Trafficking
The Hidden Columnists--Nicholas Kristof Edition (06 Nov)

In his Sunday column, "Bleeding Hearts of the World, Unite!", Kristof tells the tale of an interesting human rights conference that was put together by the odd couple pairing of former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Senator Sam Brownback (from Kansas, as well as the morals and virtue wing of the Republican party. If you're a Time Select subscriber, here's the link, as well as the intro to the column:

In a country dispirited by political mud wrestling, there was a spark of hope the other day: a conference in which liberals discussed international issues with conservative Christians - and agreed!

The conference, sponsored by Madeleine Albright on the left and Senator Sam Brownback on the right, underscored that we now have a tantalizing opportunity. If only left and right can hold their noses and work together, we can confront some of the scourges of our time - sex trafficking, genocide, religious oppression, prison brutality - on which there is surprising agreement about what needs to be done.

Democrats have mostly watched the arrival of evangelicals on the foreign policy scene the way the Romans regarded the approach of the Visigoths and Vandals, but that's a mistake. The growing engagement of conservative Christians on international issues is welcome because for the first time it has turned the American heartland into a constituency for foreign aid and humanitarian action.

A decade ago, the heartland was a force for isolation. That's why Tom DeLay said foreign aid meant "putting Ghana over Grandma," and Jesse Helms referred to aid as "money down a rat hole."

Now, in contrast, conservatives are leading the charge on some of these issues. Regular readers know that I'm no fan of this administration, but there's no arguing with facts. President Bush has almost tripled actual spending on overseas development assistance to $19 billion last year, compared with its trough under President Clinton of less than $7 billion in 1997, according to O.E.C.D. figures. (Mr. Bush hasn't given nearly as much as he's promised, but his broken promises still amount to far more than Mr. Clinton ever gave.)

BPNews.com (Baptist Press) has a bit more coverage (interestingly, I'm not finding much coverage in the MSM, save for the Moony Washington Times; I only found stories at BP and at the Christian Post):

Brownback named at the close of the meeting a list Albright and he had made of the five leading humanitarian crises in the world or –- as an aide to the former secretary of State put it, Brownback said -– the “top five worst places to wake up in the morning.” The list consisted of: (1) Darfur, the region of Western Sudan where about 400,000 have died and about 2.5 million have been displaced in the last three years during conflict with the government-sponsored militia; (2) North Korea, the Asian country where the communist regime is guilty of the widespread repression of human rights; (3) Burma, a Southeast Asian country ruled over by a military junta that is guilty of religious persecution and other human rights violations; (4) the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the African country in which it is estimated more than 30,000 people die each month and 2.2 million are displaced, and (5) Northern Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army has abducted what has been estimated to be more than 21,000 children and turned them into soldiers.

Counting all forms of trafficking, there are 27 million people globally in slavery, according to a National Geographic estimate, said Gary Haugen, president of International Justice Mission. That estimate is more than the number of people extracted from Africa in 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, he told the audience. He said sex trafficking victimizes about one million new children each year, according to UNICEF. Clinton and Brownback were on the trafficking panel moderated by Haugen.

This coming together is impressive, but I always get a tad nervous when I hear statements like this from Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land:

The persecution of Christians and other religious adherents “is waxing rather than waning in the world,” Land said, “and it’s not going to get better without the active engagement of the United States. It seems to me to be a sad but true reality in the 21st century that without American leadership, a lot of these situations are not going to be actively addressed.”

I suppose it is a religiously themed (and in particular, a Christian-themed event), but the problems that need to be addressed goes much farther than the persecution of Christians--it's the persecution of essential human rights, full stop, no need to muddy the waters with religiosity. But in the name of getting programs and policy moving in that direction, this is a good start. I'll let Kristof finish it out:

Look, I think that Christian leaders on the right like Senator Brownback, Frank Wolf in the House and Chuck Colson are utterly wrong on many issues. I probably wouldn't vote for them for political office. But I admire them immensely for their humanitarian efforts, and I might vote for them for sainthood.

Over the next year, Democrats and Republicans will devote millions of dollars to heap slime on each other. If they devote 1 percent as much energy to cooperating on a few of these issues, they'll make the world a much better place. Bleeding hearts of the world, unite!