Fine crafts from too-tiny hands

But employers in Fes, the Islamic world's most complete medieval city, say human rights campaigners are jeopardizing the survival of the kingdom's ancient fine arts. Small hands, they say, are better than big ones at weaving. And in a kingdom where millions are unemployed, they argue their "apprenticeship" at least gives children a trade. Their futures, says Ben Makhlou, a Fes potter and president of the handicraft manufacturers association, compares favorably to the squadrons of children trawling trains peddling single cigarettes, or the homeless young passing the nights sheltering beneath the palace walls.

Despite a new law that makes school compulsory, Morocco admits it has 538,000 child workers under the age of 13. In fact it is far higher. The figures exclude the hundreds of thousands of little girls sold by their parents in the countryside to work in the cities as child maids. The practice is so common, kitchens in Morocco are specially built with child-high sinks and workbenches. Known in Morocco as petites bonnes, they are treated as slaves.

"They beat me and waved scalding irons at me," says 10-year-old Asma, who has now found refuge and a cuddle with the charity, Bayti. "They never let me home for holidays - even when Daddy died, they said I had to stay." At the age of 6, her father had packed her into a bus for the journey alone from her village 250 miles north to the Casablanca metropolis in return for $5 a week.

New ad campaign

With the backing of Morocco's royals, a child nongovernmental organization - the Moroccan Observatory for Child Rights - has launched a television ad campaign to persuade employers to send their child maids to school. It stigmatizes the servitude that until now has been deemed a deep-rooted tradition, and offers children like Asma a help line.

The response has been overwhelming. Calls to the Observatory are running at over a thousand a day from parents denied access to their children held in the cities; neighbors reporting the screams; houseboys alleging sexual abuse; and even calls from desperate girls like Asma. The Observatory says it is setting up a network of lawyers across the kingdom to pursue cases of abuse in court.

But critics charge the campaign does not go far enough - it stops short of demanding an outright ban on child maids, or enforcing the law against the parents of the 2.5 million 6- to 11-year-olds who do not go to school.

Parents argue that they are offering their children the chance of a lifeline out of rural poverty. "What's the point of an education, when you can't get a job?" asks Abdallah from the town of Fkih ben Salah, in the central plains of Morocco. He sold his eldest daughter, Fatima, age 8, to a wealthy household in the capital, Rabat. With six mouths to feed, he needed the money.

With 5 million Moroccans living on less than a dollar a day and tens of thousands each year fleeing the kingdom as boat people to Europe, parents are resorting to child labor for income - some even sending their children to southern Europe to work.

"The Moroccan man conceives a lot of children to have a lot of income," says Ahmed Dialmi, a sociology professor at Fes University.

Despairing of bringing children to school, UNICEF is now taking teachers into the workhouses. At the Congress Palace, UNICEF is implementing a new project to teach the carpet-weavers how to read. "We don't want to damage Moroccan handicrafts in anyway," says Ms. Berrada. "It is a beautiful unique tradition and one of the major sources of income for the country, but we must protect children's rights."

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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