IRIN Focus on female trafficking from Bangladesh

After admittance to engineering college in Karachi, southern Pakistan, Ahmad and two college-friends rented a comfortable apartment for the duration of their studies. On moving in, they realised they needed to find a cleaner. Unsure as to how to arrange this, they approached a senior student, who offered a solution. "Why don't you buy a woman who could cook, clean the house and then be used for physical comfort as well?" he said, and explained how to obtain one. They agreed to the idea, pooled the equivalent of US $500 and bought a young Bangladeshi girl in her early twenties. Zeenat (name changed by IRIN), from Sherpur, Bangladesh, worked for the students for five years. During this period, besides cooking and cleaning, she was made to "entertain" all three boys and many of their friends. She thought that her ordeal would be over once the boys had completed their education, but, to her dismay, after their graduation, she was sold to the incoming group of students. As happens with many of her compatriots, Zeenat was bonded for life. The scale of trafficking from Bangladesh is sobering. According to a report released by the NGO Action Aid Pakistan last year, 200,000 women and girls between the ages of 12 to 30 have been trafficked from Bangladesh to Pakistan in the last 10 years. Unfortunately for thousands of Bangladeshi women, Pakistan is perceived as an escape from dire poverty. Those involved in fuelling the trade offer only encouragement. They promise wealth, fancy clothes, big cars, homes with fresh water and ceiling fans, and an escape from hunger pangs. The Edhi Trust, run by its founder Abdul Sattar Edhi, has set up two women's shelters - one in Karachi and the other in Islamabad. Edhi told IRIN that persuading women to leave Bangladesh was very easy. "Traffickers can easily entice these women, as most live below the poverty line and are helpless. They have nothing to eat, have no clothes to wear and no money to buy medicine," he said. The ordeal for women like Zeenat starts when they attempt the 3,000-mile journey across India to Pakistan. According to women in the Suhrab Goth shelter in Karachi, many women are attacked and even shot while trying to cross the two borders. Many give up en route. Noor Bano, from Dhaka in Bangladesh, crossed into Pakistan some 12 years ago. She told IRIN: "We managed to sneak over the Pakistani border near the Thar Parkar desert in southern Sind, but halfway to Karachi, we saw a police unit. We tried to hide in the mango gardens, but the police trapped us. There was a teenage girl, Zareena, in the caravan I was in. The police said they wanted her. They raped her in front of us and then they took her away. After a beating, they released us, but warned of severe consequences if we ever made a fuss about the incident," she said. Impoverished and illiterate, these women are easy targets for exploitation when they arrive in Pakistan. Noor Aga, president of the International Human Rights Alliance, has been working to counter human trafficking from Bangladesh. She said border police and local feudal landlords often worked in collusion with trafficking agents, demonstrating that illegal immigration was fuelling an entire industry in parts of the country. Aga said women arrested on the border were often sold to agents. So far, there has been little success in stopping a trade that has become so profitable. President of a legal aid society, Zia Awan, said in Karachi alone there were 20 brothels where the services of women could be taken for a night or purchased for life. The local authorities were unlikely to intervene. "The police are party to this, and manage to extort huge commissions from the brothels," said Awan. According to a local social worker, Faisal Edhi, many trafficking agents are from within the immigrant community. "Illegal immigration is a golden fish for the Bangladesh community, so being an agent is a booming business," he said. There are strong vested interests in the trade.On 2 May last year, a local journalist and reporter for the Urdu-language daily 'Ummat', Sufi Mohammad Khan from Bad Bistrict in the southeastern Sind Province, was shot dead by local landlords for exposing their involvement in female trafficking. Naziha Syed Ali, a journalist in Karachi told IRIN: "Sufi was murdered to warn fellow journalists to behave." In the absence of legislation to decriminalise victims of trafficking, Bangladeshi women are particularly exposed to arbitrary arrest. Women unable to pay for their release end up languishing in jail on charges of adultery. "These women are arrested under Zina [adultery] and Hudud [Islamic punishments] ordinances," said Awan. With prostitution illegal under Pakistan's Islamic code, these women are charged with adultery, which is punishable by stoning to death. Anware Bibi, currently in an Edhi Trust shelter, is one such woman awaiting trial. A middle-aged woman who came to Pakistan when she was hardly 10 years old, Bibi said she had been sold to different people in Lahore and had two children in the process. "I was married to a Pakistani truck driver, but he did not come to my rescue after the police arrested me," she said. Now, she has no documentation to prove that her marriage was valid, and hopes to be acquitted by the courts. If she is, her future is uncertain in Pakistan, and she has no desire to return home to Bangladesh. "I was a child when I came here. How can I even locate my family if go back to Bangladesh?" she asked. Shaheen Burney, vice-chairperson of the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust, said that despite the government's recent pledges to defend women's rights in Pakistan, little note seemed to be taken of the fact that women were being sold like animals in Thar Parkar District in Sind Province. She said that buyers took the opportunity to humiliate, molest and harass women in the open market. Few solutions were offered by the Bangladesh Embassy in Pakistan. A spokesperson for the Edhi Trust shelters said she had approached the Bangladesh Embassy to discuss how women could be returned home. Officials at the embassy said they could help women to return home to Bangladesh, but not their children born in Pakistan. The Pakistani Home Office maintains that human trafficking from Bangladesh is intractably linked to illegal immigration. Chief Secretary of Sind Province Javed Ashraf said that in Karachi's Bangladeshi communities, men and children were being trafficked, as well as women. "We cannot think of preventing female trafficking without addressing the entire issue of immigration," he said, although he acknowledged that women were a more "tradable commodity". Meanwhile, media reports state that the government has formed a task force to tackle human trafficking. Scheduled to meet on Monday, its first task will be to draft legislation to match international standards in the campaign against human trafficking.