Focus on human trafficking

Pakistani police raided a house in a middle-class Karachi suburb on 15 March and found 11 infants - the oldest aged 18 months - in the process of being smuggled to Malta for adoption. Each baby carried a price tag of US $20,000. The tip-off came from neighbours who heard incessant crying from the house in the middle of the night. "I was horrified at the sight," a social worker, Bilqis Edhi, told IRIN in the southern port city. "They were all lying on the floor on a dirty sheet - filthy, hungry and crying," she added, who was called in by the police to take care of the infants in her shelter home. The illegal trade in people goes on unabated as it has done for centuries, with criminals more organised then ever before, exploiting every loophole in the law to evade arrest and conviction. The arrest of about eight people in Karachi on 15 March, thereby preventing 11 Pakistani infants from being smuggled out of the country, has shaken the police force, which is working "full-time" to investigate the case. "We know this is not the first incident. We have arrested and busted many gangs in the past, but it's such a lucrative business, and then there are organised gangs operating in the region," a senior police official told IRIN in Karachi. The smuggler's job is facilitated by corruption, because it is easy to obtain forged identity cards and passports in Pakistan. "All these 11 infants had passports," Bilqis said, pointing to the row of cots in which the babies were lying quietly, some peacefully sleeping. "Those were all forged passports, and now they are with the police." Zora, less than a year old, watched with large intent eyes as Bilqis talked. Zora had been screaming due to lack of food for a couple of days. "She was refusing to take milk, apparently because she was on her mother's milk before being kidnapped," Bilqis recalled. Finally, after several attempts, and in the middle of the night, the centre was able to find a woman whose milk Zora accepted. "She was crying and whimpering all the time," Bilqis said. "Now she is happy." However, very few victims are lucky enough to be discovered. Zora and the other children now live in the centre, and one day may be legally adopted by Pakistani couples, or, by chance perhaps, come across their real parents. Despite weeks of investigation, it was still unclear whether they had been kidnapped, stolen or sold by their impoverished families. According to Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid (LHRLA) documentation, thousands of children have been smuggled to the Gulf states for camel racing, a favourite sport in the area, which requires very small riders to control the animals. Young boys are usually roped to the camel, and sometimes do not survive the experience. "Most of these children come from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka," Zia Awan, the president of LHRLA - an NGO at the forefront of anti-trafficking work in Karachi, told IRIN. Awan explained that many children died before the race ended, out of fear of falling off, or by being brutally tossed from side to side. "Some die because of being partially dislodged from the rope binding them to the camel," he added. Awan said newspapers had reported that at least 30 boys were kidnapped or sold monthly in Pakistan for the Gulf camel racing. "But very few get detected and stopped," he said. "In some cases, poor parents sell children to smugglers, not knowing what their fate will be." Children are not the only humans trafficked through Karachi. Law enforcement and rights workers say Pakistan has long been a destination and transit point for the trafficking of women in the region. The government has still to formally legislate against the trade, which, after arms and drugs, is considered to be the most lucrative worldwide. "There are no exact numbers of how many women are smuggled into Pakistan and how many children are trafficked out," Awan said. "But it is in the thousands." Awan, who has been working against human trafficking since 1990, said the problem in Pakistan was only about 10 percent of that in neighbouring India and Nepal. "But Pakistan is an easy destination for the traffickers, because our borders are not very strict," he explained. With thousands of miles of borders with India on its east and Afghanistan on its west, Pakistani authorities say they can neither monitor nor prevent the movement of people. The most typical kind of smuggling into Pakistan is that of Bangladeshi women by land routes through India. The smugglers also use the country for onward trafficking of the women to the Gulf states. "Even if they are caught, due to corruption, and in the absence of effective laws, smugglers bail out, whereas victims end up in jails or shelters," the police official said. Shahnaz Bukhari, a prominent women's rights activist in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, told IRIN that most of the women trafficked from Bangladesh ended up in misery. Some are sold into marriage, some for domestic work and a few into prostitution. Most work like slaves, and have nowhere to run, as they have no legal status in the country. Pakhi, a 22-year-old Bangladeshi girl, was illegally brought into Pakistan about eight years ago. She told Bukhari that she had then been sold to a man who married her and took her to a village near Islamabad. She now had three sons and an unhappy marriage. "She returned to Bangladesh this week after the embassy prepared her documents and arranged for her ticket," Bukhari said. However, most remain trapped in their wretched circumstances with no one to turn to. "Bilqis mummy, these men, these old men would examine our chests," Bilqis quoted another victim at her centre as saying. "They would undress us, see how young and pretty we were, and then offer a price," the girl had said, describing her humiliation at the auction she had undergone in Karachi a few years earlier. Shafqat Munir, a researcher at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, told IRIN that auctions of Bengali women still continued in Karachi, though not as openly and frequently as they used to. "It still goes on, though the criminals are very careful and discreet," he said. Trafficking is not confined to Bengali women; Pakistan had received Sri Lankan and Burmese women too, and Munir said even Pakistani women had been trafficked to the Gulf countries for prostitution. Women from Central Asia had also been brought to Pakistan and taken to the Gulf for prostitution. "They are usually sent there for three months for day-and-night sex work. Most of their income is retained by the pimp, who has paid a heavy price for them in Pakistan, so they work overtime to save money for themselves," Munir said. Munir, who has interviewed more than 40 women victims, said some of these prostitutes would take contraceptives to avert their menstruation cycles, to enable them to work even harder. "This trend of Pakistani women trafficking has picked up over the last two to three years," he added. Rights activists say human trafficking thrives unchallenged because countries in the region do not have proper legislation to deal with the problem, nor the will to implement existing laws. Awan said a regional conference to be held on 15 April in Karachi would address some of the legal issues and discuss ways of cooperating to combat the problem. "We are looking forward to at least bringing the governments and civil society together to jot down a strategy," he said, noting that the participants would discuss ways of implementing United Nations conventions on human trafficking. "We are going to develop a resource centre on trafficking in this region," he added. The seven-member South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), signed a convention in January against trafficking of women and children, the first time the regional countries decided to take a step to curb the inhuman business. However, the convention has to translate into national laws and the countries - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives - have to evolve a joint strategy on how to implement it. Awan said this was the first positive step to tackle the problem on a regional basis. "It is a breakthrough, we are heading towards a regional strategy," he added. However, hostilities between arch-rivals Pakistan and India, who have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, are seen as a major impediment in any mutual cooperation between the two SAARC members. "The problem of tensions between India and Pakistan is not allowing anybody to deal with it [trafficking] effectively," Awan complained, noting, that the SAARC nations will have to set up a joint policing to curb the trade. "Like Interpol there should be something like SAARC-pol," he said.