asian descent over the mistreatment of a Tanzanian maid.

The suspect reportedly brought the 45-year-old maid to Britain in 2006, but the woman from Kondoa District recently developed severe pain in her legs, which prompted her boss to take her to hospital.

It was while the maid was in hospital that doctors alerted authorities about her serious health condition. Police questioned her employer over what was described as "inhuman and appalling"conditions she was forced to work in.

The maid was then put under the care of an organisation which fights for the rights of domestic migrant workers and the Tanzania Women Association (Tawa), pending further investigations.

Police investigating the case learnt that the domestic worker was being paid ten pounds (about Sh22,000) a month, which was given to her at the end of the year. Her personal belongings were kept in a shed while she slept on the kitchen floor.

She was made to work every day, without break or leave, and her employer never called her by name, using a bell instead. Her boss also took away her passport, fearing she might escape.

Immigration rules in Britain state that an employer cannot own a domestic worker.

People brought into the country as domestic workers have the right to change employers as long as they have valid visas and work within households.

However, most immigrant domestic workers are unaware of this rule and, therefore, think that their employers own them in what is widely perceived as modern-day slavery.

Reports of the maid�s suffering surfaced a month after a Tanzanian couple were arrested and charged with human trafficking and immigration offences.

Mr and Mrs Shariff of Birmingham were released on bail and are expected to appear in court next month.

Meanwhile, another Tanzanian maid, Ms Zubeda Ali, has won her case at an employment tribunal and is awaiting a decision on her compensation.

The 32-year-old woman, who hails from Lindi Region, was brought to Britain to work as a maid in March 2007.

After allegations of physical and emotional abuse, her case was referred to various Tanzanian entities in the UK, including Tawa, which who sent her to London's Brent Law Community Centre.

Because of the seriousness of the allegations, the legal body liaised with solicitors specialising in human trafficking cases, who requested a judicial review of Ms Ali's case. This paved the way for police investigations into the matter.

Two months ago, British police officers travelled to Tanzania and met with Ms Ali�s parents in Lindi.

In 2008, another Tanzanian domestic worker in the UK, Ms Elizabeth Kawogo, won a case against her employers who were ordered to pay her the equivalent of Sh140 million in compensation by a London labour tribunal.

The compensation was for unpaid wages and suffering she endured at the hands of her employers, Mr and Mrs Ramzan Dhanji, who have yet to pay up.

Ms Kawogo is currently being assisted by the organisation Kalayaan, which fight for the rights of migrant domestic workers in Britain, and Tawa.

TheCitizen Newspaper