27 October 2008
Maputo — The Mozambican police have seized two busloads of children in the central province of Sofala, on suspicion that they were being trafficked.
Both buses had come from northern provinces, and were stopped in Caia district, on the south bank of the Zambezi. The first bus was stopped on Friday. It contained 23 children, between seven and 17 years old, who were taken to the Provincial Office for the Care of Women and Child Victims of Violence in Beira.
At midday on Sunday, the second bus was intercepted, and found to be carrying 41 children.
But in both cases the children themselves said they were not being trafficked, but were being taken to a madrassa (koranic school) in the southern city of Matola to continue their "Islamic studies". To check this story out, the police, according to a report in Monday's issue of the independent daily "O Pais", decided to escort the second bus all the way to Matola.
This is the second case this year of children taken from their homes in northern Mozambique and transported the length of the country in order to study the Koran in Maputo. In the first case, reported in January, 40 children, aged between six and 16, had been herded like cattle into a truck.
The adults transporting them were arrested, and the authorities returned the children to their families, who had apparently authorized them to attend madrassas, but were unaware of the inhuman conditions of the transport used. In the case of the two buses stopped this weekend, at least the children seem to have had proper seating.
The spokesperson for the Sofala provincial police command, Feliciano Dique, said the police are gathering more information. He noted that none of the children possessed reliable documentation, and the police were not sure whether their parents really had authorized the journey.
These incidents do not fall into the classical definition of human trafficking, since there is no indication that the children were going to end up as slave labour or as prostitutes. But it remains a serious abuse of children's rights, since they were being deprived of their right to a proper education.
The spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, Eurico Banze, pointed out that the law regulating private education insists that private schools, whether run by religious organisations or not, cannot teach only religious studies, but must also use the Mozambican national education curriculum.
The college mentioned by the children is the Jamiah Anass Bin Malik madrassa, and Banze said the Ministry will investigate to see exactly what it teaches. If it turns out that the education offered is exclusively religious, he promised "tough measures" against the madrassa.
"O Pais" has already done this research, and confirmed that the madrassa is only for boys and is dedicated exclusively to teaching Islam. Children caught up on this treadmill will find that later in life the only jobs open for them involve reciting the Koran, in the original Arabic, in mosques.
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