Boys
rescued from slave labor
COTONOU,
Benin (AP) -- Their bodies scarred by beatings
and their hands callused from breaking rocks,
74 boys as young as 4 received medical treatment
Thursday after their rescue from Nigerian
granite quarries where they were forced
to work as virtual prisoners.
Following
their rescue -- only the second of its kind
in West Africa -- the children told authorities
that over the previous three months at least
13 other boys died, succumbing to exhaustion,
disease, hunger and abuse, officials said.
''We
would break the stones, and the men would
come take them away in trucks,'' one boy
told The Associated Press. Skinny, filthy,
scratched and heavily scarred, the boy looked
no more than 10.
The
children, many just hip-high with bare chests
showing white scars, hung from the windows
of the buses that authorities used to return
them from Nigeria to Benin, where they had
been taken by traffickers and sold as child
labor.
Authorities
in Benin assembled the children -- none
older than 15 -- in a soccer stadium in
the capital, preparing them for the return
to their families. Officials prevented reporters
from questioning them in detail about their
experiences.
In
Nigeria, granite pit bosses buried the dead
children in shallow graves near the quarries,
said Kemi Olumefun, whose Nigerian women's
charity helped rescue the children after
receiving tips about the brutal conditions.
Child
labor and labor-trafficking are common across
West Africa -- while mass operations to
rescue the victims are extremely rare.
Under
an accord signed in August, the neighboring
countries are cooperating to find and return
children who have been forced into grueling
and dangerous labor.
The
first rescue under the pact came Sept. 27,
when authorities brought back 116 children
who had been put to work in the granite
quarries of southwest Nigeria.
Three
of the children died later at a camp where
Nigerian authorities brought them before
repatriation, Olumefun said.
Most
of the children worked at a granite quarry
near Abeokuta, the hometown of Nigerian
President Olusegun Obasanjo.
Intervention
by the governments may stem from increased
international attention to child labor,
said Frans Roselaers at the International
Labor Organization in Geneva. The attention
includes boycott threats of Ivory Coast
cocoa, often harvested with the help of
trafficked children.
''We've
noticed that the governments in West Africa
have increased commitment to eradication
of the root causes of child trafficking
and labor,'' Roselaers said.
''They
weren't that much aware or focused on it
before. They felt the heat of being denounced
for having unacceptable labor practices,''
Roselaers said.
Nigerian
police believe at least 6,000 children from
Benin alone still labor in the country's
granite pits in the southwest.
On
Thursday, Benin sent teams back across the
border into Nigeria to find them, Benin
Families Minister Latoundji Lauriano said.
Nigerian
police returned the 74 children to Benin
late Wednesday. The boys told social workers
that quarry operators were gone when police
arrived to free them.
In
Cotonou, the port capital of Benin, social
workers and health workers scrubbed the
children, gave them into clean clothes and
injections to prevent disease.
''The
children must be washed, dressed and allowed
to rest a little before social workers can
start interviewing them to find their parents
and return them to their families,'' Lauriano
said.
The
children's parents had put them in the hands
of labor traffickers for as little as $35,
said Philippe Duamelle, an official with
the United Nations Children's Fund in Cotonou.
The
children themselves received 35 cents a
day for breaking stones with mallets, said
Olumefun, whose group, the Women's Consortium
of Nigeria, tended to the children immediately
after their rescue.
Some
had been working in the quarries up to four
years, she said.
''They
were subjected to work and very harsh conditions.
You can imagine a 7-year-old boy being compelled
to crush a lorry-load of gravel. They were
poorly fed,'' Olumefun said. ''And in the
process, some of them fell sick and died.''
|
