Taiwan Prostitutes Fight Crackdown

Wearing shorts and T-shirt but not her usual makeup, she stands in a dimly lit lane off Snake Alley, Taipei's red-light district, seeking signatures on a petition against a vice crackdown that has closed her place of business.

Lee, 30, is among 128 prostitutes fighting City Hall over the closure of their shanty brothels in the Taiwanese capital.

What's surprising is the support they are getting from feminist activists and other social crusaders, who have joined the prostitutes at several street demonstrations.

The reason: the cleanup is seen as a rich-vs.-poor issue.

The prostitutes, legal, licensed and hard-working, are being targeted, but not the powerful business interests involved in the ubiquitous street-corner barbershops, saunas, karaoke bars, pubs or restaurants that employ about 100,000 women as surreptitious prostitutes. Most of the places are in business or residential districts where brothels are banned.

Lee, country-born and ill-educated, says she lacks the classy veneer that would get her work in a barbershop or karaoke bar.

"Here, it's a simple job," she says, chewing watermelon seeds in the company of her colleagues. ``We're free. We can reject drunks or dangerous clients."

Her customers, she says, are the poor, the elderly and laborers "who were only seeking a little comfort and tenderness."

Chen Su-hsiang, head of the Female Laborers Union, a trade group that has taken up the prostitutes' cause, accuses City Hall of "attacking the lowest among all prostitutes while sparing the high-class exotic places catering to the rich and powerful."

Taipei Mayor Chen Shui-bian says the brothels were shut because many of them employed underage girls, some of them sold by their parents and forced into prostitution by mobsters.

"I don't believe anyone will go hungry," he told reporters, promising that the authorities would find the women other jobs and tide them over for a year with monthly allowances of up to $1,750.

The women say they earn three times that much as prostitutes, and don't want taxpayers' charity. The city says three task forces have been set up to arrange the payments and job training, but only five women have applied.

The crackdown started Sept. 6, with police patrolling Snake Alley and the brothels shutting under a threat of having their water and electricity cut off.

Fifty masked prostitutes pelted the mayor's office building with eggs, but to no avail.

Since his election in 1994 as Taipei's first mayor from an opposition party, the energetic Chen has won popularity for his efforts to clean up the city.

No one in this metropolis of traffic jams and firetraps objects to his zealous enforcement of traffic and fire safety laws. But unionist Chen says Mayor Chen ignores the fringes of society.

The city "wants to erase all visible filthiness, poverty and vulgarity in building a new city for the majority middle class," she said. "We wonder if there will be any room left for the poor."

Homosexuals have been expelled from gathering places in a park and back alleys. A shantytown of street vendors and army veterans was razed for a park despite fierce protests from the inhabitants, one of whom hanged himself.

"The mayor is a man of strong will and high moral standards," says city councilor Lee Chen-lung. "But prostitution cannot be wiped out. It only needs better government control."

Lee and colleagues have proposed setting up a legal red-light zone.

The mayor says he'll do it on condition it goes up in a councilor's backyard.