Significant numbers of women and children in Tanzania and Uganda are abducted or coerced to serve as sex slaves, prostitutes and forced labourers, the US State Department says in a new report on worldwide Trafficking in Persons. 

Kenya is not included in the survey because it is among the countries where the State Department could not gather enough reliable information about what it terms "this modern form of slavery." 

In Tanzania, the practice is said to occur mainly on an internal basis, although the report cites unidentified sources as suggesting that Tanzanian women and girls may be trafficked to South Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe to work as prostitutes. "To a lesser degree," the report adds, "Tanzania is a destination point for trafficked persons from India and surrounding African countries."

 The United States itself is not exempted from the findings. Describing the US as principally a transit and destination country for trafficking in persons, the State Department cites a 1997 estimate that some 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually into the US for sexual exploitation. 

In its section on Uganda, the report focuses on the "tens of thousands" of women and children abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army during the past 15 years. Other instances of trafficking in Uganda are not mentioned in the study. 

Neither the Tanzanian nor Ugandan governments fully complies with minimum standards for combating trafficking in persons, according to the State Department. The report consequently places the two East African countries in a "Tier 2" category, which includes about 50 nations making "significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance" with the standards. 

Tier 1 countries, those judged to be carrying out the most rigorous anti-trafficking initiatives, are mostly prosperous and politically stable states. Tier 3 consists of 19 countries, including Sudan, that are said to be making no effort to institute safeguards against enslavement of their people. 

The US law requiring issuance of an annual international survey on human trafficking calls for imposition of penalties on Tier 3 countries beginning next year. The punishments could take the form of cuts in US aid as well as moves by Washington to block World Bank lending to the condemned countries. 

The State Department report says Uganda is striving to stem trafficking despite "limited resources, a civil conflict and continued kidnapping raids" by LRA forces. At the same time, however, the Ugandan government "does not actively investigate or prosecute cases of trafficking," according to the report. 

Tanzania's efforts to curb the practice are hampered by "severe financial constraints, pervasive corruption and porous borders." A new section of Tanzania's penal code makes trafficking inside or outside the country a crime, but the penalty for it is "relatively light," the State Department says. 

Tanzania is one of three countries participating in a pilot programme intended to eliminate the worst forms of child labour, the report notes. 

Children are trafficked from rural to urban areas in Tanzania for domestic work, commercial agriculture, fishing and mining. Young members of the country's large refugee population are especially vulnerable to being used as labourers on Tanzanian plantations, the report says. 

The State Department says there are no firm estimates of the total number of people being trafficked worldwide. No fewer than 700,000 and as many as four million were bought, sold, transported and held in slave-like conditions during the past year, the report suggests.