Fadel, 14, stands near the end of the road, waving tissue packages in his small hands. He is always smiling as he offers his goods to the car passengers stopped at the traffic lights. He hopes to sell out before the day ends.
Child’s work
Fadel, 14, stands near the end of the road, waving tissue packages in his small hands. He is always smiling as he offers his goods to the car passengers stopped at the traffic lights. He hopes to sell out before the day ends.
Child’s work
Fadel says he has been selling Kleenex with his friends for more than seven years. They share their daily returns, which amount to 170 Libyan dinars (USD 125). He and some friends go every morning to a wholesaler and take large quantities of Kleenex and pay part of their price and go back at night and pay back the rest. “What remains after paying the wholesaler is equally divided among us,” says Fadel in a quiet voice.
Fadel admits that he often cries but cannot wipe his tears despite all the paper tissues he sells every day.
Fathi Tarhouni, Fadel’s 15-year-old partner, stands in Jannet Arif in the centre of Tripoli for two hours a day. He then heads to a car park where he and other children wash cars and prepare water and soap for the workers who monopolise the car-washing profession in that area. Fathi earns five Libyan dinars (USD 3.5) for each car that he washes— he can wash five cars every day.
Selling through begging
Another little boy, carried by his niqab-clad mother, is also selling tissues at a junction in Ras Hasan one morning.
When we attempt to approach her and take some photos of her and her small child, she yells: “I am Libyan … I am Libyan,” waving her green passport, which attracts the attention of passers-by who demanded that we delete the photos, which we do.
Many of the children working in Tripoli’s most-crowded streets, all wearing worn-out clothes, tell us have no other source of income and they are also not in school.
Colonel Mohamed Bakoush, Head of the Anti-Begging and Child Trafficking Committee, says that the phenomenon of trading using children is on the rise and it has become a burden on the relevant authorities, including the ministries of interior, social affairs and the child-related civil society organisations.
He says the committee’s work has been suspended due to a lack of funds, despite “our huge efforts to fight negative phenomena including child labour, begging, vice, drug dealing and others.
Hollow meetings
The committee was formed last year as a result of an agreement between the ministries of social affairs and interior and in cooperation with many social workers. However, Bakoush says, it was suspended after the Minister of Social Affairs, Samira Farjani, was replaced.
Bakoush says the committee will not resume its work unless the needed support is provided, which includes cars, funds and needed supplies.
The former minister did not hide her resentment at suspending the committee’s work. She demanded that her successor completes the action plan she started. Farjani did her best to understand the child labour phenomenon. She tasked committees of studying their living and social conditions. “I left my position and my replacement should complete what I started,” she adds.
On the ground, no practical measures are taken to combat child labour. Meetings are held to recommend solutions which are never applied.
Khamis Milad, Head of the Child Care Committee at the Ministry of Social Affairs, says that one of these meetings will be attended by representatives from the Ministry of Interior and all security authorities to “figure out the reasons behind the rise of this phenomenon that has spread all over Tripoli in particular.”
Criminalised by law
Ahlam Khweildi, from the Childhood and Women Organisation, did not wait for the results of that debate session to know the reasons. She says they have been following this growing phenomenon and that “they have discovered new horrifying details.”
She went to the police after detecting a hotspot in Tajoraa where many foreigners employ children and girls for a monthly sum of 1,500 Libyan dinars (about USD 1,100). Children are distributed every morning and the returns are divided at the end of the day.
Moneera Azabi, a lawyer, says what this gang is committing a punishable crime based on Article 27 of the Labour Law, which bans child labour and is punishable with imprisonment.
