Benin searches for child slave ship

COTONOU, Benin (CNN) -- Authorities have mounted a search for a ship, believed to contain as many as 250 children intended for slave labor, that is expected to arrive in Benin on Sunday.

The ship has been seeking a port on Africa's west coast for more than a week. It was recently spotted off the west coast of Nigeria, said UNICEF spokeswoman Esther Guluma.

The government of Benin requested that Interpol try to locate the boat because it contains a number of children to be taken for forced labor in Gabon, she said.

Benin police said the ship left Cotonou a week ago, bound for Libreville, Gabon, where it was refused entry. It then headed to Douala, Cameroon, but officials there refused to let it dock, so the vessel was on its way back to Benin.

Cotonou police said there were about 250 children on the ship, from Benin and neighboring Togo, though Douala police said the ship carried 28 children and 148 adults.

Officials from UNICEF were at the port awaiting the ship's arrival, said spokeswoman Esther Guluma. She said the children would be cared for by a doctor while the agency worked to find their parents.

Guluma said police told her they would make arrests when the ship docks.

It was unclear in what capacity the children were traveling. Guluma said it was possible the children were involved in illegal child trafficking.

Often, she said, traffickers will offer poor families money to take their children to other countries. The families accept, believing their children will send money home, but the children are often resold as plantation workers or domestic servants and are never able to send wages to their families.

"Trafficking children ... is very similar to slavery," Guluma told CNN, "because the children are normally not paid and they work very, very hard labor in the plantations and in other areas where they work. The conditions are not the same as slavery, but they work as slave labor, in essence."

More than 200,000 children in West Africa are involved in this kind of labor, Guluma told CNN.

UNICEF and other organizations have made headway against the problem, by educating parents in rural areas about the dangers and working at governmental levels. Last August, Mali signed an agreement to stop sending children to work on plantations in the Ivory Coast.

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UNICEF - United Nations Children's Fund
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