For a list of the current Friends of the Scottish Review, click here
Marian Pallister
It costs £35 to get a visa to enter Zambia. Its High Commission doesn’t ask citizens of every country to go through the process of applying for one, and that process is far less rigorous than the circus hoops through which our Government pushes visitors to the UK.
Even so, there are checks, and questions are asked at Lusaka International Airport. Forms have to be filled in when you leave the country.
And it was when he tried to leave the country that one particular visitor fell foul of this rather gentle system. He was a man in the company of six teenage boys, and despite the apparently laid back Zambian border controls, he was spotted for what he was – a trafficker of vulnerable youngsters.
I learned the story of this man and the six youngsters from the manager of the children’s residential centre supported by the charity I set up. I was there to sign the lease on the land where we’ll build a school for young people whose vulnerability stems from poverty.
When the manager received a call from the child care ministry a few weeks ago and was asked if he could look after six teenage Syrians, he didn’t know what to expect or why. The story turned out to be complex, international – and deeply disturbing.
Mike, one of ‘our’ boys, told me that he used Google translator to communicate with the Syrians. Sign language helped, too, to reveal the extent to which their trafficker and his accomplices were willing and able to go to feed greed and corruption.
The boys came from one village in Syria that had been destroyed by government forces. They were separated from their families and don’t really know whether their parents are alive or dead. In the confusion of the massacre, they joined others who were fleeing across daunting mountains into Turkey where they were settled into a refugee camp.
It was there that a man talked to them and suggested that he could get them away from all this danger and the squalor of the camps. He’d take them to Holland and the future would be bright. They told Mike that he was nice to them and gave them gifts. As Mandy Rice Davies once said, ‘he would, wouldn’t he?’.
What the manager of the centre learned was that the somewhat circuitous route to Holland, south through Africa, was made easy by bribes and false documents. Each of the boys had two passports. The leg from Zambia to South Africa was scuppered because the bribed immigration official wasn’t there to escort them through the airport at Lusaka. The group was monitored on their long and winding road by international authorities and this no-show allowed them to pounce.
The whole party was thrown into prison – and Zambian prisons are no picnic – until the Ministry of Child Care was called in and the transfer to our residential centre was made.
The man remains in custody while it is decided whether he should be tried in Zambia or elsewhere. Chillingly, after a couple of weeks, the six boys were taken to the Syrian embassy. When the centre manager asked if he and I could pay them a visit, he was told the request would have to be referred, that the boys were being cared for elsewhere – obfuscation was the name of a frightening game.
I wondered what the greatest threat was to these youngsters – to be taken to Holland and sold on into the sex industry in Britain and mainland Europe or to be ‘looked after’ by the officials of the government that had bombed their village and created the possibility for such trafficking?
In the furore in the UK surrounding the obscene abuses allegedly perpetrated by Jimmy Savile, we are ignoring a flourishing trade emanating from the Middle East. Syrian women are sold online. Others have been sold by their own families to get them out of the refugee camps.
Ironically, until the civil war turned the country upside down, Syria was the destination of trafficked women and children. Syrian nightclub owners recruited women from Iraq, eastern Europe, former Soviet states, Somalia, and Morocco. Criminal gangs exploited women and children from the Iraqi refugee community living in Syria. Now Syrian children are being spirited away from the refugee camps in Turkey for western destinations.
If it’s still worth it after the long journey south and then north again, with all its attendant bribes, purchase of false documents, hotel bills and grooming gifts for the victims, then somebody somewhere is making a real killing out of this sick trade.
In 1989, governments worldwide signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which gave those aged 18 and under the same rights accorded to adults – respect for the dignity and worth of each individual, regardless of race, gender, language, religion, opinions, wealth or ability.
In 2012 we have learned of cared-for children throughout the UK, accorded no dignity or respect for their worth. And somebody somewhere is planning to import refugees – already traumatised by violence, bereavement and the chaos of civil war – to satisfy the deadly sins of lust and greed.
It seems that those signatures on the UN Convention were worthless. We don’t listen to the voices of children who have been violated. We don’t watch out for those who are vulnerable to exploitation. We seem to care more about the reputation of the BBC than the broken lives of those defiled in childhood by one of its employees.
Shouldn’t the measure of a ‘civilised’ society be the level of respect and justice it metes out to every child – whether they are Syrian refugees or Scottish kids in care?
Marian Pallister is the founder and chair of MALI, an Argyll-based charity that provides education for vulnerable young people in Zambia
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web