U.S. Columban JPIC Newsletter

Challenging Structures, Changing Lives

Ahora Disponible en Espanol! Haz un Click Aqui.

In This Issue

• Poem by Fr. Denny O'Mara, SSC
• Labor Trafficking in Iraq
• Action Alert: Christian Peace Witness for Iraq

Useful Websites & Resources

• Pax Christi
• School of the Americas Watch
• Pacem in Terris

Contact Us

On February 13, 2003, I was on the Underground in London on my way from the Heathrow Airport to the Columban Center house. I had just flown in from Santiago, Chile, to attend an international meeting of Columban JPIC coordinators. Overhead on the streets of London, millions of people were coming together to protest the impending invasion of Iraq.

Now, five years later and despite unprecedented global opposition to the war, we are marking its fifth anniversary.

In this newsletter, we highlight a hidden violence of war: human labor trafficking. Many countries where Columbans are present, including the Philippines, Peru, Chile and Fiji, are source countries for mercenaries recruited to the Middle East then trafficked into Iraq and Afghanistan. We see first hand the price families and communities pay for the deceptive practices often used to bring private contractors into this war-torn region.

For this month’s reflection, we share with you a poem written by Columban Father Denny O'Mara, a life-long champion for peace and justice. His beliefs have cost him dearly, including his expulsion from Chile in the mid-1980s under the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

During this season of Lenten repentance, with Jesus Christ as our example, let us pray that we may all become better agents of peace and change in the world.

Below the Radar: Labor Trafficking and Mercenary Recruitment in Iraq

By Theresa Polk

As we close in on the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, nearly 4,000 Americans have lost their lives, tens of thousands are wounded in body and mind, and unknown hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, while more than 2 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries from the everyday violence of life under occupation.

The infrastructure of Iraq is in shambles, the political landscape as divided as ever and unemployment continues to climb. Yet, amid the uncountable victims of this war, hidden amidst the chaos of the conflict, one group remains even more obscured and forgotten— numbers uncounted, losses unremarked.

Ramil Autencio was promised by his recruiter in the Philippines a two-year job at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait. But when he arrived, he was told there was no work. He and 800 other Filipino migrant workers were held in a run-down building, their papers confiscated upon arrival. They then were taken into Iraq to work on the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other military bases.

They worked 11 hours a day, seven days a week, and lived in empty truck containers, sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes. "A jail would be better," Autencio recalled. "We were ordered to go. . . . They forcibly brought us to Iraq" (www.ispnews.net/news.asp?idnews=3819). Gunfire and mortar blasts would wake them at night, rattling their unprotected trailer.

Autencio, along with some 7,500 other migrant workers from the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ghana and other countries, was recruited by First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a subcontractor for Kellogg Brown and Root and winner of the $592 million building contract for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The project has been plagued with accusations of deceptive hiring practices, exorbitant recruiting fees, sub-par living conditions and abusive and unsafe working conditions.

An April 2006 Pentagon memorandum acknowledged that workers' passports were routinely confiscated to prevent them from leaving or seeking better working conditions elsewhere, a direct violation of U.S. labor trafficking laws (s3.amazonaws.com/corpwatch.org/downloads/2-TCN%20Memo%2004-19-20061.pdf).

The U.S. State Department conducted in September 2006 what was, at best, a cursory review of First Kuwaiti's labor and hiring practices in which they noted some causes for concern. Meanwhile, countries such as the Philippines have banned their citizens from working in Iraq, although many are still trafficked in.

Norman Alfonso Solano is no stranger to counterinsurgency. He served in the Peruvian army in the fight against the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) movement. High unemployment and low wages in Peru mean that work is unsteady and does not meet the basic needs of his family.

Solano has been hired for $1,000 a month by U.S.-based private military contractor Triple Canopy, along with recruits from countries such as Chile, Colombia and El Salvador.

"I have four kids . . . and am trained for war. That's why I have to go where there is war," Solano said. An estimated 1,600 fellow Peruvians have joined Solano in Iraq since 2005 according to the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Since firms are under no obligation to report on their activities, this number is only an estimate (www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39941).

A July 2007 Congressional Research Service report found that of the 182,000 private contractors serving in Iraq, about 43,000 were third-party nationals not from Iraq or the United States. They included citizens of Peru, Fiji, South Africa, Chile and about 30 other countries (www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32419.pdf).

Many of these contractors come from countries with high poverty and unemployment and recent histories of internal conflict. Most have previous experience in police, intelligence or military units—often organizations that have been implicated in serious human rights abuses within their own countries. Still, the recruits receive no training in human rights norms before deployment.

In fact, the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries has documented repeated instances of a lack of appropriate training, poor working and living conditions, unpaid or partially paid salaries, and of recruits being asked to sign contracts that they do not understand and that leave them unprotected, particularly in the case of serious injury.

Human rights experts wonder under whose laws private security contractors must operate and who can hold the firms accountable. Thus far, in both recruitment practices and operations within Iraq, they have operated with almost complete impunity.

The U.N. Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries has been investigating the recruitment of foreign nationals for service in Iraq by private security firms and attempting to pressure countries to sign the 1989 U.N. Mercenary Convention aimed at restricting mercenary activity.

Following the killing of 17 Iraqis last September by Blackwater staff operating in Baghdad, U.S. Representative David Price (D-N.C.) introduced the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction (MEJA) Expansion and Enforcement Act of 2007. Although the legislation calls for enforcing greater accountability and oversight over private security firms, it does not fully address recruitment practices, particularly outside of the United States.

Private security contractors from the United States and Britain might receive from $500- $1,500 a day for dangerous work in Iraq. Recruits from Peru and other poorer countries, however, receive a much smaller salary—usually about $1,000-$1,500 a month.

As of March 2007, about 1,000 private security contractors had been killed and more than 12,000 injured, although with no official numbers as to how many are in Iraq to begin with, these remain only estimates.

According to the Washington Office on Latin America, the developing world has become a cheap labor source for life-threatening work. "It may be tempting to hire low-wage workers to take risks for us, so that we don't experience the human cost of casualties or deaths ourselves. But it's not morally acceptable" (www.csmonitor.com/2005/0303/p06s02-woam.html).

****************

Action Alert: Christian Peace Witness for Iraq

The whole world has been affected by the war in Iraq that began with the U.S. invasion in March 2003. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Over the past five years, we have heard and seen horrid and vivid images of roadside bombings, military funerals, shattered mosques, wounded children and destroyed lives. These are the wages of war, and it is time to put an end to them.

People of faith will gather on March 7 in Washington, D.C., to worship and, together, call for peace. The day will include worship services, workshops and will culminate in an interfaith witness on the National Mall. At the same time, people across the country will gather in coordinated local vigils.

Whether or not you can come to Washington in March, you can be part of the web of resistance by offering a strand of hope. Send or bring to Washington a 6-foot length of light rope (multi-colored, easy-tie clothesline is ideal). Attach ribbons or bands of cloth to the rope upon which are written your own hopes for a peaceful Iraq, your prayers for peace, your definitions of peace.

Leave 1 foot at each end of your length of rope (so they can be tied together) and fill the remaining 4 feet. Please keep the ribbons or bands of cloth or prayer flags to 2 feet or shorter, so they can be carried without being dragged on the ground.

Let our common longing for peace bind us together in hope.

Send your piece to:

10,000 Feet of Hope
c/o Clarendon Presbyterian Church
1305 N. Jackson St.
Arlington, VA 22201

For more information, to register for the events in Washington, or to find an event in your community, please visit the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq website at http://www.christianpeacewitness.org/march08