|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
HOME | ABOUT US | CONTACT | FEEDBACK | WEATHER | BACK ISSUES | ADVERTISE |
|||
|
Window on UK / Europe |
|||
|
Women are "being smuggled and sold in Pakistan" By Subroto Mukherjee GlobalomNet Media Service Women from India are being smuggled and sold in Pakistan, according to a report by Amnesty International. Pakistan is becoming the destination of women being trafficked also from Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, Amnesty says in its report Pakistan: Insufficient Protection of Women. ”The open sale of girls and women in markets is reported from several parts of the country,” the Amnesty report says. But such ‘markets’ are held “particularly in areas of underdevelopment such as in parts of the Thar desert in Sindh and in Balochistan.” The report says that in the Mohmand Agency, a federally administered tribal area, “traditional fairs in which families offer their girls for sale were banned some years ago, but smaller fairs are reported to persist in more remote areas.”
Amnesty says that the Aurat Foundation in 2000 documented the case histories of 39 women being trafficked in the North West Frontier Province, “with some being offered for marriage to Punjabi men but many sold to Middle Eastern countries.”
Trafficking of women “for purposes of forced domestic labour, forced marriage and forced prostitution continues to be reported with Pakistan which functions both as a country of origin of trafficked women and as a transit and target country,” the Amnesty report says.
The report says “women and girls are deceived, coerced, abducted and sold, often re-sold and repeatedly re-married without regard to their own wishes or to any children they may have.”
The report says that these women are “forced to work and live under conditions of slavery by their agents who are organised in crime networks that span the Indian subcontinent.” Amnesty says that often the women’s family is “complicit in such abuse by facilitating the sale of the girls and women.” Marriage is often used as a method of recruitment for trafficking and to avoid arrest under Pakistan’s zina law, which criminalises sex outside marriage.
”Many trafficked women are arrested in Pakistan and charged under the zina law or under the Foreigner’s Act with illegal entry into Pakistan, thus turning the victims of trafficking and forced prostitution into accused both in terms of their work and status neither of which they had chosen,” the report says.
The report says that, “some women, both trafficked and local, are killed if they refuse to earn money in prostitution into which their husbands or agents force them.” Amnesty cites the case of Fareeda Bibi who was beaten by her husband with an iron bar, had kerosene sprinkled on her and was set on fire in Sukkur on 15 October 2000. In hospital before her death she told police that her husband had forced her to lead a sinful life and that he had abused her when she refused to comply.
”Those uncovering the trafficking of women have sometimes had to pay with their lives,” Amnesty says.
Journalist Sufi Mohammad Khan from Badin, Sindh, was killed on May 2 last year “after reporting extensively about drug trafficking and trafficking of women in the Tharparkar area of Sindh which he said happened with the connivance of an apathetic administration.”
The
journalist had reported that some 70 women had been kidnapped in Sindh and
Punjab, detained by a mighty feudal family in that region and forced into
prostitution.
|
