EUROPE ‘TURNING A BLIND EYE’ TO TRAFFICKING OF VIETNAM’S CHILDREN
THE most talked about woman and political prisoner this International Women’s Day is Leyla Guven, who has been on a hunger strike for 121 days – over four months.
Guven is a democratically elected member of Turkey’s parliament who represents the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, which is protesting against the isolation of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Ocalan has been incarcerated for 20 years on Imrali island.
Iconic women around the world are speaking out in support of Guven, including African-American writer Angela Davis, who has written a letter to The New York Times, and Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled.
Fifty Nobel Laureates have signed a letter calling for an immediate end to Ocalan’s solitary confinement, which is prohibited under the “Mandela rules”, the UN’s minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor and Nigerian author Wole Soyinka are among the Nobel Laureates calling for an end to Ocalan’s solitary confinement.
The Turkish authorities have kept Ocalan in complete isolation. He has not been allowed to meet his lawyers since July 2011 and has been allowed only one family visit since 2016. His letters, faxes and phone calls have been banned indefinitely.
South Africa’s parliamentary spokesperson, Lechesa Tsenoli, has called for an international campaign for Ocalan’s release, similar to that waged for Nelson Mandela’s release.
“The Kurds are going through much of what we went through,” Tsenoli has said.
Mandela himself had rejected the Ataturk Award which Turkey wanted to bestow on him, saying the award was “not consistent with our principles”.
Madiba had rejected it as a sign of protest against the continued incarceration of Ocalan, whom he had promised to give asylum in 1999 if he managed to get to South Africa.
It was when Ocalan was en route to South Africa that he was abducted by Turkish intelligence in cahoots with other intelligence agencies at Nairobi’s airport.
Ever since Guven started her hunger strike on November 8 last year, hunger strikes in solidarity have spread across Turkey, Kurdistan, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.
Fifteen people have gone on a solidarity hunger strike outside the European Council.
On March 1, a mass movement began in Turkey’s prisons as thousands of political prisoners announced they would begin an indefinite hunger strike. As of last month 331 prisoners in Turkey had officially gone on hunger strike in 67 prisons.
The hunger strike has been used by political prisoners as a method of passive resistance over time. Mahatma Gandhi used it to fight racism and to promote equal rights for Indians at the end of British colonial rule in India.
This hunger strike is particularly justified, considering isolation is a crime against humanity, which is why Guven has accepted that her protest may well lead to her death.
The Kurds’ struggle for autonomy in Turkey has been a long one, and they were subjected to genocide in the 20th century.
The Kurds are the largest non-Turkish ethnic group in Turkey and they have been targets of assimilation and ethnic cleansing policies.
After the 1980 coup in Turkey, the authoritarian nationalism failed to recognise ethnic identities, which is what led to the Kurdish uprisings and the formation of the PKK.
Ocalan’s struggle has been one for democratic autonomy for the Kurds, and a system which ensures cultural diversity, gender equality and the co-existence of ethnic and religious components.
The Kurds are in need of constitutional recognition, and the right to use, and study in, their language needs to be protected. There are Kurds living in South Africa who grew up in the Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey and were forced into boarding schools at a young age by the Turkish government, dragged away from their parents.
For years they were beaten at school weekly for having the audacity to speak the Kurdish language.
For one prominent Kurdish South African, the beatings became a weekly occurrence in his school years, and the discrimination continued into his adult life, in that being Kurdish was a constant impediment to upward mobility and getting a good job in mainstream Turkish society.
It is all a continuing machiavellian attempt to destroy the Kurdish culture and language, and to indoctrinate the young with a strong sense of Turkish nationalism, which is intolerant of minority cultures, particularly Kurdish culture.
Just as South Africans, including some of our ministers, engaged in a solidarity hunger strike with the Palestinian political prisoners a few years ago, perhaps it is time to express solidarity with Guven and the struggle of the Kurds for equal rights and in particular call for Ocalan’s release from incarceration.
Madiba would have expected nothing less, particularly this Women’s Day.
Ebrahim is the group foreign editor for Independent Media. THOUSANDS of children trafficked to Britain from Vietnam are being abused and exploited while travelling through Europe as governments pass the buck on their protection, amid growing anti-immigration sentiment, three charities have claimed.
Vietnamese children destined for Britain are often forced to work – from cultivating cannabis to painting nails – or sold for sex to pay off debts to their traffickers as they are taken through Europe, the anti-slavery groups said in a report.
As Britain uncovers rising numbers of suspected child slaves from Vietnam, European nations are failing to spot or protect them, instead placing responsibility on other states, said Anti-Slavery International, ECPAT UK and Pacific Links Foundation.
“The extent of abuse children trafficked from Vietnam to Europe suffer is shocking,” said Jasmine O’Connor, chief executive of Britain-based charity Anti-Slavery International.
“By the time they arrive in the United Kingdom, the vast majority have been mercilessly exploited along the way.”
Vietnam is consistently one of the top source countries for modern slaves in Britain – at least 3187 suspected Vietnamese victims have been identified since 2009, official data shows.
About 362 possible child victims from Vietnam were uncovered in Britain in 2017 – up more than a third on 2016.
European states must treat such children crossing their borders as victims – rather than criminals or illegal migrants – and stop them from “slipping through the net”, the report said.
Britain is sold as the promised land to many Vietnamese, who pay traffickers large sums of money and travel thousands of kilometres across Europe by foot, boat and lorry over several months.
Children are typically controlled by the debt owed to their traffickers – sometimes as much as £30000 (R560000) – for the cost of their travel and the supposed arrangement of a good job in Britain, according to the research.
Yet such jobs often fail to materialise and children are instead forced to work in abusive conditions to clear the debts and are beaten by traffickers, the charities said in the report.
“Under international law, states have a duty to protect children from trafficking and exploitation,” said Debbie Beadle, director of programmes at anti-child trafficking group ECPAT UK.
“It’s simply not acceptable for states to regard trafficked Vietnamese children as another country’s problem.”
Authorities in Europe view the trafficking of Vietnamese as an issue to be dealt with by Britain as the destination country, while there is a lack of co-operation among various actors both within and between nations to tackle the trend, the report said.
“There is often a shrug of the shoulders, an attitude that Vietnamese communities are closed off and hard to crack, therefore ‘we can’t do anything about it’,” said Mimi Vu of Pacific Links Foundation, a US-based anti-trafficking charity.
“Preventing people leaving Vietnam is always the priority, but European countries must do more to stop trafficking and exploitation along the way,” said Vu, who has visited Vietnamese communities across Europe.