‘A slave for 5 pesos’

Press, 11 August 1982, Page 7

‘A slave for 5 pesos’

•' NZPA-Reuter Geneva Five pesos ($NZ4.73) is the 1 going rate for Haitians captured and sold to the sugar - mills in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, a United Nations group on y slavery was told in Geneva. - The' London-based Anti- ? Slavery Society — the world’s oldest human rights ’’ organisation — said that allegations of the v sale of Haitians were continuing. » “A 10-year-old boy was captured and sold to a sugar ' mill. Five pesos was reportedly the price of captives last year in the border town of Padernales,” the socigjy said in a report to the United

Nations group, which began a week-long meeting yesterday. The United Nations body is being urged by one of its members, British human rights campaigner Ben Whitaker, to take urgent action to free and help rehabilitate millions of slaves around the world. He said that age-old forms of slavery had been replaced by new forms of servitude and gross exploitation. Listing these as thesale of - women and children, forced marriage, prostitution, child' labour and debt bondage, he called tin the United Nations to provide legal and educa-

tional advice for ending these practices and funds to help freed slaves. ■The Anti-Slavery reports particularly attacked India, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. ’ It said that there were 2.6 million bonded labourers — people forced to work off family debts — on Indian farms, some 86.6 per cent of them “untouchables” of the caste system. Half a million abandoned children in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest industrial city, had to accept forced labour to survive, and young women were often forced into prostitution.