Twenty-First Century Slavery
Pakistan's Brutal Bonded Labor System Lingers On
A group of bonded laborers recently freed by BLLF hold an
impromptu meeting. They are now homeless and unsure of how
to support their families. Photo by Alex Stonehill.
Lahore, PAKISTAN—On the night of October 1, 2005 in the tiny town of Jannat, one hour outside of Lahore, Shoukat Masih, 35, was fast asleep. He and his extended family had pulled their rusted charpoys out into the courtyard of their one room home in order to enjoy the cool air and a night’s rest before returning at dawn to another twelve hours of hard labor in the neighboring brick kilns. Around 11:00 pm a group of men armed with pistols and sticks entered the courtyard and yanked Masih to the ground, shouting, “Are you the one making statements on the television?!” His wife was in a neighboring village visiting family, but his father, children, nieces, and nephews, all looked on in terror as he was beaten to death on the packed clay earth.
The Masih family has spent decades trying to speak out against the brutality of bonded labor, a system that kept them haris, or debt slaves, in Punjab’s brick kilns for generations. The usual tactic of the impoverished and uneducated family has been to file complaints with government officials through a unique—and largely ignored—brick kiln workers’ union they helped found. But when Masih was sold by one brick kiln owner to another for $3,300 without his knowledge or consent his fury sent him to a local reporter.
Eight months after Masih’s death there have been no arrests and his family holds out little hope that the case will ever be resolved—though not for lack of leads. Masih’s father is convinced that the men that killed his son were thugs hired by what he calls “the S.P. group” a secret organization protecting the interests of local brick kiln owners. Lawyers working with the family confirm the common belief that Masih died for speaking publicly against kiln owners.
Sadly, Masih’s case is not unusual in the struggle against bonded labor in Pakistan. The system is rooted in feudal traditions and religious prejudice against Christian and Hindu minorities, and reinforced by a rigid class hierarchy that resembles the caste system in neighboring India. Despite extensive laws banning bonded labor in the country, the practice persists due to pervasive low-level government corruption, a lethargic judicial system, and general apathy towards the issue in Pakistani society.
Eleven years ago violence against bonded labor activists made international news when 12 year old freed laborer and activist Iqbal Masih (Masih, which means “Messiah” is a common name among Christian bonded laborers), was gunned down, presumably by the “carpet mafia” that he had recently escaped.
Despite a flurry of attention at the time of his death, little has been done to eradicate bonded labor since. A mid-Nineties awareness campaign to clean up the carpet industry yielded some success and a recent International Labor Organization effort has rid soccer ball manufacturing of child labor, but bonded laborers in Pakistan’s domestic industries, especially brick manufacturing in the north and agriculture in the south, continue to suffer under this oppressive system.
This encampment in Secunderabad was founded over a decade
ago. It still has no infrastructure but provides a safe haven for
freed laborers. Photo by Alex Stonehill.
“Most Pakistanis fund social service work through religious institutions, which by definition deal with Muslim populations and traditionally focus on the needs of widows, orphans, or local schools,” says Zafar Yasin, a Supreme Court Advocate who has devoted much of his work to bonded labor issues. “Because laws already exist on the books banning bonded labor, many, when they think of bonded labor at all, see it as a responsibility of the government.”
The Pakistani Bonded Labour System Abolition Act, which was officially adopted by parliament in 1992, outlaws bonded labor, cancels all existing bonded debts, forbids lawsuits for the recovery of debts, and punishes bonded labor by children with up to five years in prison and an $800 fine. Any bonded laborer can petition for a writ of habeas corpus and free themselves legally. But despite these well intentioned laws, conservative estimates put the number of bonded laborers in Pakistan at several million, while human rights activists believe the total number hovers closer to eight million.
The very nature of bonded labor in Pakistan easily explains why these laws are ineffective in practice. Especially in the brick kilns of Punjab and the agricultural fields of Sindh, laborers are kept in complete isolation, are often born into bondage, and never receive any kind of education. Many don’t even have an understanding of the basic arithmetic they would need to calculate the debt that enslaved them or the wages they earned. They are easily tricked—if not terrorized—into laboring long after their real debts are paid. Their knowledge of the world is confined to the factories and fields where they work seven days a week from sunrise to sunset.
If they are not born into bondage, Pakistan’s poorest, most marginalized populations can find themselves there due to common catastrophes. Many are faced with an expensive dowry, an illness, or a drought in their native villages. Their inability to financially cope drives them to factory bosses or landowners who offer them peshgi, or advanced wages, and they and their entire families—including young children—are claimed as the property of the owners.
Even if offered freedom some workers have no other economic options and see this exploitive relationship as the only way they can meagerly feed their families. But many do attempt escape and are often hunted down by owners and re-kidnapped. Human rights groups have reported that landlords, particularly in rural Sindh, maintain private jails where errant laborers are kept. It is well known that local police and politicians turn a blind eye to such practices due to strong ties with landowners.
Children at a school founded by BLLF receive a political and
academic education. They start each day with the communal
chant "we are free." Photo by Alex Stonehill.
“There is a general lack of comprehension of the dignity of ordinary humans among the government and upper classes here in Pakistan,” says Dr. I.A. Rehman, Executive Director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), when asked about the reasons behind the continuation of the bonded labor system despite its legal abolishment. “The mindset of the people in power towards ordinary human beings is very much like that of the factory owner towards his bonded laborers. In a country where no one even recognizes the right to work it is hard to raise an awareness of these kinds of labor issues.”
“We are safe here”
A hot wind blasts across the parched yellow patch of land that is home to over 1,000 families. Blue smoke rises from smoldering garbage piles that seem to have spontaneously combusted in the 105-degree plus temperatures, plastic bags wave like tattered flags tangled in leafless shrubs, maniacal truck horns from a nearby road roll across the empty landscape. It may be desperately poor, but it was here, in this encampment outside of Secunderabad, in Sindh Province, that Haffeezan Nizamani found freedom.
“It was three a.m. when we snuck out,” says Nizamani, speaking of the night of her family’s escape from bondage, “we heard that someone in Hyderabad could help us and we were very hungry and scared.”
Nizamani had attempted escape three other times only to be caught, beaten, and brought back to the sugarcane, rice, and cotton fields that her family had worked under bondage for more generations than she can count. But that night seven years ago, luck was on the side of Nizamani, her husband, and their six children. They made it to the local HRCP offices and were quickly ferried to this makeshift camp where they joined thousands of other recently freed haris.
But that was about the extent of NGO support that Nizamani and her family received. Now this little settlement, often referred to as a “free village,” where most people live in basic mud huts without electricity or sanitation services, fends for itself. Unemployment is over 50 percent, almost none of the 5,000 children attend school, babies are regularly stricken with fever, diarrhea, and malaria, and there is no access to health services.
A few years ago Pakistan’s Salvation Army built a water tank here, but on this scorching day its faucets are dry. It costs 300 rupees ($5) to fill and the village doesn’t regularly have that kind of money. There is one brackish well in town, but most women walk long distances to gather river water when they can.
Despite these hardships, the free village offers a crucial benefit: protection against angry landlords who come looking for runaway laborers. Nizamani says this happens regularly enough that residents are afraid to leave its borders. But when the gun wielding owners approach, the Muslim, Hindu, and Christian villagers pull out axes, stones, and any other weapons they can find and refuse to give their neighbors up. “Last month armed persons from the brick kilns came,” but, she states proudly, “we fought back.”
Life for Nizamani and her family is unimaginably hard. Her husband and thirteen year old daughter bring in the only income, 100 rupees ($1.35) a day from the nearby cotton factory. She tries to send her three sons to the nearest government school and says she hopes to see them live “respected lives,” but the costs of books and uniforms are prohibitive and it is unlikely that they will receive a regular education. Nizamani dreams of a cement house, a private place to go to the bathroom, and a regular water source, but has little faith that anyone, whether the government or NGOs, will help her.
Still, when she speaks of her life before, her relief at being freed from bondage is palpable. The pink plastic bracelets that line her arms, and announce her Gujarati heritage, clack together with her gestures as she describes her previous life: a life where there were no accounts of labor performed or salaries owed, where there was only a crowded floor to sleep on and insufficient handouts to eat, where she saw her children wake at dawn every day to work someone else’s fields, and where the landlords’ Kalashnikovs loomed large in her nightmares.
Though she says she feels desperate in her current situation, Nizamani looks confused and then laughs when asked if life in the free village is better. “We were facing starvation before, we were very afraid. Yes this is better. We are safe here and it is better.”
Naid Masih with a picture of his son,
Shoukat. Photo by Alex Stonehill.
Lifting The Curse
Almost thirty miles away from Nizamani and her neighbors, Himatabad, or “Courage Village,” offers a rare glimmer of hope in the world of bonded laborers. It is one newly constructed street carved out of 25,000 square yards of land set aside to build a functional village for freed laborers. The first row of ten freshly-painted pink houses glows softly in the fading light of a summer evening, a pile of new porcelain squat toilets sits ready for installation, and four partially constructed brick walls broadcast plans for a community clinic. A sign on the door of one home proclaims, “A child employed is a future destroyed.”
But Courage Village is not the work of the government or a nonprofit. It is the vision of two men, peace activist Aslam Khwaja and businessman Kaleem Sheikh. While Khwaja provided the inspiration, Sheikh, has used his family’s impressive power and wealth from a successful cloth trading empire to do what social organizations and government schemes seem incapable of accomplishing—providing some aid to Pakistan’s forgotten haris.
Pakistan’s NGO sector offers little on-the-ground relief. Most large NGOs like the HRCP see their role as one of advocacy for law enforcement. Others, such as the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF), do regularly free laborers through legal means, but their lack of funds means that they can offer very little rehabilitation for freed laborers and that many are forced to return to the very system they dreamed of escaping.
“The root of the problem is religious discrimination and government inaction,” say Sheikh, who is Muslim, but whose family comes from Hindu roots, “we [Muslims, and the wealthy], have a duty to show these people that we care about what is happening to them.”
While the land for Courage Village was bought by the international NGO ActionAid , the funds for the homes themselves have come straight from the pockets of Sheikh and other members of the ruling class close to his family.
First ground was broken at Courage Village seven months ago and Sheikh found willing freed haris in nearby encampments to build the houses they would later inhabit. He hopes to see it grow into a town of 207 homes, though he is still fundraising to continue construction. Sheikh believes that his program will be successful where others have failed because he and a few other friends are personally committed to the project.
“Nobody trusts the government or NGOs in Pakistan,” says Sheikh, “they make promises, come visit, and do nothing. The money they raise is never seen by these people. Occasionally they free some laborers and then send them to the streets.”
Sheikh believes that only a raised consciousness among the wealthy in Pakistani society can yield results. He is currently trying to find relatively well-paid employment for the inhabitants of Courage Village in fellow industrialists’ factories.
“These people must get away from the fields and the system that has enslaved them. They have a slave mentality now and won’t be free until they have independent work in another sector.”
Sheikh, who recently accompanied Courage Villagers on a peace march across the border to India to lobby for laborers’ rights and religious tolerance, also encourages a culture of activism among the free laborers that he aids. They believe that only when all classes, nationalities, and religions unite against modern day slavery will it truly be abolished.
“The American people must put pressure on the landlords through President Musharraf to put an end to this practice,” says Lali Kolhi, a Courage Village resident and bonded labor activist that recently accompanied Sheikh on the peace march. “Many people are living in bondage and suffering. Only with international unity will we lift this curse.”
Paradise Lost
Eight hundred miles away from Courage Village, in Jannat—“Paradise” in Urdu—the bereaved Masih family is feeling the full weight of this curse. The sun beats down on Masih’s widow and her sweat mingles with tears as she kneels at her husband’s fresh grave, decorated with the very bricks that he toiled baking in local kilns.
Masih’s death has renewed some interest in the injustices of bonded labor. Many hope that a Supreme Court inquiry into the effectiveness of Pakistani labor laws, due out this month, will embarrass the Musharraf government into action. But a lifetime of empty promises, and the loss of a beloved son, has left the Masih family wary and exhausted.
Masih’s father, Naid, holds a worn and yellowing folder overflowing with documentation of abuses and important business cards in his toughened hands as proof of how hard they’ve tried. He automatically lists off his union’s demands: registration of workers and brick kilns, officially notified payments, hourly based work. But then he reaches for a black and white photo of Shoukat, posed young and serious in an argyle vest. Naid’s lined face pulls tight against high cheekbones and collapses into grief.
An angry crow squawks in the mid-day heat and tired mules hide themselves from the hazy sun in the brief shadow of a crude mud wall. Shoukat’s fatherless children sit with their heads lowered. Naid’s hands rise to cover his tear streaked face and the business cards slip to his lap. “This problem lingers on, it will never be solved. They take the money and run away. They come and nothing ever changes.”
© 2007 The Common Language Project
