Report on sexual slavery within the UAE.

The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) remains a destination country for men and women trafficked for the purpose of involuntary servitude and commercial sexual exploitation.

Read the full article here.

Relevant links (with excerpts):

Human trafficking from Armenia to Dubai, UAE

… when she arrived in Abu Dhabi she was taken to a brothel where a pimp told her that he had bought her for $7000. From that moment on she was to work as a prostitute until she paid off her so-called debt. After three months of captivity, Tanya managed to escape. She bolted to a police station and recounted her story. Incredibly, she was charged with prostitution and sentenced to three years in a desert prison. In 2001, psychologically crushed and ashamed, Tanya was released. Nothing happened to her pimp. Branded a prostitute by the Muslim nation, she was summarily deported back to her Ukraine.

Private sector ‘can help combat human trafficking’

He said T.S. and M.K. used the victim’s poverty to subjugate and exploit her into working in the sex industry unwillingly. “The couple bought her from an unidentified person for Dh4,300 after she reportedly abandoned her sponsor. When she refused to have sex with customers, she got brutally beaten by the female suspect,” said the Attorney General.

New study shames human traffickers

Countries in the Middle East have been named as the worst culprits of human trafficking.

A new report by an international trade unions’ umbrella organisation says Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen are notorious destinations for women trafficked from Kenya.

Its report, ‘Trafficking in Persons — The Eastern Africa Situation’, notes that women and children were favourite targets for well-organised trafficking rings, which operate freely for lack of solid laws against the vice.

Stress on global network to fight human trafficking

A teacher in her home country, Noora says she was tempted by the promise of a good job and salary in Dubai. It was the first time that she had ever left her home country and her job and visa were arranged by a man she was put in contact with by a friend from her home town.

In her early 20’s at the time, Noora was told to expect a representative from the school where she was to work to collect her from the airport. Instead, she was met by a couple who took her to their home in Sharjah and locked her inside a room in a high-rise.

“The first couple of days were a blur. I kept asking when I was starting my job. The wife laughed and said there is no school - that I had to work as a prostitute,” she remembers. “I was terrified and couldn’t do anything. I was powerless.”

UAE: Probe begins into Indian Human Trafficking Racket

The 54 year-old visitor identified as A.K.S, 50, and his wife identified as M.S, were waiting for a connecting flight to Paris when they were arrested. They were reportedly carrying fake passports of two young boys accompanying them.

The data recorded in the passports of the two minors showed them to be the sons of the accused but upon questioning, the couple denied being the parents, claiming they had been asked by some people in Mumbai to hand over the children to someone in Paris.

Blast from the past:

Mariam, 16, relives the day her father in Baghdad sold her off as a domestic worker in one of the prosperous Gulf nations. Instead, she was forced into the sex trade.

“I was a virgin and didn’t understand what sex was. I was told that they [the traffickers] were going to get good money for my first night with an old local man who paid for my virginity. He was aggressive and hit me all the time,” Mariam, who refused to reveal her real name, told IRIN.

Thousands of Iraqi women are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous sex worker traffickers seeking to exploit young girls’ desperate socio-economic situation for profit, United Nations agencies have reported.

In Mariam’s case, she was taken to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and kept in a house with 20 young girls, all of them sex workers, she said.

Before she left Iraq, she and her three sisters were being cared for by her father. Their mother was killed during the US-led invasion of the country in 2003.

-IRIN News

Follow-up on this previously noted article about a French boy who was raped by 3 Emirati men in Dubai:

The public prosecution in Dubai yesterday demanded the maximum penalty for two Emirati men accused of raping a French-Swiss teenager in a case that has attracted international attention.

“I demand the maximum penalty against the two accused,” one of whom is said to be HIV positive, a representative of the public prosecution said at a hearing in the booming Gulf emirate.

Under the penal code in the United Arab Emirates, the maximum penalty if the suspects are convicted could mean a death sentence.

The prosecutor accused the pair of “losing their humanity and turning into human wolves” when they committed their alleged sexual assault against the 15-year-old boy in July.

The trial of the two UAE nationals opened on October 24. A third Emirati defendant, who is a minor, is being tried separately in a juvenile court.

The two accused, aged 18 and 36, committed “a horrible crime of abduction and rape, threatening (their victim) with a knife and baton, in an isolated desert spot,” the prosecutor said. The mother of the alleged victim, Swiss journalist Veronique Robert, told the tribunal that her role as a mother was to help her teenage son “rebuild and forget.”

“Only you can decide the punishment. But my mother’s heart tells you that God gives life and only God can take it away,” she said, visibly moved.

“I was drunk,” was all the older of the two defendants, who according to legal sources is HIV positive, said in court.

The trial was adjourned until November 28 to hear the defence arguments.

Source: AFP

Glen Carey reports:

Fei Fei, a 22-year-old from China’s Guangdong province, has a souvenir of her eight months in Dubai: burns on her back and arms from cigarette butts crushed against her skin when she refused to work as a prostitute.

She eventually submitted when a criminal gang threatened to send nude photos of her to family members. That indignity, she said, would have been worse than selling her body.

“They take pictures of me naked in shower,” Fei Fei said in broken English as she pulled up her shirt to reveal the dark red circular marks. Soon afterward, she adopted the English name “Lucy,” and sold sex in Dubai bars for 500 dirhams ($130) a trick to claw back her freedom.

Fei Fei’s story symbolizes the dark side of Dubai, better known for its skyscrapers, sail-shaped hotel and man-made islands built in the shape of palm trees. The United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is the second-largest member, is on a U.S. State Department watch-list for failing to take “meaningful steps” to end trafficking of women for prostitution and other workers trapped in conditions of slavery.

There are an estimated 10,000 victims of human trafficking in Dubai, according to the department’s 2007 report. U.A.E. officials say the figure overestimates the problem and that they have begun to take action, passing the first anti-trafficking law in the Middle East.

Read the rest of the report here.

The International Herald Tribune reports this very disturbing story of three Emirati men who raped a French teenager in Dubai:

DUBAI: Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a dream summer in this tourist paradise on the Gulf. It was Bastille Day, and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts, aged 35 and 18. They drove Alex past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club and told him they would kill his family members if he ever reported them.

Then, Alex says, they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex on the side of the road across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.

Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, its legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and legal protection of foreigners.

The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he says; they have left open the possibility of charging Alex with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested HIV positive while in prison four years earlier.

“They tried to smother this story,” Alex said by phone from Switzerland, where he fled a month into his 10th grade, fearing a jail term in Dubai if charged with homosexual activity. “Dubai, they say we build the highest towers, they have the best hotels. But all the news, they hide it. They don’t want the world to know that Dubai still lives in the Middle Ages.”

United Arab Emirates law does not recognize rape of males, only a crime called “forced homosexuality.” The two adult men charged with molesting Alex appeared in court Wednesday, and will face trial before a three-judge panel on Nov. 7. The third, a minor, will be tried in juvenile court. Men convicted of sexually assaulting other men usually serve sentences ranging from a few months to two years, legal experts here say.

Read the rest of the story here.

So much for the “land of opportunities.”

From PBS Frontline:

Four years ago, I began a photo project on the sex trafficking of young women in Eastern Europe. I interviewed and photographed girls who had escaped. Some had been trafficked to Turkey and Russia. Others were taken as far as the United Arab Emirates, lured by the promise of legitimate jobs and a brighter future. Once they arrived in the new country, they were priced and sold, and their documents taken away. The young women told me they were forced to service mechanics, soldiers, priests, butchers, tourists, and even U.N. personnel who were supposed to protect them.

I grew up in Eastern Europe and met Vika on my second reporting trip to Moldova. (You can hear Vika’s story in the FlashPoint slideshow, Moldova: The Price of Sex.) She told me she had been trafficked to Dubai, at times serving 30 clients a day. She quickly learned the only English words necessary to keep her owner from hitting her: “How much?” and “With or without plastic?” Once, without plastic, her luck ran out and she got pregnant. It didn’t matter. Her pimp kept her working for the duration of her pregnancy.

After hearing Vika’s stories, Dubai became a place I felt I had to see to understand.

Read the rest of the article here.

Gulf News:

Dubai: Police are investigating whether the door of a flat where a club dancer died when a fire broke out on Monday night was locked.

Aaina Malek, a Pakistani dancer, died in the apartment when the fire broke out as she could not escape. Another girl, Lucky, who was also trapped in the fire, was rescued by neighbours after they broke the door open.

“We are investigating the case,” said a senior police official.

He said that locking people up is a criminal offence and legal action can be taken against them.

The death of Aaina could have been averted if the flat had not been locked, said witnesses.

Two Pakistani girls, Aaina and Lucky (their stage names), were trapped and could not escape the flames because they did not have the key, Gulf News has learned.

Left behind for a rest

Aaina’s original name was Sana’a Malek while Lucky’s real name is Tahira Hajjab. Both are from Karachi.

Aaina was 19 and had been performing in Dubai for the last year and a half.

“While all the girls had been taken to perform in the club, both of them were supposed to join them later because they wanted to rest a bit after their flight for visa change on Monday evening,” a close friend of the girls told Gulf News.

“They normally keep the girls, who perform in dance clubs, locked in their flats during the day for ’safety’ reasons,” said a dancer, who works at another club.

“It is quite common and the management of many Indian and Pakistani night-clubs follows the same practice.

“We are taken to clubs around 8pm and brought back to flats after 3am when the clubs close. We are not allowed to go anywhere. We are given food in the flat and we live like prisoners,” she said.

Several girls and employees of other clubs also confirmed this.

When contacted, the management of the club refused to comment.

“We have given information to police. It is not our fault. Come with legal papers if you want information from us,” one of the top managers told Gulf News. The same management runs similar clubs in some other hotels in Bur Dubai and Deira.

The dance club where Aaina performed was closed for the last two nights.

Kiran, a bar dancer at a Deira club, said that there had been many incidents when girls have fallen sick but could not get the much needed medical attention on time.

“Such an incident was expected. We are always scared because we cannot get out of flats during an emergency,” she said.

There are more than 150 Asian dance clubs in Dubai where hundreds of girls perform every night. They are mainly brought from India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.

They normally come on a three-month visit visa and their visas are renewed if their performance is appreciated by customers, otherwise they are sent back.

“They are paid hefty salaries and a good performer earns up to Dh8,000 to Dh15,000 per month apart from gifts from customers,” said a manager of a night club.