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The slave labor scandal has shocked the nation and caused a public uproar. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have ordered a thorough probe to unearth the facts and punish the guilty. The Ministry of Labor and Social Security (MLSS) has sent a probe team to Shanxi and Henan, the two provinces where brick kilns and small coal mines forced people, including minors, into backbreaking labor without paying them wages, or providing them enough food or medical care, and thrashing them mercilessly for trying to escape or not working as hard as they were told to.

Members of the Ministry of Public Security and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, too, have joined the MLSS team to ensure that "the guilty don't escape the long hands of the law". Police, on their part, have launched a massive operation to free all slave laborers. By Sunday night, about 45,000 policemen had raided more than 8,000 brick kilns and small coal mines in Shanxi and Henan, and freed 591 of them, including 51 children. They have detained 168 suspects, including kiln and mine owners and managerial-level staff.

The Hongtong county government in Shanxi has announced it will pay the 31 people freed from a kiln in its Caosheng Village a monthly salary of 1,410 yuan ($186) for the period they had worked as slave laborers. It will also pay each of them a compensation of 1,000 yuan ($130), accompanied by a written apology.

Investigations, in the meantime, have thrown up some tragic facts like those of 17-year-old Zhang Wenlong. He says he was drugged before being abducted from Zhengzhou Railway Station and "shipped" to the kiln in Hongtong. It was a real "prison" from where "it was impossible to escape There were musclemen and six ferocious dogs guarding the kiln especially to prevent anyone from escaping."

The working conditions in the kiln were "hellish", and they were forced to work up to 16 hours a day. Just over a month after being forced into the "hell", Zhang burnt his hands seriously when he was ordered to carry bricks that hadn't even cooled down. That was on April 26. Let alone being taken to a hospital for treatment, he wasn't even given proper medicines; he was given expired medicines. The "overseer" told him to use "traditional" treatment - applying yellow clay on the wound.

Zhang describes his daily life in the kiln thus: Waking up at 5 am; having some cabbage, radish and cold buns as food; starting work almost immediately; slogging it out the whole day and late into the night; returning to bed around midnight. They were not allowed to go to the toilet at night, and didn't even get water to wash their face, let alone have a bath. They slept on bricks with doors locked from the outside. Strong wire nets were fastened to the windows to turn the rooms into prison cells.

What about wages? Zhang says he had been promised a monthly pay of 800 yuan ($105) but got nothing.

"You cannot imagine the cruelty unless you've been there," says Fu Zhenzhong, a reporter with Henan provincial television station who went to Hongtong with some parents looking for their lost children. There were at least 1,000 children working as slave laborers in the kilns, Fu says.

One of the persons who went in search of their kids was Yang Aizhi from Henan. It was she who sent a petition to Premier Wen Jiabao on June 11 that read: "Please save our children who have been abducted by devils and are living in hell." About one week before the 46-year-old mother sent the letter, some 400 men in Henan who believed their children had been abducted and sold as slave workers to kilns in neighboring Shanxi sought help online.

They said they had "spent all their money and risked their lives to go deep into the mountains looking for their children, with the youngest 8". But not many succeeded in seeing their kids because of the heavy security in the kilns and the indifference of the local police. Many owners ran the kilns, as Zhang says, like prisons with ferocious dogs guarding their boundaries. Musclemen beat up and tortured the laborers who tried to escape to instill fear among the others.

Only two of the six parents who initiated the rescue operation could free their kids. One of the children, a 17-year-old boy, had to be carried on a stretcher because his feet were seriously burnt.

Yang began the search for her 16-year-old son as soon as he went "missing" on March 8 from Zhengzhou, capital of Henan. After visiting hundreds of Internet cafes and issuing thousands of missing person notices, she had almost given up hope when she got a call from another parent. The woman told her that her son had just escaped from a brick kiln in Shanxi, and Yang should look for hers there.

Yang began the Herculean task of visiting the more than 100 kilns in Shanxi in early April. But she couldn't see her son. Instead, what she saw was horrifying. "In most of the kilns, children were being forced to work beyond their physical capacity. Some children were still in their school uniforms. When they could not carry on with the inhuman task of pushing massive carts full of bricks anymore, they were whipped by the taskmasters," she says. Many children had wounds on their feet and around their waist.

Yang tried to save some of the boys who secretly begged her to take them away. But the kiln owners told her she dared not try it if she wanted to leave the place safe and sound.

She then pleaded with the local government to help rescue the children, but received little help. That's when the parents sought the media's help last month. After the expose, police raided the Caosheng Village kiln in Hongtong and freed 31 workers, with the youngest being 14.

But much before the police launched the operation, a greater tragedy had already struck. A worker named Liu Bao died after being hit with a shovel in November and was buried without proper documentation. Police have detained kiln foreman Heng Tinghan, owner Wang Bingbing and three of his hired hoodlums.

Even with the rescue operation in progress, many parents fear, as Yang says, that their children might have been shifted to other provinces or hidden in remote mountainous areas to avoid detection. "We saw at least 200 to 300 child laborers, but only about 50 have been freed," Yang says. "Where are the others?"

That is also the question on almost every shocked citizen's lips. People have criticized government officials for their indifference and blamed corruption for the delay in freeing the laborers. "We've appealed to police but received little help," say the 400 fathers in an online petition. "Some officers even prevented us from saving children that were not ours. They told us to mind our own business."

Some officials were reportedly involved in the trafficking. Zhu Guanghui, a 16-year-old boy who was freed from one of the kilns, told reporters that a labor inspector had sold him for 300 yuan ($40). It has come to light that many of these kilns had connections with local governments. The Hongtong kiln, for instance, is in the courtyard of Wang Dongji, the Communist Party secretary of the village, and its owner Wang Bingbing is his son.

Many people and the media have been asking why police swung into action only after the central leadership's order. The People's Daily, in a scathing report, has said: "Dereliction of (duty of officials in) local government departments and collusion between officials and criminals is clear."

Other reports have said human trafficking started about 10 years ago in central China, and gained momentum in recent years, with organized gangs being involved. Investigations have shown the "trade" began with traffickers and middlemen, who trapped people at railway stations and long-distance bus terminals with the allure of high-paid jobs in big cities. Boys aged around 16 were the most sought after because they were old enough to work and easy to control.

After they were abducted or lured into a trap, they used to be kept in a room near the stations or terminals and sent in groups of five or six to cities such as Linfen, Yuncheng and Jincheng in Shanxi where most of the illegal kilns were concentrated.

As soon as the slave laborers reached the kilns, the owners used to seize their luggage and identity certificates.

They gave them new names, too, to mislead parents who came looking for their children.

Such sad stories could be repeated if the government doesn't set up a foolproof law enforcement mechanism at the grass-roots level, which it has vowed to do, and take every possible measure to narrow the rich and poor divide.

Agencies and the Southern Weekend contributed to the story

(China Daily 06/19/2007 page12)