Damascus rejects US charges of human trafficking

Syria on Wednesday dismissed a US State Department report listing it among the countries accused of human trafficking, saying that the report was “irrational, far from reality and aims at subjugating Damascus to the political orientation of the US”. “Human trafficking is an illicit industry of coercion, subjugating and exploiting the world's most vulnerable people for profit and personal gain,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at a briefing on the 2000 Trafficking in Persons Report on 5 June. As many as 800,000 people – mostly women and children – are bought and sold across national borders each year or lured to foreign countries with false promises of work, the State Department survey notes. The report also presents a list of 12 violators, many of which are already at odds with Washington: Myanmar; Cuba; Iran; Laos; North Korea; Sudan; Syria; Uzbekistan; Venezuela; Zimbabwe; Saudi Arabia; and Belize. While the report does not rank the US in terms of human trafficking, it concludes that US efforts aimed at curbing the trend “need improvement”. The report goes on to note that countries failing to crack down on trafficking can be subjected to a variety of sanctions, including the withholding of US aid funding. Countries such as Syria that receive no US aid, meanwhile, can be declared ineligible to participate in cultural and educational exchange programmes with the US. The government-owned Al-Thawra newspaper responded to Syria’s inclusion on the list of offender-nations by calling the report “malign, and coming from [a country] up to its neck in sin”. Al-Thawra went on to charge that the US was directly responsible for the increase in human trafficking, adding that Washington was trying to “deal a blow to all human rights principles worldwide through defaming human beings and countries and subjugating them to its political orientations”. “The issue [of human trafficking] is not a game,” the paper added. “The US is trying to hit us in an area that we have long preserved: our social and ethical security.” Ammar Qurabi, head of a prominent local human rights group, also rejected the US charge as “baseless”, saying that human trafficking was “rejected in Syria socially, morally and religiously, as it's well known that Syrian society is a conservative one”. While Qurabi conceded that there were some violations involving eastern European and Asian women coming to Syria “to work as show girls”, he added that such cases were relatively few. The US considers Syria a state sponsor of terrorism and accuses Damascus of allowing militants to cross into Iraq to fight US-led coalition troops. These charges have never been substantiated. AO/AR/AM