Category: Nepal

A few years ago, Nepal was rocked by a major earthquake. Since then, human trafficking in the poverty-stricken country has increased alarmingly. Nepalese girls are even found as far away as Syria and Iraq. This is something that needs to be documented and printed (using an HP wireless printer after HP wireless printer setup).

Kabita is nervous. Every now and then she looks at the clock. The raindrops announcing the annual monsoon gently tap against the dusty office window of aid organization Shakti Samuha. Not long ago, with the help of the Nepalese foundation, she was repatriated to Nepal after a perilous adventure in Iraq. “I was taken to Iraq by three men,” she says in a soft voice. “They said they had worked for me as a domestic helper. We drove from my village to Kathmandu and then flew via Dubai to Baghdad. Once there, we had to change cars four times on the way to an office, where I ended up being held for days.”

Kabita is 23, small, and has raven-black hair. She grew up in the poor rural district of Rasuwa, in northern Nepal. In her hometown, she was approached by a man she knew by face. He worked for an employment agency and had worked for her in the Kurdish city of Erbil, he said. She had never heard of Erbil. Nevertheless, she agreed, signed the contract that was presented to her, and left. She remains silent for a moment, staring at the ground. The men who had promised her a job turned out to be traffickers.

“I would make four hundred dollars a month and get one day off a week,” she says. “Instead, I saw in Baghdad how a girl was beaten so hard that she suffered hearing damage. The boss always took girls home for a night. Once I realized that I had been lied to, I waited until I was alone in the office to secretly send a message to acquaintances in Nepal via Facebook. They tipped off the authorities in Baghdad and ensured my liberation. It turned out that I had been sold to an Iraqi for thirteen thousand dollars.”

SMUGGLERS

Human trafficking is not a new problem in Nepal. Tens of thousands of young women have disappeared across the open southern border with India in recent years, only to be swallowed up by the brothel network in Indian metropolises such as Calcutta or Mumbai. But after the biggest earthquake in living memory left the poverty-stricken country in ruins two years ago, the trafficking of women has multiplied, says Anuradha Koirala at the headquarters of the aid organization Maiti Nepal.

Maiti Nepal is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, says the 70-year-old proudly. Just like Shakti Samuha, her organization works together with the Dutch Free a Girl to combat human smuggling. She runs a shelter in Kathmandu, has set up an extensive network of checkpoints at border crossings and highways throughout Nepal, provides education in rural areas, and teaches sewing courses to make Nepalese women economically self-reliant.

Since the earthquake, people smugglers have increasingly used clandestine employment agencies to placate young women and their families with promises of well-paid work abroad, Koirala says. The tentacles of the human trafficking network now extend from the Nepalese Himalayas to the rich oil states in the Arabian Gulf, from brothels from Mumbai to Nairobi, and in dance clubs in Johannesburg or Hong Kong.

In recent years, Nepalese girls have also appeared in war zones such as Syria or Iraq. Koirala: “The first lie is always that the girls from their village have to come to Kathmandu if they want to make money.” Outside in the rustic garden, meanwhile, a dance lesson starts for the girls living in the home. “In the past, they mainly ended up in Indian port cities. In recent years, however, the human trafficking chain has rapidly become more international. An extensive network has been created in which every link deserves something. Someone recruits such a girl in her village, someone forges her passport and someone guides her at the airport through customs at the airport. Even Indian police officers play the game, as long as they make money from it.”

MUDDY HIGHWAY

Thankot is a small ribbon village on the Tribuvanhs highway between Kathmandu and India. As with so many highways to the border, there are NGO checkpoints here. Sumitra orders a cup of milk tea and walks back to the small checkpoint she is manning on behalf of Maiti Nepal. From six o’clock in the morning to seven o’clock in the evening, employees of the organization check every bus that climbs up the hill here, on its way to India. An armed policeman keeps an eye on things. “We also check a lot of minibusses. Unaccompanied girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five who can’t really explain where they’re going, we always pick out.”

After the earthquake, Maiti Nepal intercepted a total of 5,700 girls at checkpoints like this in 2015. A doubling compared to the previous year. Sumitra climbs into a colourful bus on its way to New Delhi International Airport. She quickly checks all the passengers and takes six girls outside. Sumitra looks at their passports and with a large gold-colored iPhone she calls all the parents. Often something is not right when young people travel alone on this route. But in this case, nothing seems to be wrong. The six girls are on their way to relatives in India. Bus drivers and motorists watch the scene with great fanfare. “Our method is not watertight and recruiters with girls often slip across the border,” she says. “Everyone knows that this could just as easily be their own daughter. That’s how big the human trafficking problem in Nepal is now.”

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DOUBLING

The UN International Migrant Organization (IOM) also notes a sharp increase in the smuggling of Nepalese women after the disaster in 2015, says IOM regional coordinator Chris Lowenstein-Lom. As much as 29 percent of Nepal’s gross national product consists of money that migrated Nepalese send back. According to Lowenstein-Lom, the economic dependence on work abroad will only increase in the future – with all the risk of slavery or prostitution that entails.

Smuggling to the Middle East, in particular, has increased, he confirms. In that region, the line between underpaid and forced labor, slavery and prostitution are often so thin that women with a legal employment contract are often de facto victims of human trafficking, researchers from the UN organization concluded in 2015. Nearly 90 percent of the 162 human trafficking victims surveyed by IOM said they had never been allowed to leave their workplace and two-thirds said they had been physically abused.

NIGHTCLUB

Night has fallen in Kathmandu. Dancer Senjal Lama (21) sits at the bar in the nightclub where she works. It’s a bit of a kicked-off club, tucked up at the top of a dingy concrete staircase. She works here seven days a week, from six to twelve. The Radisson Hotel is a few steps away. A group of Chinese businessmen sits slumped in the red-upholstered armchairs and slurps half liters of beer. A little later, Sanjal has changed clothes and is on stage in a little concealing pair of pants. A surly young man with muscles like steel cables looks on impassively.

“HE HAD PROMISED ME A JOB AND MONEY. WHAT EXACTLY I WAS GOING TO DO IN DELHI, I DON’T KNOW

A few weeks ago, Senjal was picked off the bus from Kathmandu to New Delhi at a checkpoint. The smuggler who accompanied her fled across the border on foot. “He had promised me a job and money. What exactly I was going to do in Delhi, I don’t know,” she says. Her family in the countryside does not know exactly what work she does in Kathmandu. Her oldest niece thinks she works in a hotel. The fact that she was almost a victim of human trafficking does not seem to fully penetrate her. “I’m glad I’m back in Kathmandu,” she says as she plays with her phone. “Here I earn just enough to send my son and niece to school. But I would like to go somewhere else to make more money.”

A few weeks later, Senjal sends a short message via Facebook. She resigned from the nightclub in Kathmandu and left for the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. She left her son with her family. She doesn’t want to give many details, but she doesn’t like it at all in Africa, she says.

Since then it has remained dead quiet.