IVORY COAST: Ivorian police step up efforts to stem child trafficking.

For decades, thousands of parents across west Africa have handed their children over to people who promise to help them find work and a better life in places like Ivory Coast. In most cases their children end up as workers in Ivory Coast's cocoa plantations or as domestic servants and manual labourers. Police in Ivory Coast's border towns have stepped up their efforts to stop the illegal traffic of children into the country. Sitting nervously in a police courtyard, a group of boys and young men wait to be interviewed. Sitting with them is Lambo Zouglou, the 34-year-old farmer who took them from his native village about 600 kilometres (375 miles) away in northern Togo to work as either labourers and domestic servants here in Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast's cocoa, coffee, rubber, palm oil, pineapple and banana plantations make it a magnet for workers from across West Africa, including children, many sent with traffickers by willing parents hoping for a share in the proceeds. Inside the police station, two bewildered girls mumble details of how they were smuggled in to Ivory Coast. Plain clothes police officers clatter away at typewriters to record their testimonies. Visibly nervous as he spoke, Zouglou, whose young niece was among the seven minors, said he thought both the children and adults in the group would have a better life in Ivory Coast, and said he did not fully understand why he was being detained - since it was their parents' wish for him to take them away. "It's not good to bring the little children, but I took pity on his (little boy in group) father. His father begged me to take him, and I took pity on him. I told him his son is too little, but he told me he had confidence in his son, and that he knows his son can handle the farm tools," Zouglou said, adding that back in their villages, the children would only get two meals a week. Zouglou dodged the border post from Ghana by crossing through bush. But when he arrived in the nearby town of Aboisso to find the streets empty after a rare armed attack at a border post, he led the group to a police station to find a safe shelter. Now he may face charges of child trafficking and clandestine immigration. None of the group carried ID cards or passports. Some traffickers run large criminal operations but many others are farmers like Zouglou who, said he planned to employ the boys in Ivory Coast as labourers. Abiosso's officers wear plain clothes to interview the children instead of their usual military fatigues to make the youngsters feel more at ease -- a tip from a recent Interpol training course to help them better combat child trafficking. Some traffickers run large criminal operations but many others are farmers like Zouglou who, said he planned to employ the boys in Ivory Coast as labourers. "Given the fact that this is a phenomenon which occurs throughout the region, the 10 countries in the region have signed an agreement and have reached a common understanding on the way to fight against child trafficking. Agreements have been signed, so all the 10 countries are in the loop. The agreement has been ratified and it is on the basis of that accord that we have now taken charge of these children," said Diangosse Maxime Mobio, Aboisso's police commissioner. The children, wearing the only grubby clothes they had and speaking through an interpreter, would utter little more than their name and age. Some of the older boys, already accustomed to farm work in Togo and not attending school, said they wanted to stay. Mobio said police were only now becoming sensitised to child smuggling after the recent training by Interpol and an awareness campaign run by Germany's international cooperation body, GTZ targeting farmers and villagers close to Aboisso. Police have also been trained to spot trafficked children among the hundreds of coach passengers who pass through Aboisso each day after crossing over the border with Ghana. Security forces found 65 such children in 2006, the GTZ says, most of them from neighbouring Burkina Faso to the north. "False promises were made to the parents of these children which encouraged them to send their children to work on plantations in Ivory Coast," said Michel Seka, of GTZ, adding that if the children chose not to go home, they would be given accommodation and vocational training at centres in Ivory Coast until the age of 18. Seka added that repatriating the children against their will was usually futile. Impoverished parents were likely to keep trying to send their children back.

ITN Source | January 22, 2007

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