Slavery in Iraq

This is a few days old, but I've seen very little commentary about it online, and I'm surprised it hasn't received more attention. This fascinating article from the LA Times describes how our beloved subcontractor overlords are engaging in human trafficking to staff their projects in Iraq. One can only describe this properly as slavery.

The story focuses on one teenager's story, but gives context to the wider policy.

Ramesh Khadka began the journey to his slaughter in this valley of rivers, where green rice terraces march up the mountains like stairs toward the heavens.

After passing among a series of shadowy, indifferent middlemen, he finished it a month later in a dusty ditch in western Iraq.

There, bound and helpless, the teenager was shot three times in the back of the head by insurgents, his execution and that of 11 of his countrymen captured on videotape.

The 19-year-old and his colleagues were on their way to jobs at a U.S. military base in Al Anbar province when they were kidnapped. The killings last year remain the worst case of violence against private contractors in the Iraq war.

The incident and its aftermath raise troubling questions about America's reliance on the world's poorest people to do the dirtiest jobs in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Contractors working for the United States, including KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., have brought tens of thousands of workers into Iraq from impoverished countries such as Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh to do menial jobs, from cooking and serving food to cleaning toilets.

In relying on a workforce of third-country nationals, however, the U.S. has embraced a system of labor migration rife with abuse, corruption and exploitation, according to dozens of contractors, migrant workers, labor officials and advocates interviewed in four countries.

The system revolves around so-called labor brokers, whose numbers have exploded during the last decade in the Middle East and Asia. Such agencies take advantage of porous borders and rising global demand for cheap labor to move poor workers from one country to low-paying jobs in another.

Although millions of Iraqis are desperate for jobs, the U.S. military requires that contractors such as KBR hire foreigners to work at bases to avoid the possibility of insurgent infiltration.

Willing to work anywhere, the laborers often take out usurious loans to pay the agencies a finder's fee for the overseas jobs. Once abroad, the workers find themselves with few protections and uncertain legal status.

So the desperately poor in Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere are brought into Iraq to scrub toilets and such. Never mind that unemployment in Iraq is skyrocketing, these migrants come much cheaper to KBR and the like. The system for transporting them from their countries to Baghdad is no different than the system for sending girls from Malaysia and Eastern Europe into the international sex trade. Workers get paid pennies in Iraq, and must pay that money back to their job placement agencies at predatory lending rates. Once they get there, they are not benefited by any labor protections. Should they die in insurgent attacks (and at least 200 of them have so far), their surviving next of kin are not likely to receive the death benefit that all families of federal contractors deserve by law. In a place as dangerous as Iraq, that's arguably the greatest motivating factor for subcontractors to use migrants.

Here's the model for such a practice:

By 1620, the Virginia Company had organized an effective system that enabled poorer Englishmen to sail for America. These Englishmen, often skilled workers that were victims of England's widespread unemployment, considered America as the Land of Opportunity. Company agents, as well as private recruiters, impressed Brits with promises of land and other benefits for several years of servitude. According to agents, benefits included, travel, trade, and land. Typically, the Virginia Company sent servants over to Virginia to be "sold" to planters, who would reimburse the Company for the servants' passages. More often than not, the indentured servants were shocked by their new conditions. Rather than finding venues in which they could practice their profession, like gardens and orchards, overseers marched servants out to the fields. Many died, attempted to return, or ran away. In addition to mistreatment, many servants also encountered contract extension, a popular punishment of planters for rowdy indentures.

Taxpayers, you and I, are funding this 21st-century indentured servitude in the form of no-bid Congressional contracts funneled to the companies engaging in this practice. Our Representatives need to hear about this, and need to know that the American people don't want their money financing a slave trade. We're sending Third World indigents into Iraq like pigs to a slaughter, and if they are captured, beheaded, killed, we turn away and pretend they never existed. That's how we shamelessly spread freedom and democracy around the globe. This is a scandal that shouldn't be explained away by legal technicalities, as the Secretary of Defense has attempted to do:

More than a year later, the labor markets operate as usual in Iraq.

U.S. officials said they were about to include new regulations in all Defense Department contracts to prevent labor trafficking. The payment of labor broker fees is not considered trafficking, although exceptionally high fees or interest rates are illegal under U.S. trafficking laws.

Commanders "need to be vigilant to the terms and conditions of employment for individuals employed by DoD contractors," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote in a memo in September 2004. "Trafficking includes involuntary servitude and debt bondage. These trafficking practices will not be tolerated."

There is no material difference between broker fees that tie a worker to his job and forced slavery. The Defense Department can spin and parse all it wants.

Read the whole story, as the tale of Ramesh Khadka is absolutely heartbreaking. Then call your Representative. This is shocking.