 Pic / Malaysiakini Tenaganita's Aegile Fernandez (left) gave a talk entitled "Child and Women Trafficking - Is There Hope?" at the Assumption Church on June 24. SABM's FARIDA JIVAMALA IBRAHIM came away shaken and angry
THE facts are horrifying. Sex trafficking, drug trafficking, slave trafficking, baby trafficking - you name it, Malaysia and other countries are doing it.
Talk about global business!
And enforcement officers are very much in the thick of it.
It turned out that men too were being kidnapped and brought out of their countries and onto open sea - to get ransoms paid and to toil as fishermen!
Here's a brutal fact to grasp:
In 2008, our country had 982 children reported missing. Of these, to date, 500 of those 982 are still missing. What of the other years? What of 2009 and 2010 so far. The statistics are staggering and still climbing!
And these children are whisked away for prostitution (because the maniacs think the younger they are the less likely they are to catch AIDS or HIV) or for begging.
And for begging, what they do to get the public's money is to either break the legs of a child or chop off a hand or disfigure the face with acid. And these children are often smuggled out of the country.
And I didn't know that here a sex slave earns RM150 for the sex syndicate (mind you, she doesn't get the money). Women are either kidnapped or tricked into coming into this country with promises of legitimate decent jobs but are then sold like meat to bidders and entrapped in conditions which degrade them completely.
Read this:
Prostitutes here usually have to serve eight customers a day. That earns the syndicate a formidable RM1,200 per prostitute per day.
But hey, one syndicate can have as many as 100 prostitutes distributed in several places.
How much does it therefore earn in a day? Approximately RM120,000.
And what if a woman gets pregnant? She goes for an abortion.
But wait - there's an old business burgeoning again now. Babies for sale. Women are made pregnant again and again so babies can come forth. Pregnancy is great business now.
But again, that's not all.
What about the refugees who have come here?
Read this excerpt from Tenaganita's book "The Revolving Door" on modern-day slavery and know what refugees endure:
1. Mya - pregnant, with her husband and son - grabbed by Rela officers together with others and on the way to a detention camp. She says this through her translator:
"As we were marched to the lorry, my husband asked the same officer in English if I could go to the bathroom. He ignored him.....
"...My bladder was going to burst as my baby was pressing on it in my womb. I felt like dying trying to hold in my urine. I held it and it hurt so much....
"Throughout the journey...I sat squirming and whimpering...Finally, the same officer told my husband that 'if she wants to urinate, she will have to do it here, in the truck,' he said pointing to the floor. He laughed at me. I couldn't take it anymore. I took the plastic bag which was used to hold my son's medication, pulled my 'longhji' (a Burmese tunic) around me and urinated into the bag in the truck in the middle of everyone.
"The humiliation. I cried while I was doing that. I was ashamed. I felt humiliated that all those men were watching me urinate. But I couldn't take it anymore. I urinated all over my hand while holding the plastic bag..."
2. Mariah - recounted through her translator:
'The lorry was parked outside the police station for at least half an hour. The two female officers exited the lorry and left Mariah and the other women in the lorry - the male officers stayed behind with them.
"Suddenly, the two male officers came towards us and smiled. They lifted our skirts and touched our legs. We struggled, and tried to move our legs, but they grabbed hold of our legs and continued to touch our legs up to our thighs. One of them lifted my dress and put his hand on my brassiere and started to rub and fondle me. 'Please stop, please stop,' we pleaded with them."
Only when the Burmese women threatened to scream out loud for the female officers, did the male officers stop touching the Burmese women.
Mariah's ordeal became worse in the weeks and months after and there came a time when for six days she and other women were forced to stay in a jungle in Thailand and there the men raped everyone of them for all of the six days.
When asked what those experiences of being raped repeatedly were like, Mariah could not express what she went through. Her tears flowed freely in painful recollection.
What words can there be, really, to describe such experiences?
None at all.
Do you know what I would like to do?
Castrate every enforcement officer (are there any innocent ones? Complicity is taking sides still!) and parade them naked before every refugee camp in this country.
Tenaganita is calling for the abolition of RELA.
What will you do?
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