June 25, 2000

U.N. Warns That Trafficking in Human Beings Is Growing

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

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UNITED NATIONS, June 23 -- Trafficking in people is now the fastest-growing business of organized crime, and it is being run by new, barely understood networks that have sidelined traditional criminal syndicates, the top anti-crime official at the United Nations said this week.

Pino Arlacchi, an Italian sociologist who worked closely on fighting the Mafia before becoming director general of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention three years ago, said in an interview Thursday that the tragic deaths this week of 58 Chinese migrants trying to reach Britain was "just the tip of the iceberg, and one of several recent accidents that show the magnitude and seriousness of the problem."

He said that reliable estimates indicate that 200 million people may now be in some way under the sway or in the hands of traffickers of various kinds worldwide. He said that while four centuries of slavery moved about 11.5 million people out of Africa, in the last decade more than 30 million women and children may have been trafficked within and from Southeast Asia for sexual purposes and sweatshop labor. Rates are also high in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

"This is the fastest growing criminal market in the world because of the number of people who are involved, the scale of profits being generated for criminal organizations -- and because of its multifold nature," said Mr. Arlacchi, a United Nations under secretary general. "We don't have just sexual exploitation. We don't have just economic slavery, which includes two things, forced labor and debt enslavement. We have also a lot of exploitation of migrants. And we have classic slavery.

"If you put all this together under the same concept, you get the biggest violation of human rights in the world," he said.

Among the proposals he is making to governments is that anti-slavery laws be reintroduced where they have lapsed or been taken off the books. He is also considering recommending temporary residence to would-be immigrants who cooperate with authorities in identifying criminals who are trafficking in people.

"This a measure that in some countries, like Italy and Austria, is showing very important results in understanding the nature of networks -- how the victims are attracted, how they are recruited and the way they are exploited," he said.

"But first of all, we really have to understand the size of the phenomenon," Mr. Arlacchi said. "It is a sensitive political issue. No country likes to admit to having sexual exploitation and human trafficking. So we have to be very careful how we deal with the source countries." In Europe, he said, large numbers of migrants are arriving from Africa, the former Soviet bloc, China, Southeast Asia and, lately, India.

Narcotics is still a bigger profit earner for organized crime than trafficking in people, he said. But the trade in human beings is growing quickly enough to demand better estimates of its value and links that the smuggling networks, strung along illegal migration routes, have with other areas of international crime, he added. In Europe, Mr. Arlacchi said, traffickers from Eastern Europe and Asia have already pushed crime gangs out of street prostitution in Western Europe.

The sexual slave trade was never acceptable to the Sicilian Mafia, Mr. Arlacchi said. "They are totally out of this business and they are losing ground vis a vis all other international competitors because of that." Albanians and other Balkan criminal groups, known for their ferocity, dominate street trade in drugs and prostitutes.

"The Albanians are particularly ferocious," he said. "In three or four years in the biggest Italian cities they have succeeded in destroying the competition of the other organizations. Albanians scare the Sicilian Mafia."

Chinese migrants are not found often in the sex trade, Mr. Arlacchi said. Like the migrants who died on the way to Britain and many who find their way to North America, he said, most Chinese are headed for restaurant or sweatshop work, and disappear into neighborhoods and businesses run by other Asians.

Compared with Italian or other European syndicates, he said, Chinese and other Asian networks are very closed, and therefore hard to penetrate.

"The Chinese work very much inside closed communities," he said.