- A near-fatal accident on a pig farm in Romania has uncovered
a brutal new trade in forced labour in which poverty-stricken parents sell
their children into slavery for as little as £70.
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- Gheorghita Ciornei, 13, was taken to a hospital in Bucharest
last week suffering from 60 per cent burns after an accident involving
a power line. As doctors struggled to save the boy's life a farmer from
Gostinu, a village 30 miles south of the capital, arrived to claim him.
The man said he was the child's "master". Hospital officials
refused to hand the child over and called the authorities.
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- Investigators found that Gheorghita and his younger brother
had been working on the Gostinu pig farm for more than a year, after the
farmer bought them for £140.
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- Save the Children said the brothers were the victims
of a new trade in which employers from better-off areas in the south of
the country were buying child labour from the impoverished north-east.
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- "This is modern-day slavery," said George Roman,
a programme director for Save the Children. He said the boys were not alone
and that dozens of others were doing hard labour, some as young as nine.
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- The case has revealed the growing wealth gap in the European
Union candidate country which is negotiating to join the 25-country bloc
in 2007. High unemployment and soaring poverty are driving people to abandon
poorer northern areas in search of work in the western region of Transylvania
or close to Bucharest.
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- The children were forced to work 14-hour days and received
only food and lodging. In some cases parents leased their children for
a monthly fee of £12. Police inquiries in Gostinu and the surrounding
region of Giugiu found at least 16 other cases, including nine on the farm
where Gheorghita was electrocuted after climbing a telegraph pole while
tending the pigs.
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- Officials believe other "masters" have gone
into hiding since the accident.
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- "The whole area has been poisoned by this new phenomenon.
People are taking advantage of the naivety, desperation and poverty of
these parents," said Mr Roman.
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- One angry local farmer confronted television cameras
saying: "If you take these children we will buy others." Under
Romanian law those found guilty of trafficking children face up to 15 years
in prison.
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- Reporters who traced the boys' family to their home in
Ceplenita, in the north-eastern Moldavia region where most of the traded
children are believed to come from, said they lived in near-medieval conditions.
The couple, who have 15 children, were living in a house made of mud and
straw, with sheets of nylon for windows and an intermittent electricity
supply. "The father is a drunk, he drinks all the money and he still
doesn't get much to drink," Razvan Chiruta, a local reporter, told
The Independent.
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- Pintilie Penciuc, the director of the child protection
agency in the regional centre of Iasi, said proceedings had started to
take the Ciornei brothers into care.
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- The case has led to criticism of the authorities. Allegations
were made in 1999 by a boy who claimed to have escaped from a regime of
forced labour and beatings in the same region, but police did not investigate.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=462593
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