Slave Trade in Eyerak

Slave trade in US-controlled Iraq?
From Our Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON - Contractors working for the United States have brought tens of thousands of workers into Iraq from poor countries to do the dirtiest jobs in one of the most dangerous places on Earth, but no one cares for their rights or even their lives, a news media report said Sunday.

Among the contractors is KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, which was headed by Dick Cheney before he became US vice president. 

Recruited mainly from Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines, several workers have been kidnapped and some of them even killed by Iraqi resistance fighters. Observers here say it ironic that while the United States itself is tightening its procedures to restrict the flow of foreign workers, it is importing them in big numbers in a country where they are calling the shots. 

In a dispatch, The Los Angles Times said America�s reliance on the world�s poorest people to do menial jobs, from cooking and serving food to cleaning toilets, raises troubling questions. 

In doing so, the U.S. has embraced a system of labour migration rife with abuse, corruption and exploitation, according to dozens of contractors, migrant workers, labour officials and advocates interviewed by the Times in four countries.

The system revolves around so-called labour brokers, whose numbers have exploded during the last decade in the Middle East and Asia, the dispatch said. 

Such agencies take advantage of porous borders and rising global demand for cheap labour to move poor workers from one country to low-paying jobs in another.

Although millions of Iraqis are desperate for jobs, the U.S. military requires that contractors such as KBR hire foreigners to work at bases to avoid the possibility of infiltration by reistance fighters.

Willing to work anywhere, the labourers often take out usurious loans to pay the agencies a finder�s fee for the overseas jobs. Once abroad, the workers find themselves with few protections and uncertain legal status.

In Iraq, the vulnerability of such workers is heightened. Neither the U.S. nor Iraq has an adequate system for protecting their rights, the Times said, citing labour advocates say.

Violence is the greatest risk. At least a third of the 255 contractors reported killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 came from Second or Third World countries, according to a Times analysis of data maintained by a website that tracks contractor deaths.

The enforcement of labour rights appears virtually nonexistent. Those slain in Iraq, including 12 men from Nepal should have been covered by generous death benefits required by federal law for anyone working for a U.S. contractor, even indirectly, The Times said, citing insurance and legal experts. But their families have received no such payments.
After questions from The Times, KBR said it would investigate whether benefits were owed. KBR is the largest employer in Iraq of third-country nationals, with about 25,000 workers, typically through Middle Eastern subcontractors.

Because of the danger of exploitation, some labour-exporting countries, such as the Philippines and Nepal, have forbidden their nationals to work in Iraq, the dispatch said. 

But labour brokers bring in such workers using loopholes in a system with almost no regulation. An estimated 5,000 Nepalese work in Iraq.
Labour advocates, cited by the Times, say the practice amounts to modern-day indentured servitude, funded by U.S. taxpayers.
�This is 2005. This is a sort of slave trade,� Majed Habashneh, undersecretary for Jordan�s Labour Ministry, was quoted as saying.

 Jordan has been struggling to contain a wave of people passing into Iraq. �No one is taking care of the human rights of these people. Who will take responsibility?�