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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks at State Department Conference on the Global Fight against Sex Trafficking
Andrew S. Natsios, USAID Administrator
U.S. Department of State
Washington, D.C.
25 February 2003
It's a pleasure to be here at this very important
conference. I do want to commend my
good friend Paula Dobriansky for her leadership, her commitment, and her
expertise in the area of human trafficking. She sits next to me actually every morning in the 8:30 meeting with
Secretary Powell, so we know each other's work very well. We talk before the meeting starts and one of
the subjects that comes up often in our conversations is how we're driving
forward the agenda on trafficking. She
has been a major international leader on this issue, and I want to commend to
all of you the wonderful work that she and her staff have done in her bureau.
I have
several comments I want to make tonight.
The first is that even though we sometimes disaggregate these issues,
international criminal cartels increasingly exist in the world and use the high
technology that we talk about in the new global system, and the legal global
system of the new international economy for their own purposes. And so there has been a dramatic increase in
international criminal activity as globalization has proceeded.
There's a
darker side as well as a brighter, legitimate side of international
business. These latter have created
jobs and a wealth of opportunity around the world. But these same technologies have also been used for darker
purposes.
There's a
wonderful book written by a friend of mine, Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani
journalist who writes for the Far Eastern Economic Review. It's called "The Taliban." It's the preeminent work on the Taliban,
written before September 11th. Ahmed
describes in this book how al Qaeda and Taliban used the drug trade in
Afghanistan to fund the international terrorist network of al Qaeda. (Even though they condemned the drug trade
for people from their particular sect of Islam, the reality is they'll abide if
Sufist Muslims use drugs, because they'd been massacring Sufist Muslims all
over Africa, I understand, before the United States went in after September
11th. They in fact have said it can poison
the West if we allow these narcotics.)
So if you
look carefully at the kind of work international criminal cartels are involved
in, there is a lot of it - in human trafficking; in slave acquisition in Sudan;
in the drug trade; in counterfeiting.
People
wonder why we changed our currency recently in terms of the printing of our
bills. The reason is to make it much more difficult to counterfeit. I see the bills myself in the developing
world, where states that are weak or collapsed are wonderful breeding grounds
for all these criminal activities, including counterfeiting.
And so if
we think we can separate these issues, we can't. These groups are involved with each other in various criminal
cartels and are using high technology to make huge profits against the rule of
law. We need to know all of these
networks that violate the rule of law, the very basis of democracy and of human
rights.
Let me make
some comments specifically on the trafficking issue itself. There are three points that I want to make
tonight.
The first
is that human trafficking is an abuse of human rights. It is a human rights issue. We need to treat it that way. It is a repugnant business that not only
abuses the human rights of the victim, but stands as a direct affront to all of
us. People who are ensnared and
entrapped are often kept in conditions of virtual slavery. As a contemporary form of slavery, this is a
clear violation of international standards, rights that are accepted worldwide.
There are
various kinds of this abuse. There's
debt bondage, as we see in some countries in Asia. There's impressment, there's forced labor, there’s indentured
servitude. All of these are, in
different form, violations of inalienable human rights.
We know
that a large number of women and children are trafficked for the specific
purpose of sexual exploitation. This,
too, is a violation of individual rights, because forced sex is rape, and rape
is a form of torture.
Secondly,
human trafficking is development issue. We cannot separate the development process in a country from the
trafficking issue. Poverty, lack of
opportunity, lack of jobs, inadequate economic growth, collapsed economies,
inadequate education, and the special needs of women and children are all
development issues.
I don't
know if the study's been done, but -- it would be difficult to do this, I
suppose -- but if you took women who had been trafficked and see how many of
them have college degrees, I suspect you'd find a very, very low correlation. It is not that traffickers choose people
without education, it's that women who have a college degree, or at least a
high school education, are much less likely to be naive about promises that are
made by people who understand the reality of the way the world works and its
darker side. And so education is critically
important, in addition to other parts of development, to reducing the
vulnerability of women to trafficking.
The dimension of this despicable business and
the sophistication of the organizations and the networks that support it are
becoming clearer to all of us all the time. And so, too, is the commitment of the United States to fight it.
Paula
mentioned some of the things that USAID is doing around the world. We now invest $10 million a year in programs
specifically aimed at trafficking. Of
course, we've just doubled our budget over the last few years on the
instructions of President Bush. In our
education program we went from $100 million to actually, I think it's $212
million for our fiscal year 2004 budget request. So we've had a dramatic increase in our funding just in primary
education. And I always like to say
that we like to invest money in development programs that have multiple good
side effects.
And
primary education's an interesting thing, because it not only improves a young
person's chances for a job and economic growth -- we've done studies in Africa
and other countries that show that without any additional input or training,
just a sixth-grade education for girls, will substantially increase their
purchasing power.
I suspect the
reason has something to do with computational skills that women can use in
calculating what makes sense in terms of what they purchase. We're not quite sure. But the studies are very clear.
It's also
clear that education has an effect, as I mentioned earlier, on trafficking and
on human rights generally. We have
programs now in 34 countries in trafficking, designed to address a variety of
different parts of the trafficking problem.
Development
is a very long and hard, difficult task. One thing I always tell people who want immediate results is if you want
immediate results, you won't get them. The fact of the matter is: development takes a while to take place.
I tell this
story. My father was born in the United
States, like my mother, but my grandparents on both sides of my family were
born in the old country, Greece. They
came to America a hundred years ago. We
went to their village in 1963, and my father said it was so depressing in my
grandfather's village that he would never go again. People were ill; they were stunted in growth because of poor
nutrition. There were high mortality
rates even then, in 1963. And people
were poorly educated: my grandfather was illiterate when he came to the United
States.
And we went
back. I took my wife and my kids back
in 1994, 30 years later. The village
had no donkeys: everybody had cars and tractors. Everybody had at least a high school degree. The streets were all paved. The nutrition was so good that people were
bigger than my kids and I. When you go
through a list of indicators, it's very clear that in 30 years Greece went from
a Third World country with per capita income of $300 to a First World country
with per capita income of $16,000. I
asked people why in the village; I said what's changed here? My father said don't go back, it's so
depressing. They said, it's because
Greece joined the European Union and their products are now exported all over
Europe. And that income means more jobs
and more wealth. This is a remote
village, in the rural area.
And people
aren't emigrating out of the village; they're going back to the village. People were leaving the village because it
was so poor, and now they're coming back to the village. That's the real Greece.
The point
here is that it took 30 years for one of the poorest countries in Europe to
become a prosperous middle-class democracy. Development works, but it does take time, it takes investment, and it
takes commitment. And it takes economic
growth. Economic growth will help us in
whole effort to destroy trafficking and the other international criminal
cartels around the world.
The third
point I want to make tonight, the final point, is that trafficking is a
criminal justice issue. We should not
separate criminal justice from all these international criminal cartels,
particularly human trafficking.
One
organization that has shown what can be done when enforcement is taken
seriously is the International Justice Mission (IJM). I have a little bias in this because World Vision, where I served
as vice president for five years, was one of the original funders, as I recall,
of Gary Haugen's group, the International Justice Mission. And for a short time -- I won't embarrass
you, Gary -- I did sit on the board of directors. I don't know how much trouble I caused when I was on the board,
but it is a very impressive organization because it's focusing on what it needs
to focus on, which is the criminal justice area.
By
employing criminal justice investigators and seasoned law enforcement
professionals, the IJM has used modern surveillance technology to document
where children are being held -- depending on the cadre and the trafficking
we're talking about -- and in the collection of evidence for prosecution.
I think we
need to test the law more aggressively around the world to see whether or not
an aggressive enforcement model will bring down the trafficking rates. I have every confidence that's exactly
what's going to happen. And I think we
need to focus more attention on this aspect of it, because it is a legal issue,
it's a rule of law issue, and it's a criminal justice issue.
We at AID and at the State Department will work with all of you and your organizations around the world to advance the cause of human rights and to advance our efforts to destroy the criminal cartels, particularly the trafficking cartels. I've made this a personal priority for myself.
We have a new AID anti-trafficking strategy that will come out very shortly. I didn't realize this, and I always am
surprised by it, but AID is a great jewel. But it is not well recognized around the world. I shouldn't say that. In the Third World, its development work is very well recognized. It's not well recognized sometimes in the United States. But the reality is, some of the experts in the world on human trafficking are in AID field missions. I've been meeting with them over time, and they've been educating me about what we need to do to combat this blight against humanity.
So we are your allies and your friends, and we look forward to working with you.
Thank you very much.
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