£35 A-PIECE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12663, 17 September 1904, Page 2 (Supplement)

£35 A-PIECE.

PERSIAN GIRLS SOLD ON RUSSIAN FRONTIER. The Russo-Persian trad** in women and girls has attained such dimensions that, according to the Askhabad, the Government has at last ordered a formal inquiry. Enormous numbers of Persian girls, says the same journal, are, with the connivance of petty Persian officials, violently taken from their homes and sent across the Russian frontier into moral slavery. The middlemen who engage in, this nefarious traffic hold fairs by night, just within the Persian frontier, and these sales are attended by Armenian and Turcoman buyers, who transport their victims secretly to Askhabad and other Russian centres. A tea trader, who accidentally came upon one of these sales and was taken for a buyer, thus describes the scene: — "Sitting on Persian carts I saw, dejected, sleepy, but picturesque, half a dozen pretty Persian girls, as fair as Europeans, all of them between fifteen and eighteen years of age. Two were gorgeously attired, and had silver and gold ornaments on their arms and breasts, while the others, though not less attractive, were dressed in the scanty rags in which they had been ravished from their peasant homes. An ugly Armenian of mature years bought four for 1400 roubles (£140). But this transaction was not concluded until the hideous old man had subjected the girls to an examination which would have been humiliating m the case of • a horse or mule. When one was being transferred to the Armenian's cart she screamed violently, whereupon the Armenian stunned her with his whip-handle and cast her, like a sack of flour, into the cart. Then the assemblage dispersed, the Armenian, whipping up his horses, making for the road to Askhabad."