Why did the Caucasus Media Institute work with NYU on organizing a seminar in Armenia to train journalists on how to report human trafficking? And did we learn something from this seminar?
Before we were approached by NYU to organize this event, we had limited information on the reality of human trafficking in Armenia. I myself had read reports that human trafficking in the sense of trafficking women from East European countries to force them work as sex slaves in Western countries, Turkey, or the Arab Gulf, and I was also conscious that the State Department was putting pressure on the Armenian government to have more restrictive legislation and crack-down on this illegal activity. But what was the reality in Armenia, I did not know much about that.
On the other hand, I knew that hundreds of thousand migrants, most of them young men, had left Armenian since this country became independent, out of social misery. Most of them had left without valid work contracts, without valid visa and other necessary legal papers. And I had heard stories that many of those workers, although not sex slaves, were being exploited in such conditions that could fit international legal explanations of “trafficking”. Therefore, it was – it still is – necessary for journalists in Armenia to investigate and report not only the conditions in which its sons and daughters work in foreign countries, but also to understand the conditions which pushes them to take such extreme, desperate steps.
In the last 12 years I have travelled intensively in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Russia, and in various airports, buses, trains or taxis met with people from various backgrounds and experiences. Again, I confess, I never investigated about trafficking, or sex workers, but I heard numerous stories here and there.
CMI, in collaboration with its sister organization CIMERA, hosted the seminar delivered mainly by consultants chosen by NYU at the Writer’s Union house in the Armenian mountain resort Tsaghkatsor on November 10-14, 2003. Fifteen journalists, and twelve government officials, and six NGO representatives took part. The seminar was dominated by presentations and video material prepared by international organizations specializing in issues related with human trafficking, which basically told the following narrative: Young, naive women from Eastern countries where jobs are rare are seduced by people around them who promises them attractive jobs in western Europe or the US, take them out of their country, confiscate their passports, exploit them as sex slaves, and once they return they have no cash in their hands, they are destroyed physically and psychologically.
Now twelve years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is something naive in this narration. I doubt that it is possible to bring young girls into such a trap, without that they doubt something. And I do doubt that most of the women exploited in sex trade come back home penniless. Think about this alternative narration. That women are recruited by rings of the sex trade while doubting what is expecting them, and while doubting they end up losing their freedom to leave that bondage and go back to their country of origin. Or, that after six months of misery in Berlin or Dubai they return to their provincial town wearing clothes of the latest fashion, with a diamond ring on each finger, and with a mobile phone? Isn’t this the best publicity for the sex traders? Wouldn’t this bring down the myth that the international organizations have created for themselves, which collapses after the first two-three interviews with the real people?
Then, why do people end up in the hands of traffickers? The answer often given by international organizations is poverty, desperation, lack of hope in the future. I do agree with this analysis. It is enough to visit one of those Soviet-made cities, where one or two factories provided half the jobs in the city, now causing half the unemployment in the same place. What can young or old people, men or women do in such a reality? They have to find a solution for paying the electricity bill, buy food, pay for education, pay for heating. Poverty could explain why people even doubting that they might be trafficked, that their work contracts will not be respected (in case there was a contract in the first place), and ready to jump in the next plane and hope there will be better than here. But I think it is only partial. I think that we are leaving out another powerful. In the 90’s the formerly Soviet societies went through a radical monetarization of their society, something that they had not experienced during seven decades of Soviet rule, and which went further than deeper than any ‘capitalist’ society. The 90’sa were the decade of privatisation, during which individuals privatised portions of state ownership, and during which success was measured by money, and expressed through luxury consumer goods. Mercedes cars, Rolex watches, and mobile phones had a social value that measured degree of success in the new society. And what could a worker, or a university student in a provincial town privatise?
Posing such questions is important to us. We at the CMI are working for the development of professional, accurate, critical, independent media, on the background of a journalism trained for Soviet-style propaganda. The development of such an independent media means, among others, that journalists working in countries like Armenia should be critical not only towards the functioning of their own government, economic leaders, and the political elite, but also towards international organizations who have much influence, and therefore power, over the media. Journalists should be trained to be critical to the whims and fashions that comes to this edge of the Caucasus from Washington, Brussels, Paris and London in the form of “fighting corruption”, “conflict-resolution” or why not “reporting on human trafficking”, as some decades ago used to come from Moscow in the form of Marxism-Leninism. While different international organizations have their political agenda, the local media should have a distance and independence to be able to report about these topics in a balanced, objective, precise, and critical manner.
The only way to develop independent media on the ruins of Soviet journalism is to make it an independent source of power. Media dependent on their respective governments is not media, but propaganda; media working for money is not media, but business; media working to reproduce what NGO’s or international organizations tell them is not media, but public relations. Dependent media could be successful in propaganda, in business, in politics, or in PR. But our aim at the CMI is to develop professional media.
But we are not still there. Very often journalists are submerged by training courses, round-tables, seminars, on various topics, and often they do not have the critical distance to report these issues from an original perspective. To achieve independent journalism, and eventually to be able to have valuable reporting on the issues on the international agenda, we all need to be careful not to create a new ideological dependence of the post-Soviet journalism.
Most of the responsibility does not lie on the shoulders of international organizations and donors, but on actors of the local journalism community. Armenian journalists should cherish their professional independence, understand it as the basic rule for their professional activity, so that they become an independent source, and enjoy the confidence of the public.
How far did we succeed in our aims through the four-week reporting work? It is up to the reader to judge the results of the reporting.