January 6/2004

Despite protests and condemnations, the sale of young Ethiopian women unto modern slavery in the Middle East continues unabated with the traffickers enjoying official protection and complicity.

A young Ethiopian woman, Abeba Assebe, thus sent to grueling and unpaid domestic work in Yemen, has committed suicide by hanging herself.

Another young woman has been murdered in Jordan with no one asking why.

More than 25,000 young women are in Lebanon alone working as domestic servants with little or no rights whatsoever. Subjected to working under modern slavery conditions, victims of racism, mutilated and disfigured, denied their wages, their passports confiscated (as was the case of the late Abeba in Yemen) these young women are victims of rapacious predators of all sorts. The EPRDF government not only tolerates the ongoing trafficking of the young women but many of its officials are accused of being partners of the middle men and the firms involved in the illegal activity. In addition, top government officials have also been accused of being behind the ongoing sale of children under the cover of providing adoptive parents" to the children. One person identified as a culprit in organizing the illegal sale of children to European countries is a close relative of none other than Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

The young women sent to the Middle East ostensibly to work and get paid are made to work more than 14-hour days but are not paid their proper wages. They had to pay thousands of Birr for the dispatchers, the middlemen, for the visa, etc and they start out indebted from the start. In their place of work, be it Beirut or Dubai, Jordan or Libya, Yemen or Saudi Arabia, they are treated as "slaves" with no rights whatsoever. Verbal declarations of concern aside, the EPRDF has done little or nothing to stop the illegal trafficking in and sale of children and young women.