Ms. Rees explores the business of sex trafficking in Eastern Europe particularly from the standpoint of her own personal experience. She explains, from her many years in Bosnia, the tragedies of the business, as well as the failures in attempts to stop it. In addition, Ms. Rees looks forward and argues how she feels the problem should be tackled in the future.

Synopsis

Ms. Rees sets the tone for her talk from the start by stating that while our interventions are a response to the phenomenon of sex trafficking, the phenomenon develops as a result of our interventions. Offering a simplified definition, she explains that the sex trafficking business consists of three main stages: recruitment, transfer, and exploitation. Mr. Rees continues by arguing that although there are many different perceptions of trafficking, focusing on only one of them, such as purely the prostitution aspect or solely the migration factor, will lead to eventual failure.

Placing strong emphasis on the fact that sex trafficking is a free market affair and therefore must be treated as such, Mr. Rees begins her focus on the business in Eastern Europe from the perspective of the dire economic situation in post-Soviet states. Discussing primarily her personal experience in Bosnia in the midst of the Balkans conflict, she explains the situation was one where organized criminal activity was for survival. In addition, Ms. Rees reveals that the status of the region both during and after the conflict was perfect for sex trafficking. There were almost no border checks, the 60, 000 peacekeepers provided a large and convenient market, and the police were easily corruptible. Ms. Rees explains that this messy situation lasted until 1999-2000 when the international community finally realized the seriousness of the problem at hand.

Resulting from the stabilization of the region and increased international attention, the crime of sex trafficking and its response was becoming increasingly sophisticated. However, Ms. Rees explains the role of the UN consisted of, in large part, offering clients and doing little to punish their conduct. She also expresses discontent at the UN program of bar raids which shifted the business underground, making it much harder to track. Similarly, Ms. Rees examines the efforts the International Organization for Migration and her concern with the tactics of coercive testimony. Ms. Rees also focuses on the period after 2003, once the UN peacekeepers had left, where the market had shrunk and the business was legitimizing. As women were starting to make money, the law enforcement approach was becoming increasingly messy, and Ms. Rees examines the certain merits of shelters and legal advice for the female victims.

Ms Rees concludes on a more somber note, exposing her belief that Bosnia was a failure in attempts to stop sex trafficking. She emphasizes that it was a failure with considerable economic ramifications. Finally, Mr. Rees finishes by arguing that current approaches do not listen enough to the subjects of the crime, the women. These are who we must base our efforts around.

Ms. Rees also kindly takes the time answer the audience’s various questions, raising a multitude of issues. She explains the inaccuracy and impossibility of estimating the numbers of the sex trafficking industry. Ms. Rees also explores the issues of HIV and pregnancies, as well as immunity for foreign workers such as the UN peacekeepers. Another key point raised was the potential effectiveness of prosecuting clients of the sex trafficking business.

Sponsored jointly by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Stanford Law School, and Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

This keynote speech kicks off the Trafficking of Women in Post-Communist Europe conference April 18.

Conventional wisdom says that relations between China and Japan are fated always to be exceptionally wary, if not openly hostile -- and Japanese leaders' visits to the notorious Yasukuni have done nothing to undermine this view. Nor have Sino-Japanese standoffs over the disputed Senkaku islands. Meanwhile Beijing's opposition has been widely credited as the reason why Japan has failed in its reported aspiration to join the United Nations Security Council. Author and long-time Tokyo-based East Asia watcher Eamonn Fingleton argues that these issues have been grossly misunderstood in the West and that on closer inspection they say little if anything about the true state of Sino-Japanese relations. He insists that on a host of substantive issues overlooked by the press, Japan and China have been cooperating closely for decades. So much so that Japanese help has been one of the most powerful factors in China's rise.

A former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, Eamonn Fingleton has been monitoring East Asian economics since 1985. He met China's supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986 as a member of a New York Stock Exchange delegation. The following year he predicted the Tokyo banking crash and went on in Blindside, a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by J.K. Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted leadership in advanced manufacturing to Japan.

His 1999 book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity anticipated the American Internet stock crash of 2000. In his 2008 book In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony, he issues a strong challenge to the conventional view among Washington policymakers and think tank analysts that China is converging to Western economic and political forms and attitudes. His books have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com.

He was born in Ireland in 1948 and is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. He was the recipient of the American Values Award from the United States Business and Industry Council in 2001.

Copies of Fingleton's newest book In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony - due March 4 by St. Martin's Press - will be for sale during the event.

Matthias Küntzel, born in 1955, is a political scientist in Hamburg, Germany. He has served as senior advisor for the German Green Party caucus in the the Bundestag and is currently a Research Associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as a member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Küntzel's essays have been published in The New Republic, Policy Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Telos. His most recent book, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, published by Telos Press,won the 2007 London Book Festival Grand Prize.

In this lecture, Dr. Kuentzel examines an understudied legacy of the Nazi past, the transfer of the ideology of European antisemitism into the Arab world and its role in the formation of contemporary terrorism.

Event Synopsis:

Dr. Kuentzel begins his talk by recounting widespread celebrations within some Palestinian communities after the March 2008 killing of 15 young Jewish students by a Palestinian. He shows a video of a sermon from a mosque in Gaza in 2005 which praises the murders. Kuentzel rejects common arguments that the celebrations represent a desire for revenge on Israel for Palestinian deaths since 1948. Instead, he asserts that the incident shows that Islamists are obsessed by genocidal anti-Semitism, which has been influenced by and can be compared to European and Nazi anti-Semitism, both of which he sees as attempts to answer the success of liberal capitalism.

His talk follows the outline of his recent book, and covers four topics:

1. The birth of Islamism

When the Muslim Brotherhood was established as a mass movement in 1928, it aimed to replace a parliamentary system with a caliphate, emphasizing a return to the roots of Islam. By 1948, the group had 1 million members in Egypt alone. A form of populist Islam, it invoked jihad as a means of establishing Sharia law, and focused its efforts almost entirely against Jews, drawing on both early Islamic thought and Nazism.

1. Jew hatred as related to the hatred of modernity

Kuentzel sees Islamist anti-Semitism as closely tied to a fear of modernity. In this sense Jews are seen as representing the most threatening aspects of modernity including gender equality, freedom of thought, and individualism.

1. Islamism and national socialism

Kuentzel draws ties between Islamism and the ideology of national socialism embodied by the Nazi party. He describes a Nazi radio station which broadcast Arabic language programming between 1945 and 1949. The programs emphasized religious identity of Muslims, utilized popular broadcasters, and were professionally produced with strong transmission signals, making them popular and widely accessible.

1. Present day Islamism and anti-Semitism

Dr. Kuentzel asserts that Nazi ideology persisted in parts of Europe after 1945, and that when the Cold War emerged as the prominent political and economic feature of the era, it obscured/overshadowed the continuation of national socialist thought.

Finally, Dr. Kuentzel offers his views of both Islamism and anti-Semitism today, and concludes that the incidents like the one described at the beginning of his talk represent a revival of Nazi ideology "in new garb." He credits Muslims such as scholar Bassam Tibi who urge tolerance and speak out against anti-Semitism.