Earthquake Children are 'targets for traffickers'
Human traffickers are preying on child victims of the South Asian earthquake, experts say yesterday. It is thought they have reached the remote parts ok Pakistan held Kashmir and taken orphaned children, or those separated from their families, from hospitals and medial centres.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said it was too soon to asses the scale of the problem but it was ‘responding with concern’.
Since the quake hit 11 days ago, thousands of children’s have lost their families. More then 1,000 were evacuated from Kashmir to medical care. One report said two men me tried to take a 16 year old girl from a hospital claiming to be her uncles. Guards are now monitoring units where orphans are kept. UNICEF said the risk of exploitation was high in situations such as earthquake. To quell fears, prime minister Shaukat Aziz said orphans would be looked after by the government and no non-relatives would be allowed to adopt.
The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is similar to the Nazi camps during the 1940s, Mustafa Sami, columnist at Al-Ahram, an Egyptian paper, wrote. "The anti-black racism exposed by Hurricane Katrina is not the only disgrace hounding the Bush administration in the U.S. There is another disgrace that the world is talking about, which concerns the 600 prisoners at the Guantanamo camp, and which has greatly damaged the reputation of the American ‘democracy’. "This can be called the first massacre of the 21st century; it is being perpetrated by the Bush administration against 200 Muslims, mostly Arabs, who have been hunger-striking for the past three weeks. This premeditated crime is taking place before the eyes of the [entire] world, but not a single conscience has awakened to demand that the slaughter be halted and that these prisoners be rescued from death. 