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‘Close down the brothels in the north’
By Simon Bahceli
TWO of the most influential women in Turkish Cypriot public life yesterday called for brothels in the north to be closed down, saying they were nothing more than centres for human trafficking.
Oya Talat, wife of Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, and Emine Erk, the north’s foremost human rights lawyer, were speaking at a conference on human trafficking held at the north’s Near East University (NEU). The conference was backed by the US Embassy, the British High Commission and the Turkish Cypriot Human Rights Foundation (KTIHV), headed by Erk.
“Work has to start to close these places down, and it needs to be done with urgency,” Talat told the conference yesterday.
Erk backed Talat’s call, highlighting the need for urgent changes in the law, without which it would be virtually impossible to crack down on the traffickers.
“We have no laws to prevent human trafficking and no legal deterrents,” Erk said. She added that people generally viewed what happened in night clubs simply as prostitution, and were mostly unaware that the 300-plus women working in them were victims of human traffickers who made vast amounts of money by forcing the women into modern-day slavery.
Erk was at pains to explain the differences between human smuggling and trafficking, the latter being where people are brought into a country to face exploitation of their sexuality or physical labour. The phenomenon was widespread in the north Cyprus sex trade, she said, because women brought to the island were kept in prison-like conditions, had their passports confiscated, and were burdened with debt on their arrival – something which rendered the women indentured labourers who worked “inhumanly long hours”. All these factors constituted violations of the UN’s human rights charter on human trafficking, she said.
Much of what goes on in north’s Cyprus’ brothels was brought to light by researcher Mine Yucel, who delivered a stinging report to the conference on the authorities’ ineffectiveness at dealing with the problem, even going as far as accusing them of culpability.
“If prostitution is illegal here, why are women who are brought to the island supposedly to serve drinks put in quarantine for two days and given tests for sexually transmitted diseases? As far as I know, you cannot pass on an STD by serving someone a drink,” Yucel told the conference. She also accused the authorities of further complicity, highlighting the fact that the police keep the passports of the women until they had completed their contracts and are released by their employers.
Yucel’s report referred to a number of interviews she had held with sex workers at the clubs, taxi drivers, and even club owners. What she spoke of left few in doubt that major human rights violations were taking place under the noses of ordinary Turkish Cypriots.
“I interviewed one woman who said she wanted to remain drunk 24 hours a day, seven days a week so that when it was all over she would not remember what she had gone through,” she said. Another woman told Yucel she had been “sold into prostitution by her boyfriend”. From an interview with a club owner, Yucel said she believed owners were earning around $150,000 dollars per month from the proceeds.
But there was light at the end of the tunnel, Talat told the Cyprus Mail on the fringe of the conference, saying that a committee of legal experts and people from a number of other fields were working together to update the north’s laws in a way that would make it much harder for human traffickers to ply their trade.
One of the lawyers on the committee told the Mail that new laws would clearly differentiate between pimping and human trafficking, and that traffickers in the future could face up to 25 years in jail.
“We can’t say that we will close all the night clubs down. If they are providing legitimate services, we can’t. But if, once the law is in place, they are found to be trafficking, we will,” he said.
Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2008
by DT. » Sat Dec 13, 2008 10:56 pm 
