Uganda’s new slave trade as girls trafficked to
Asian region for sex
Max Delany | AFP Honorary Ugandan Consul to Malaysia Hajah Noraihan views police pictures of murdered Ugandan girls on her computer in Kampala on March 19, 2012.
KAMPALA,
Wednesday
Sitting at a table in a run-down bar on the edge of
Ugandan capital Kampala, Stella Kobusingye stares into the distance as she
recalls the tangle of lies and deceit that led to her sex-slavery ordeal.
Struggling to support her young son and sickly mother
with the income from a small shop, last year Kobusingye heard about a job
opportunity earning $800 a month working at a Ugandan-owned boutique in
Malaysia.
After double- and then triple-checking that the job
seemed genuine, Kobusingye sold her shop, paid for a passport and bought a visa
for China, where middlemen told her she needed transit, before being handed a
ticket and boarding a plane.
But when she arrived in China, she was met by a
Ugandan woman, taken to a hotel where scores of other Ugandan girls were
staying and told she now owed $7,000 for the airfare.
“There were no jobs there, they had lied to me — the
only thing they had taken me there for was prostitution,” Kobusingye, who asked
for her name to be changed, told AFP.
That night, a Nigerian man knocked on the door and
said he had paid to have sex with her. Kept prisoner in her hotel room and with
her passport taken away, for the next few weeks Kobusingye was forced —
sometimes brutally — to sleep with up to five Nigerian men each night.
To scare her into silence, Kobusingye says her captors
took her to a Ugandan witchdoctor there who used her fingernails and pubic hair
to perform rituals.
Kobusingye’s story is typical of a growing number of
young and vulnerable Ugandan women whom officials say are being duped into
travelling abroad — particularly to countries in the Far East and Middle East —
and then forced into prostitution.
In a country with massive unemployment and few
opportunities, posters in shopping malls around Kampala advertise opportunities
for well-paying jobs or studies abroad.
It is almost impossible to say how many Ugandan girls
have been trafficked abroad but officials estimate in Malaysia alone — a
country with visa-free travel for Ugandans and growing economic ties — there
are currently about 600 Ugandan women in forced prostitution.
There are no figures available for the number of
trafficked women in China.
During a recent visit to Kampala, Hajah Noraihan, a
Malaysian working as Uganda’s honorary consul in Kuala Lumpur, flicked through
a series of horrifying pictures to show what happens to the girls who refuse —
the face of a young woman thrown from a third-floor balcony, the body of
another brutally murdered on a bedroom floor.
In the past two years, at least three Ugandan girls have
been killed in Malaysia, she said.
Since late last year, Malaysian police have cracked
down on the prostitution rings. In a single raid in October, 21 Ugandan women
were discovered at just one location and there are around 60 currently being
detained by Malaysian authorities.
With the help of the International Organisation for
Migration, in the past five months 14 girls have been brought back to Uganda,
Noraihan says.
Now Ms Noraihan, a native of Kuala Lumpur, is pressing
authorities in Uganda to deal with the problem at its source.
“We really need to see action on this, not just talk,
not just reports. We need to see action on it and now,” she says.
That pressure seems to be paying off.
Although several of those suspected of trafficking
girls to Malaysia have already been arrested, critics say authorities have been
sluggish or too poorly funded and trained to effectively crack down on those
behind the rings.
Now though, officials from the immigration department
to law enforcement agencies and presidential advisers have started meeting on
the issue and a group of lawmakers is pushing to visit Malaysia to investigate
further.
But public awareness of the threat remains perilously
low and the trafficking rings are highly organised and increasingly
sophisticated, said Asan Kasingye, director of the Interpol office in Kampala.
“The criminals, these international rings, they are
also working against us. Instead of taking 10 girls, they might take one a week
and if you go to the airport and there is a person going to Malaysia she will
have documents saying she is going for studies,” Kasingye said.
After attempting to find a way to flee China,
Kobusingye’s captors sent her to Malaysia, where they thought it would be
easier to keep her.Uganda is just one of many sub-Saharan countries affected by
sex trafficking. Other countries affected include South Africa, Nigeria,
Malawi, Cape Verde, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Zambia.
But at Kuala Lumpur airport, immigration officials
stopped Kobusingye. During several months in detention there she had a
miscarriage.
Then she was told she had been infected with HIV.
Kobusingye was eventually sent back to Uganda with
assistance from the International Organisation for Migration and the Malaysian
consul.
Now she is trying to rebuild her life and start up a
second-hand clothes shop. (AFP)
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