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Smashing the snakeheads
By Ma Guihua (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-02 10:40

Smashing the snakeheads

Zhao Xianming, a narcotics control officer for Mengla county in Southwest China's Yunnan province, remembers July 25 clearly.

Around midday that Saturday, he received a call from a senior police officer of Phongsaly province, northern Laos, urging him to stop a bus going from Lao to Mengla.

"I was told that a Laotian woman suspected of trafficking two girls was trying to bypass border check points," recalls Zhao.

The two victims, cousins aged 14 and 15, had been excited about the prospects of working at a restaurant in a neighboring county in Laos promised by the Laotian woman, who was married to a Chinese man. They never imagined that they were actually heading for China.

"Thanks to timely communication, the two girls were rescued at the border crossing and handed to the Lao police the same day," says Zhao.

Smashing the snakeheads

A mother and daughter in Luangnamtha, northern Laos. Sexual exploitation and forced labor are among the most common forms of human trafficking.

Mengla is Yunnan's southernmost county and shares a 677.8-km border with Laos in the south and east. It is separated from Myanmar on the west by just a river. With 46 land crossings, 14 market places for border residents, as well as five motorways to the Lao and Myanmar border, it is regarded a major passageway to Southeast Asia.

People living on the Lao-China border tend to share the same customs and speak the same language. But differences in economic levels on either side of the border have sparked cross-border migration, and with this has emerged human trafficking.

In the 10 years that he has worked in narcotics control in Mengla, Zhao has been involved in rescuing and returning more than 10 victims of trafficking from Laos.

"Most victims are teenage girls from mountainous areas in northern Lao, who were lured by job or marriage prospects on the other side of the border," says the Kunming Army Academy graduate who is fluent in the Lao language.

Although economic factors are the driving force in cross-border migration, Zhao also cites the gender ratio that is skewed in favor of men, as a reason.

With more Chinese farmers engaged in growing rubber trees or other cash crops to help the locals weed out poppy production in Laos - which is part of the notorious Golden Triangle for drugs - a clandestine cross-border match-making service has emerged. This is reinforced by the growing demand for brides smuggled from Laos, according to Zhao.

Says Wang Wei, police chief in Mengla, since 2000 the police have received 31 reports of trafficking from Laos. Of these, 19 were tracked down to Hunan, Shanxi, Henan and Shandong. Some were even found as far as Suzhou in East China's Jiangsu province.

Although trafficking along the China-Lao border is not as bad as along the China-Myanmar and China-Vietnam border, the opening of the Kunming-Bangkok highway (via Mengla) last year is cause for concern.

"We have to brace ourselves for more cases," says Hang Lintao, of the Yunnan Public Security Bureau.

A Global Report on Trafficking in Persons released this February by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that almost 20 percent of all trafficking victims were children. In some parts of the Mekong region including China, it noted, children formed the majority. Sexual exploitation and forced labor are the most common forms of human trafficking, it noted.

The latest report by the United Nations Children's Fund titled Child Trafficking in East and Southeast Asia: Reversing the Trend warns that child trafficking continues in East and Southeast Asia.

"Poverty does not cause trafficking. The demand for cheap or exploitable labor, sex with children, adoption outside the legal channels, women or girls for marriage, all contribute to the trafficking phenomenon," it said.

The recently-inaugurated liaison office in Mengla is one of a series of steps taken along China's southwest border to fight cross-border trafficking through the sharing of information and investigating, as well as repatriating the victims.

Over the years, child trafficking within China has penetrated almost all provinces. In the six-month special anti-trafficking operation this year leading up to mid-October, Chinese police cracked 1,717 cases, rescuing 2,008 trafficked children. In the meantime, cross-border trafficking is also on the rise.

The China office of UNICEF started its pilot project on China-Vietnam cross-border trafficking in 2001 and since then it has supported the Chinese government in setting up border liaison offices in Dongxing, Pingxiang, Jingxi in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, and Ruili, Hekou, Longchuan and Mohan in Yunnan province.

Two ad hoc anti-trafficking operations between Chinese and Vietnamese police in 2005 and 2006 have resulted in the rescue and return of hundreds of victims.

Rehabilitation centers were also established in Dongxing and Ningming in Guangxi, and Kunming in Yunnan, where victims of trafficking are attended to and healed physically and mentally before their transfer back home.

"Trafficking victims used to be regarded as criminal suspects, having crossed borders illegally," says Wang Daming, child protection specialist with UNICEF-China. Now, child protection has been placed at the heart of anti-trafficking efforts.

Smashing the snakeheads

Primary school children in Luangnamtha, northern Laos. Children account for a fifth of all trafficking, says a UN report.

He Ye, a Yunnan-based anti-trafficking project manager for Save the Children, an international charity for children, sees changes in cross-border trafficking patterns.

Since 2002, Chinese girls from Yunnan looking for jobs or visiting relatives across the border have been increasingly trafficked to Malaysia or Thailand and have ended up being sexually exploited. Meanwhile, girls from Laos and Vietnam were trafficked to China and sold as brides.

Since 2004, says He, Save the Children has rescued 50 Chinese girls from Thailand and Malaysia, with the help of police and the women's federation in Yunnan province.

Says Li Ping, director for communications at Save the Children (China): "As child trafficking is taking on varying forms, such as a shift of boys trafficked for adoption to sexual exploitation, a holistic view of rights protection should be taken to address the root cause. No link in the trafficking chain should be missing."

With rapid economic development in the border region, there is an increased risk of trafficking as a result of migration and improved transportation, making children and women more vulnerable. According to Kirsten di Martino, chief of Child Protection Section with UNICEF-China, although media figures of cross-border cases appear quite low, "it is in fact only the tip of the iceberg", as there isn't a good mechanism in place to report and follow any trafficking incidences when they unfold.

In 2004, six countries sharing the Mekong River - China, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand - signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation Against Trafficking in Persons in the Greater Mekong Sub-region.

To better coordinate anti-trafficking efforts, the Chinese police have over the years signed memorandums of understanding with its counterparts in Vietnam and Myanmar.

Last year, China's State Council unveiled a four-year National Plan of Action on Combating Trafficking in Women and Children, mobilizing the involvement of more than 30 government departments. Meanwhile, an anti-trafficking office has been set up in the Ministry of Public Security.

This May, the Ministry of Public Security launched a DNA database for trafficked or missing children, linking 236 DNA laboratories across the country to fight trafficking.

But, says Zhao Xianming, the police officer from Mengla county, it's crucial to incorporate the DNA information of cross-border trafficking victims into the national database.

He also calls for a clear legal clarification of trafficking and marriages among border residents.

"Rescue efforts would be pointless if the victims choose to reunite with their 'buyer husbands'," he says.