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Wednesday, 4, January, 2006 (04, Dhul Hijjah, 1426) The Immorality of Child Labor in Arab Countries Fawaz Turki, [EMAIL PROTECTED] When we read bad news about an Arab country, it is, as a rule of thumb, unspeakably bad. And the country de jour is Morocco. In a 60-page report titled "Inside the Home, Outside the Law: Domestic workers in Morocco," released the last week of December, Human Rights Watch revealed that tens of thousands of Moroccan girls, trapped by family poverty and lack of schooling, endure widespread abuse as maids toiling out of sight in the privacy of their employers' homes. The girls, many as young as five, work as long as 100 hours a week with no rest or days off, for as little as 70 cents a day. Current and former child domestics have described to the New York-based organization's field researchers how they have had to face frequent physical and verbal abuse, denial of adequate food and medical care, as well as sexual harassment by employers and their families. Most do not attend school, rarely go out except for brief errands and rarely get to see their families. These girls, often illiterate, lack the know-how to seek help in leaving abusive workplaces, and end up having to endure the abuse because they fear getting lost or attacked if they run away on their own. Morocco has, on the books, a Labor Code that bans employment of children under 15. But the code does not regulate domestic work, and labor inspectors are not authorized to enter private homes to check for violations. "There is a myth that these girls are improving themselves by working," said Clarisa Bencomo, children's rights researcher at HRW. "The reality is that too many girls end up suffering lasting physical and psychological harm." The report details several testimonies from these child laborers - all of them gut-wrenching. I choose one at random: "If something happened - if I broke something or did something badly - they would beat me with a shoe or a belt on any part of my body. I couldn't leave the house - they would lock the door when they left. Both the husband and the wife hit me. "My family saw me twice in the year that I worked there. They came to visit me at the house but the employer sat with us during the visit and had told me not to say anything bad or she would beat me more. "When my mother came the last time to visit, I told her I wouldn't stay at that house anymore. I said, 'either I go with you or I will run away or kill myself.'" The Moroccan government does not deny the existence of its child labor problem. In June 1999, it released a report admitting that as many as 600,000 children under the age of 15, more than half of them girls, worked rather then went to school, with many of them employed in rural areas, where they followed the tradition of toiling in the fields. But tens of thousands are sold by their parents as domestic servants in the cities, tied to their jobs in what the BBC correspondent in Morocco, Nick Pelham, said at the time "amounted to near slavery." Child labor is rampant in some of the poor countries in the Arab world, but nowhere near as extensively as it is in Morocco, where it has become a tradition, accepted as a norm, encoded in the culture, as it were. And you take that tradition with you, even after you've emigrated, say, to the United States. Last week, the News Tribune, in Tacoma, Washington, published a news report about the arrest of Abdel Naser Ennassine, 47, and his wife Tunia Ennassine, 41, both Moroccan immigrants, with one count of "forced labor" and one count of "concealing an alien." The alien in question was a 17-year-old girl who had arrived from Morocco, and stayed in the US illegally, to "get a good education and become a dentist," but ended up being forced to work long hours at the cafe owned by the Ennassines, who were her relatives, without being paid or allowed to keep the $5,000 she had earned in tips. She had been taken out of the ninth grade last year and threatened with deportation "if she did not work harder and longer," prosecutors say. (The girl, whom the Tribune did not name because of her age and because she is considered a "crime victim," was taken away from her abusive relatives and is now in protective custody.) It is a vicious circle. About 60 percent of Moroccans cannot read and write. And as industries try to cut costs by replacing adults with child workers, unemployed parents send their children out to work, and the cycle is repeated. According to the International Labor Organization, Morocco is hardly alone in facing the problem. In Africa as a whole, two in five children under 15 work. And in poor countries around the world, the total is roughly 250 million. This tragedy is clearly a function of underdevelopment, but underdevelopment itself is a function of the lack of fundamental freedoms in society, and the rule of law, in these countries. And that includes those in the Arab world. As the much publicized human rights report, sponsored by the UN Development Program and prepared by 50 Arab scholars, revealed in July 2002, the slow human development in our region, involving the key areas of education, technology and economic progress, is directly correlated to the absence of "fundamental freedoms." And what is a more seminal freedom in social life than the entitlement of a child to basic education, to protection against exploitation and abuse? An educated youngster goes on to become an asset to society, just as conversely his uneducated counterpart goes on to become a burden on it. It is to everybody's benefit in those Arab countries, such as Yemen, Egypt, and Sudan, along with Morocco, that seem to condone, or turn a blind eye to, child labor, to rescue these children from bondage (for what other word will do here?) and put them in schools. The United Nations Literacy Decade, which began exactly two years ago this week, has not left a dent on countries in the Arab world that refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of their problem. Unless our children are rescued from degradation, as domestics, carpet weavers, field pickers and the like, and placed in schools where they belong, the Arab world, which as a whole suffers a 40 percent illiteracy rate, will never move on. Developed countries moved on only when education was seen as a fundamental human right, laws were legislated - and enforced rigorously - against child labor, and the freedom to live in dignity was institutionalized as the birthright of every man, woman and, yes, child. 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