ANT KATZ
Those who are tricked into going to Israel, are then denied “freedom of movement, have to work long hours and were not paid for their work”, according to the IOM’s SADEC office Project Officer Marija Nikolovska.
While they were unable to provide numbers of victims, they are unlikely to be very high. The total number of repatriation of South African human trafficking victims from all countries in the four years to 2014 was just 142.
The fact that Israel is one of the top six destination countries for human trafficking out of South Africa, emerged in a speech by Police Minister Fikile Mbalula recently. The other five are Ireland‚ Zimbabwe‚ Switzerland‚ Macau and the Netherlands.
Mbalula’s spokesman, Vuyo Mhaga, confirmed the top six list, but said that the Ministry did not have figures for the numbers of people being trafficked. He said, however, the trafficking of people out of South Africa was far less than those trafficked into the country.
IOM South Africa had “provided comprehensive direct assistance to several victims of trafficking of South African nationals who were trafficked to Israel,” Nikolovska said.
Nikolovska said the recorded cases had all been “for the purposes of labour exploitation (domestic servitude)”.
Those trafficked to Israel had “answered an advert in a newspaper and were given employment in Israel and later exploited”, she said. “They didn’t have freedom of movement, had to work long hours and were not paid for their work.”
They managed to escape and seek help from authorities, and were then directed to the IOM. They were all repatriated.
The IOM is the world’s leading international migration agency. It has helped over 13 million migrants to date.
Mbalula’s original statement had come in the wake of a joint sting operation by police in South Africa and Malaysia last month, which resulted in the freeing of a 24-year-old Bloemfontein woman, Princess Mahlangu, along with 13 other women from 13 other countries as far afield as Thailand‚ the US and Barbados.
The South African authorities had heard that Mahlangu had been conned online into entering a fake modelling competition. The speed of the intervention, said Mbalula, resulted in the rescue of all of the captive women.
While Israel appears on the IMO’s top six list, it remains unclear how many of the South African victims have been repatriated.
Hawks spokesman Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi they were not aware of the Israeli trafficking situation.
The press office of Interpol in France confirmed that the organisation was aware of the problem, but “does not gather such statistics”. They, too, rely on the information published by the IOM.
Nikolovska explained that human trafficking was different to smuggling of migrants. In smuggling, the person pays someone else to smuggle them across a border and their relationship ends there.
“With human trafficking, the intention is exploitation. Human smuggling is a breach of immigration laws, while human trafficking is a breach of human rights,” she says.
No country in the world is immune to the crime of human trafficking. It is the third most profitable illegal trade globally – after drugs and weapons. Countries are viewed as places of origin, transit or destination of victims. “South Africa is all of the above,” says the IOM.
