HUMAN TRAFFICKING

This week United States published Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report 2009. The report added six African countries to a blacklist of countries trafficking in people, and put Malaysia back on the list. Among the countries are Chad, Eritrea, Niger, Mauritania, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. The report or list is based on countries’ efforts to fight trafficking in humans for forced labour, prostitution, military service and other reasons. Malaysia is on the list because according to them Malaysia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so.

I am shock to hear the news but I am not surprised with Malaysia getting back on the list. It’s not that I am not satisfied with Malaysia’s efforts to curb this issue. I am sure that our government has done their best to prevent human trafficking. The reason that I am not surprise is that the list was produce by US who is known to be bias. They acted as if they are the good and nice one. Everything they did is always for the benefit of humankind and everything other countries did is always harming to humankind. You can judge by yourself. Each year, they will produce a list of the top universities and each year the no 1 spot is always a university from US. Are they really good? NO! If you study the list of top universities, you can see that there is an obvious element of bias. For example, some of our universities are in the list but not universities from Indonesia. Indonesia has many outstanding universities. Most of them are even better than our own universities yet there are not in the list. Possible explanation for this is because Malaysia has a better relationship with US compared to Indonesia. The problem is when everyone uses this list as the key indicator and US’ universities are very good. We have been cheated.

Back to the issue of human trafficking, Malaysia being back on the list has opened our eyes. We should take this opportunity to evaluate our performances. Maybe we are not aware that we have not done much. Accepting criticism is one way of improving our self.

Note:

I would like to take this opportunity also to correct the misunderstanding among Malaysians. The ranks that our universities usually get are between number 100 to 150. Many of us laughed looking at this result. For your information, there are more than a thousand universities in US alone and therefore to be able to be listed at that spot is indeed something that we should be proud of.