Illustration of the Trafficking in Persons Report 2010
This Monday June 14, the US Department released its global 10th annual report on Trafficking in Persons (TIP) titled "Trafficking in Persons Report 2010." The State Department is mandated to do so by the law called The United States’ Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA).
TVPA stems from the UN Palermo “Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children” to which 117 countries are signatories.
And, according to the letter of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that prefaces it,
“The Report, for the first time, includes a ranking of the United States based on the same standards to which we hold other countries. The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America. This human rights abuse is universal, and no one should claim immunity from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.”The introduction of the Report repeats Clinton’s argument, and adds that “[there] is no shame in addressing a problem of this magnitude; the shame lies in ignoring it.”
The Report ranks countries in 4 tiers, with an accompanying interactive Google map assigning tier color codes to each country: 1) Tier 1 (color: blue); 2) Tier 2 (color: yellow) ; 3) Tier 2 Watch list (color: dark orange); 3) Tier 3 (orange red).
Here’s how the Report defines these 4 tiers:
“Tier 1The Report also gives alphabetical country narratives that are compiled from reports by NGOs, local civil societies, individual citizens and American diplomats. The country narrative is written according to the “3P paradigm”: Prevention, Protection and Prosecution. The narrative also provides recommendations to each individual country’s government.
Countries whose governments fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.
Tier 2
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.
Tier 2 Watch List
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards AND:
a) the absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing;
b) there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year, including increased investigations, prosecution, and convictions of trafficking crimes, increased assistance to victims, and decreasing evidence of complicity in severe forms of trafficking by government officials; or,
c) the determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional steps over the next year.
Tier 3
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.”
A chart of the diachronic tier positioning of the country since the inception of this reporting in 2000 is also given in the Report.
The specific case of the DRC is enlightening when it comes to this chart of diachronic positioning. From the abysmal low of a tier-3 country in 2000, the DRC shot up 2 ranks to tier-2 in 2003, falling down one rank in 2004 to a tier-2-watch-list country, and then climbing up again to a tier-2 country in 2005 where it maintained itself for three consecutive years till 2007. The DRC slid down for the next two years to a tier-2-watch-list country; and then spiraled down abruptly to a tier-3 country this year, the very rank it had 10 years ago!
Well, this downturn could easily be diagnosed. It is by and large attributable to the wrong-headed peace agreements imposed on the DRC by the international community whereby armed groups, instead of simply being disarmed, are incorporated helter-skelter under the umbrella of the FARDC while maintaining their own command and control.
The Report itself recognizes this fact in so many words:
“From November 2008 to October 2009, 623 confirmed cases of unlawful child soldier recruitment were attributed to the FARDC, 75 percent of which were attributable to ex-CNDP (National Congress for the Defense of the People, a former Congolese rebel group) elements absorbed into the FARDC in 2009. In April 2009, for example, 100 children, ages 13 to 15, were recruited by the FARDC along the Bunyakiri-Hombo axis. An unspecified number of children recruited by the CNDP during past reporting periods remain within integrated FARDC units.”
For many Congolese, the imposition of these peace agreements evinces a lack of respect for the Congolese nation, for it would never cross the mind of these peace-makers to force this kind of arrangement between, say, the FDLR and the Rwandan government.
Be that as it may, the Report is out. And, contrary to human rights groups’ annual reports that Lambert Mende, the Congolese Minister of Information, could dismiss with contempt, the State Department Report has venomous fangs that could paralyze the cash-strapped DRC government—particularly at this juncture where it’s reached a crucial point in its debt-relief program with the IMF:
“Pursuant to TVPA, governments of countries on Tier 3 may be subject to certain sanctions, whereby the U.S. government may withhold nonhumanitarian, non-trade-related foreign assistance. Such assistance may be withdrawn from countries receiving it, and in addition, countries on Tier 3 may not receive funding for government employees’ participation in educational and cultural exchange programs. Consistent with the TVPA, governments subject to sanctions would also face U.S. opposition to assistance (except for humanitarian, trade-related, and certain development-related assistance) from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Imposed sanctions will take effect on October 1, 2010 (…)”
What’s even more damning, there’s also the stringent U.S. Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 (CSPA) with its separate sanctions. CSPA has issued a 2010 infamous list of 6 countries (with Burma, Chad, DRC, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen) that are also barred from receiving certain critical “forms of assistance” from the U.S. by October 1, 2010, including “international military education and training, foreign military financing, excess defense articles, section 1206 assistance, and the issuance of licenses for direct commercial sales of military equipment.”
The squeeze is definitely on the DRC. And the pro-government media of the Congolese capital that also function as the regime weathermen are now frantically broadcasting early warning advisories on the twister about to blast “throughout fiscal year 2011,” as the Report ominously anticipates.
I don’t know whether this Report is also translated into other languages. In the DRC, the Report is utterly misunderstood by the media, who seem to misconstrue it, based on VOA reporting, as dealing solely with “human slavery” as practiced in Mauritania, for example, whereas the expression “trafficking in persons” (TIP) covers a wide spectrum of crimes, including forced labor and use of child soldiers—of which are routinely accused various Congolese armed groups (as well as the FARDC).
The misconstruction of the Report explains this bafflement of Joachim Diana G. of L’Avenir in a June 16 article titled “DRC-USA: Washington threatens DRC with sanctions”:
“That the U.S. State Department should put the DRC in the same boat as Mauritania for example could certainly be shocking and concealing something nefarious. It’s well known that in Mauritania black communities are still living in slavery. It’s understandable to demand that the leaders of that country put an end to that practice. There are no Congolese who put [other] Congolese in slavery.”
This is crass ignorance and wacky reporting. First, the slavery in Mauritania is not state policy but practiced by some in local communities, a fact of which Joachim Diana G. seems unaware. Secondly, armed groups in the DRC routinely coerce people to work as diggers in mines, as carriers of their wares or use women as sex slaves. And more importantly, the concept “Trafficking in Persons” doesn’t necessarily involve moving the victim from one place to another.
In a delirious editorial on the same subject also penned by Joachim Diana G. and entitled “Washington takes off the mask,” L’Avenir literally loses its marbles:
“The DRC gives the impression of a country under siege. A country that doesn’t know whence the danger would come. (…) When Barack Obama came to power, Africans thought that a page would be turned on a certain American policy [in Africa]. Now we have become disillusioned. (…) [We] are entitled to fall back to the belief that the USA remains the USA, whatever the shape of the nose of its president.”
Joachim Diana G. also charges that:
“When you scan the list of countries warned by Washington, you find yourself along a certain axis of unloved countries. It consists of Eritrea, Mauritania, Sudan and Zimbabwe."
Wow, nice cast of rogue and knaving countries!... The State Department should urgently consider translating this Report into French so as to avoid this kind of misapprehension in the boonies of this world.
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