[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 73 (Friday, June 9, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1098-E1099]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NICHOLAS KRISTOF: INTRODUCING AMERICANS TO 
               AFRICA--ONE ASPIRING JOURNALIST AT A TIME

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, June 9, 2006

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise to enter into the Record a column by 
Nicholas Kristof: ``The Drumroll, Please'' in the May 23, 2006 edition 
of The New York Times and his column of March 26, 2006 entitled ``A 
Woman Without Importance.''
  Mr. Kristof uses his New York Times column to bring to our attention 
important, little known and neglected human rights causes. In the past 
12 months many of these causes have come from Mr. Kristofs observations 
during his many trips to countries in Africa. As a persistent, 
compassionate journalist advocating for women's rights in Africa, Mr. 
Kristof has no peer. To me, he is a quiet but powerful voice forcing 
our recognition that women and girls are without basic human rights in 
many countries in Africa and other countries as well such as Vietnam, 
Thailand, and Pakistan.
  In a column of March 26, 2006, Mr. Kristoff wrote about Aisha Parveen 
who at the age of 14 was living in northwest Pakistan when she was hit 
over the head while walking to school. She awoke to find herself 
imprisoned in a brothel where she was tortured and imprisoned for 6 
years. When she escaped she married a man who helped her. The brothel 
owner sued the couple claiming he had married the 14-year-old Aisha 
Parveen. She was accused of adultery and was ordered to go back to the 
brothel owner.
  Girls in Africa are often sold as sex slaves or servants. In some 
countries girls are inherited or used to payoff debts. Marriages are 
arranged for them when they are as young as 12 years. They have babies 
before their bodies are able to deliver a child vaginally. With no 
medical help most labor for days to deliver a dead baby and are left 
with terrible birth injuries. If the mother is incontinent because of 
an injury called a fistula she is shunned by her family and her husband 
forced to live away from the village.
  Mr. Kristof won the Pulitzer Prize for risking his life returning to 
the Darfur region of southern Sudan again and again to tell the stories 
of the people suffering from the remaining victims of a concerted 
effort by the Arab government in Khartoum to eliminate every last one 
of them. Kristof has chronicled genocide in Darfur as it has continued 
unabated for three years and goes on now in spite of a newly signed 
peace accord brokered in part by the United States.

  Kristof has told the personal stories of people who have suffered 
from the rampages of the Janjaweed, the proxy murderers of the 
Government of Sudan in Khartoum. He has personalized the murders, the 
maiming, the rapes, the killing of children, by telling the heart 
breaking stories of people who have lost their homes, their children 
and parents, husbands and wives, their livestock, their lands and their 
freedom.
  Perhaps because so little print had been spent on Darfur, Mr. 
Kristoff, decided people were not familiar enough with Africa to become 
sympathetic to the plight of people who are targets of a ruthless, 
cruel genocide.
  Maybe Mr. Kristof had the idea that more students should make travel 
to other countries part of their college education and more 
universities should offer such trips. As he announced in his video a 
``win a trip'' contest in March he felt he got a great education from 
his trips when he was a student that he was sponsoring a ``win a trip'' 
competition because he had learned so much from his trips to other 
countries while he was a student that he felt more students needed to 
experience life in other countries. Kristof's idea of visiting other 
countries is visiting places where the people of the country live, not 
visiting tourist places like Paris and London.
  In Mr. Kristof's video announcing the ``win a trip'' contest, the 
camera views him from above as he appears to be standing on a wide sand 
beach. Mr. Kristof begins by talking about spring breaks and how many 
American college students spend their spring breaks and summers 
reveling beaches. But as the camera closes in, it become clear Mr. 
Kristof is not on a beach and not near an American city or village 
recognizable to most Americans until the camera broadens its view to 
take in a skinny donkey with a rider and a few people wearing the long 
draped clothes and hoods common to desert peoples who are always 
needing protection from a brutal, relentless sun.
  For years Mr. Kristof has used his column in the Times to chronicle 
the continuing slow genocide in Darfur with the individual stories of 
people who have been maimed, raped and had children killed in front of 
them and to stop the genocide in Darfur. He has told the stories of the 
individuals who have lost everything they had; families, homes, 
livestock and parents. He has traveled to places in Africa where women 
are the least of the least and has chronicled stories of women who are 
shunned by their families if they are raped or worse go to jail even 
though they are the victims of crime.
  The fact that 3,800 aspiring journalists from universities around the 
country applied to accompany Mr. Kristof on an admittedly ``rough'' 
reporting trip to ``a neglected area in Africa''

[[Page E1099]]

speaks volumes about the esteem in which these students hold Mr. 
Kristof. The number of applicants wanting to go to Africa gives me 
enormous hope for Africa and our country. There is no better way for 
Americans to know Africa than to go there. And for those who will not 
be able to go themselves they will benefit from the journalists like 
Casey Parks the winner of the first ``win a trip'' contest who is 
accompanying Mr. Kristof this summer to Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and 
the Central African Republic.
  My wish for Ms. Parks is that she has a long career as a journalist 
who will write so intimately and well of her journey, that the people 
of Africa will be seen as individual human beings to her readers. My 
hope for Mr. Kristof is that is he is able to take a different aspiring 
journalist every year and convince Universities and colleges around the 
country of the value of establishing programs for students to live in 
countries they will not visit as tourists to see how the people of 
these countries live their lives.

                [From the New York Times, May 23, 2006]

                          The Drumroll, Please

                        (By Nicholas D. Kristof)

       In March I opened a ``win a trip'' contest, offering to 
     take a university student with me on a rough reporting trip 
     to a neglected area in Africa.
       Some 3,800 applications poured in, accompanied by boxes of 
     supplementary materials, ranging from senior theses to nude 
     photos. After weeks of sifting through the applications, I 
     finally have a winner.
       She is Casey Parks of Jackson, Miss.--an aspiring 
     journalist who has never traveled abroad. We'll get her a 
     passport and a bunch of vaccinations--ah, the glamour of 
     overseas travel--and start planning our trip.
       Casey, who turned 23 on Friday, attended Millsaps College 
     in Jackson and is now a graduate student in journalism at the 
     University of Missouri. She has won a string of awards for 
     her essays and other writing.
       In her essay, Casey wrote about growing up poor: ``I saw my 
     mother skip meals. I saw my father pawn everything he loved. 
     I saw our cars repossessed. I never saw France or London.'' 
     (The essays by Casey and a dozen finalists are posted at 
     nytimes.com/winatrip.)
       ``I so desperately want to leave this country and know 
     more,'' she wrote. Now she'll have the chance.
       We'll most likely start in Equatorial Guinea, bounce over 
     to Cameroon and travel through a jungle with Pygmy villages 
     to end up in the Central African Republic--one of the most 
     neglected countries in the world. We'll visit schools, 
     clinics and aid programs, probably traveling in September for 
     10 days. Casey will write a blog about it for nytimes.com and 
     will also do a video blog for MTV-U.
       But the point of this contest wasn't to give one lucky 
     student the chance to get malaria and hookworms. It's to try 
     to stir up a broader interest in the developing world among 
     young people.
       One of our country's basic strategic weaknesses is that 
     Americans don't understand the rest of the world. We got in 
     trouble in Vietnam and again in Iraq partly because we 
     couldn't put ourselves in other people's shoes and appreciate 
     their nationalism.
       According to Foreign Policy magazine, 92 percent of U.S. 
     college students don't take a foreign language class. Goucher 
     College in Baltimore bills itself as the first American 
     college to require all students to study abroad, and the 
     rest should follow that example.
       So for all the rest of you who applied for my contest, see 
     if you can't work out your own trips. Or take a year off 
     before heading to college or into ajob. You'll have to pay 
     for your travel, but you can often find ``hotels'' for $5 a 
     night per person in countries like India, Pakistan, Cambodia, 
     Laos, Indonesia, Morocco, Bolivia and Peru--and in rural 
     areas, people may invite you to stay free in their huts. To 
     get around, you can jump on local buses.
       Is it safe? Not entirely, for the developing world has more 
     than its share of pickpockets, drunken soldiers, scorpions, 
     thugs, diseases, parasites and other risks.
       Twenty-two years ago, as a backpacking student, I traveled 
     with a vivacious young American woman who, like me, was 
     living in Cairo. She got off my train in northern Sudan; that 
     evening, the truck she had hitched a ride in hit another 
     truck. Maybe if there had been an ambulance or a doctor 
     nearby, she could have been saved. Instead, she bled to 
     death.
       So, yes, be aware of the risks, travel with a buddy or two, 
     and carry an international cellphone. But remember that young 
     Aussies, Kiwis and Europeans take such a year of travel all 
     the time--women included--and usually come through not only 
     intact, but also with a much richer understanding of how most 
     of humanity lives.
       There are also terrific service options. Mukhtar Mai, the 
     Pakistani anti-rape activist I've often written about, told 
     me she would welcome American volunteers to teach English in 
     the schools she has started. You would have to commit to 
     staying six weeks or more, but would get free housing in her 
     village. You can apply by contacting www.4anaa.org.
 Then there's New Light, a terrific anti-trafficking 
     organization in Calcutta. Urmi Basu, who runs it, said she 
     would welcome American volunteers to teach English classes to 
     the children of prostitutes. You would have to stay at least 
     six weeks and budget $15 a day for food and lodging; for more 
     information go to www.uddami.org/newlight.
       In the 21st century, you can't call yourself educated if 
     you don't understand how the other half lives--and you don't 
     get that understanding in a classroom. So do something about 
     your educational shortcomings: fly to Bangkok.
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, Mar. 26, 2006]

                       A Woman Without Importance

                        (By Nicholas D. Kristof)

       Khanpur, Pakistan.--Aisha Parveen doesn't matter. She's 
     simply one more impoverished girl from the countryside, and 
     if her brothel's owner goes ahead and kills her, almost no 
     one will care.
       Ms. Parveen, an outspoken 20-year-old woman with flashing 
     eyes, is steeling herself for a state administered horror. 
     Just two months after she escaped from the brothel in which 
     she was tortured and imprisoned for six years, the courts are 
     poised to hand her back to the brothel owner.
       Sex trafficking, nurtured by globalization and increased 
     mobility, is becoming worse. The U.N. estimates that one 
     million children are held in conditions of slavery in Asia 
     alone. Yet it never gets much attention, because the victims 
     tend to be the least powerful people in these societies: poor 
     and uneducated rural girls.
       Ms. Parveen was a 14-year-old Pashtun living in the 
     northwest of Pakistan when she was hit on the head while 
     walking to school. She says she awoke to find herself 
     imprisoned in a brothel hundreds of miles away, in this 
     remote southeastern Pakistani town of Khanpur.
       A person of unbelievable strength, Ms. Parveen fought back 
     and refused to sleep with customers. So, she says, the 
     brothel owner--Mian Sher, the violent sadist who had 
     kidnapped her--beat and sexually tortured her, and regularly 
     drugged her so that she would fall unconscious and customers 
     could do with her as they liked.
       This went on for six years, during which she says she was 
     beaten every day. The girls in the brothel were forced to 
     sleep naked at night, so that they would be too embarrassed 
     to try to escape. Ms. Parveen says she believes that two of 
     them, Malo Jan and Suwa Tai, were killed after they 
     repeatedly refused to sleep with customers. In any case 
     condoms were never available, so all the girls may eventually 
     die of AIDS.
       I wanted to look into the eyes of a man who could do these 
     things. So I barged into Mian Sher's brothel, identified 
     myself and interviewed him.
       He warily offered me tea, pleasantries and flashes of 
     violent temper. He denied kidnapping Ms. Parveen, saying that 
     he had married her six years earlier. He also denied that he 
     pimped the girls--a claim undermined by a customer who was 
     walking out of his brothel as I arrived. Others working in 
     the area said that Mian Sher unquestionably ran a brothel, 
     and that Ms. Parveen had been imprisoned in it.
       In January, Ms. Parveen got a break. A metalworker, Mohamed 
     Akram, had been doing work in the brothel, and he pitied her. 
     ``She laid her scarf down on my feet and begged me, in the 
     name of the Holy Koran, to rescue her,'' he remembers, and 
     soon he felt not only pity but also love.
       So on Jan. 5, Ms. Parveen stealthily arose in the middle of 
     the night, crept past Mian Sher and padlocked the door with 
     him inside. Then she ran to a car that Mr. Akram had sent. 
     The next day, they were married.
       Then the judicial nightmare began. Mian Sher brought 
     charges against the couple, claiming that Ms. Parveen is his 
     wife and must return to him.
       ``The police have taken money from him,'' Ms. Parveen said. 
     ``They say, `You're married to him, so you should go back to 
     him.' Well, I would rather die than go back to the brothel.''
       The police are now prosecuting Ms. Parveen for adultery. 
     She is free on bail, but thugs have attacked her home and 
     tried to kidnap her.
       Mian Sher told me his plan: if Ms. Parveen is jailed for 
     adultery, then as her supposed husband he will bail her out 
     and take her away. Ms. Parveen says she believes he will then 
     rape and torture her, and finally kill her.
       So the judicial system, while ignoring the sex trafficking 
     of children, may now, in the name of morality, hand a young 
     woman over to a brothel owner to do with her as he wants.
       The new abolitionism, against sex trafficking, is being 
     pushed in America by an unlikely coalition of religious 
     conservatives and liberal feminists; leaders include the 
     Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Ecpat, Equality Now 
     and International Justice Mission. But progress is slow 
     because the victims tend to be voiceless young people like 
     Ms. Parveen.
       Whether Ms. Parveen is returned to her brothel owner and 
     killed may be, in terms of global issues, a small matter. But 
     after spending a couple of days with this smart and lovely 
     young woman, after seeing her in moments of giddy laughter 
     and terrified weeping, I can't help thinking that slavery 
     should be just as outrageous in the 21st century as it was in 
     the 19th.
       A court hearing to decide Ms. Parveen's fate is scheduled 
     for tomorrow here in Khanpur. I'll let you know what happens.




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