How dreams turned to slavery for Bangladesh girl
Thu Dec 1,12:20 AM ET
 
KALAROA, Bangladesh, (AFP) - When neighbours promised fourteen-
year-old Moyna a job in an Indian steel factory and a ticket out
of poverty she jumped at the chance.
 
But the offer was a cruel trap. Instead of a steel factory, the
naïve, orphaned Moyna found herself in an Indian brothel, one of
the two million people the UN Children's Fund estimates are
trafficked globally each year.

"I cried a lot and begged for mercy. I kneeled at their feet but
they did not care," she says, recalling the night she arrived in
Mumbai with the couple.

"They forced me to drink wine and pushed me into a room where an
Indian man came after me."

Moyna's virginity had been sold for 20,000 rupees. The following
day she was sold again to a Bangladeshi woman named Parvin.

"After that it was routine. I was sent to different flats on
rental basis for two or three weeks at a time.

"I was to entertain ten to twelve men a day. If I did not oblige
they would beat me," she adds, pointing to scars on her body.

Moyna was easy prey for the people traffickers who tricked and
then forced her into the sex trade.

Bangladesh is among the world's poorest countries where nearly
half the population survives on less than a dollar a day and
millions are forced abroad each year in search of work.

The US State Department estimates that up to 20,000 women and
girls are trafficked annually from or via Bangladesh to India,
Pakistan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

The majority are from impoverished rural areas and end up working
in the sex trade or as domestic helps in slave-like conditions.

After being sold to Parvin, Moyna was moved constantly between
different Mumbai brothels.

But every few weeks she would return to Parvin's flat where she
met a young Bangladeshi cook named Hassan who eventually helped
her to escape.

Four months after she arrived, Moyna became sick and Parvin
decided to sell her on to a brothel in a small town near the India-
Pakistan border.

Realising it would be his only chance to help her, Hassan
engineered an excuse to have Moyna sent to the market to buy
vegetables.

"He gave me a mobile phone as I left and when I got to the market
I got a call from Hassan telling me to wait in front of the market
main gate," she says.

"Then he arrived in rickshaw and whisked me away to the railway
station. Before they could come looking for us we were on our way
back home."

In its 2005 report on trafficking, the US State Department praised
the Bangladesh government for "commendable progress" in its anti-
trafficking drive but said it still faced a "huge" problem made
worse by widespread poverty and corruption.

    UNICEF says trafficking is most prevalent globally in south
and southeast Asia and is driven by a worldwide demand for cheap
labour.

"We are living in a world where people are stolen, sold and
trafficked like cargo ... where human life has no value," says
Louis-Georges Arsenault, UNICEF's representative in Bangladesh.

"Trafficking of women and children, especially for commercial
sexual exploitation, has become a worldwide, multi-billion-dollar
industry."

In the year to February 2005, 70 cases of trafficking were
prosecuted in Bangladesh resulting in 42 convictions, according to
the State Department report.

Anti-trafficking organisations in the country however see such
cases as merely the tip of the iceberg.

"Yes, there is some progress on the prosecution front, but overall
the picture remains bleak with many still being trafficked each
year," says Mominul Islam Suruj of the Bangladesh National Women's
Lawyers Association.

The group repatriates hundreds of girls each year from Indian
jails where they have ended up after working in brothels.

"We brought 86 girls home from a correction centre in (the Indian
state of ) West Bengal in March. We talked to them. Some were so
poor they were sold at 1,200 taka (19 dollars) a piece," he says.

"We even found the trafficker who sent some of the girls to India.
He boasts of what he has done.

"Unless the government goes after them with tough meaures and
shows girls how their dreams can land them in prisons or brothels
in a foreign country there is no way that this trend will stop."

For now, Moyna is happy to be home.

"I lost my life and now I have found it again. I would not mind
being scolded or even beaten by my family for my foolishness. Such
things are nothing as to the misery I endured in that big city,"
she says.

"I thank God that he sent me a rescuer. Had he not sent me Hassan
I would have passed all my life in Mumbai entertaining 10 to 12
men a day and living off almost nothing," she adds.

But she regrets leaving her friend Baly, also from Kalaroa, behind
in Parvin's Mumbai flat.

"Baly was promised a good job in Mumbai like me, but she does not
even have any ambition to escape from Parvin. She said she did not
want to come back to Kalaroa because her family would not accept
her."

Moyna is still thin and frail after her ordeal and has a low-grade
fever and jaundice.

But she is determined to seek justice against those who exploited
her, convinced that her story can prevent other girls from meeting
Baly's fate.

"I now seek justice. I may be ill and an orphan. But I want
justice against this man and his wife even though they are now
threatening to slaughter me and my family.

She has filed a case with police although officials say there is
insufficient evidence to press charges adding that a lot of girls
in Kalaroa go to India willingly

"Some of these girls are very poor. They travel to India illegally
and every now and then one of them comes back with a lot of money.
We cannot say who goes there willingly and who does not," says
Arju Miah, the police officer-in-charge of Kalaroa.

But critics say trafficking is a way of life in Kalaroa, a sub-
district of Bangladesh's southwestern Satkhira district close to
the Indian border, and accuse the police of sharing the proceeds
with traffickers.

The US government has also urged Bangladesh to tackle what it
calls the "witting and unwitting complicity of offiicials in
trafficking".

"Poverty is rampant here. There are some success stories that you
hear about some girls who went to Mumbai a decade ago, became rich
and came back home to build brick houses in their villages," says
K.M. Anisur, a lecturer at Kalaroa's Kazirhat College.

"It all makes Kalaroa fertile ground for the traffickers. There is
hardly a single example of a trafficker who has been punished in
Kalaroa, even though they do this under everyone's noses.

"One Moyna is back but hundreds of Moynas are still waiting to be
deceived."

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