Business Is Booming for Slave Trade

May 15, 2002 -- When Ibrahim Mohammad, now around 6 years old, fell off a camel in Dubai and fractured his shoulder last year, he says he broke into a sobbing fit and pleaded with his handlers not to strap him onto the back of a camel ever again.

But as he well knew, no amount of sniveling, whining or weeping could save him from the camel-racing track. There was a lot of money at stake, there were no adults who would intercede for him, and the skinny little Bangladeshi boy was just pushing his luck.

As a camel jockey in the United Arab Emirates' glitzy port city, Ibrahim was just a tiny cog in a vast, popular sports industry, and like the other 20-odd boys in his dormitory, he was a child slave. Protests were treated with a sound whipping with the sticks used for the camels, and then it was back to the races for the tiny lads.

Ibrahim was one of innumerable, mostly South Asian children smuggled out of their homelands to work as camel jockeys in several Persian Gulf states. But unlike most of the unfortunate children, he was rescued from Dubai and repatriated home to Bangladesh earlier this year after his handler died and authorities found the abandoned boy.

"I didn't like camel racing," he says slowly in a frail, high-pitched voice during a recent phone interview with ABCNEWS.com from the shelter in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka that he now calls home. "I was very scared of riding camels."

Medical experts at the Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association, the country's main anti-slave-trafficking organization, estimate Ibrahim is approximately 6 years old. But Salma Ali, BNWLA executive director, says it's hard to believe he is that old — he's tiny, malnourished, timid, and three months after he arrived at the shelter, he still suffers from severe emotional trauma.

On the top floors of the shelter where Ibrahim currently lives, Shabana Khatun, 16, is finally getting a basic education a year after she was repatriated from Calcutta, India. She had been smuggled there and sold to a brothel — joining the untold number of women and girls trafficked annually across international borders and sold into a brutal but thriving global sex industry.

21st-Century Slavery

In Rome today, representatives from five continents are attending a conference on international trafficking in human beings. It aims to bring together members of the diplomatic corps, law enforcement agencies, rights groups and religious groups as well as policy planners and victims of global trafficking.

Titled "21st-Century Slavery — The Human Rights Dimension to Trafficking in Human Beings," the conference is hosted by James Nicholson, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, in conjunction with the Pontifical Councils for Justice and Peace and for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People.