Surya B. Prasai
The US State Department´s Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, Maria Otero´s visit to Nepal between 12 to 14, 2011 provides strong moral encouragement to the Nepal Government to curb human trafficking and promote the cause of a planned approach to safeguarding women and children´s rights in Nepal. Although Otero´s visit was planned to address in the main, the Disaster Risk Reduction Symposium in Kathmandu, part of the itinerary also included holding meetings with Nepali officials, experts and civil society representatives on trafficking of persons, which primarily concerns Nepali women and children. The US State Department has infused a lot of technical and financial assistance to various South Asian governments, including Nepal to reduce and curb human trafficking, although Nepal has not ratified the 2000 UN TIP Protocol. Nepal forms the tip of the South Asian iceberg on human trafficking.
With Otero´s visit to Nepal one anticipates the Nepal Government will accelerate its efforts to comply with the minimum UN standards for the elimination of trafficking and to prosecute traffickers involved in cross border and transnational activities. Maria´s visit is also a significant encouragement to Nepali media wallas and civil society, in that she wears multiple hats at the State Department in charge of coordinating U.S. foreign relations on a variety of global issues, including democracy, human rights, and labor; environment, oceans, health and science; population, refugees, and migration; and combating trafficking in persons, besides serving as a Special Coordinator for Tibet.
As part of her Nepal trip, Maria´s visit to Anuradha Koirala´s Maiti Nepal is a significant tribute towards the cause of preventing women and child trafficking from Nepal. The two women also share a notable achievement: Anuradha was voted the CNN Hero of the Year in 2010 for primarily helping curb human trafficking from Nepal, while Maria was included among the 20 most influential women in the United States by Newsweek in October 2005; she is acknowledged a global authority on microfinance, women and poverty issues with notable leadership exhibited in the field with USAID and CEDPA earlier.
I have time and again written on the issue of human trafficking from Nepal about which three major points need to be noted by the reader. One, the trend of nearly 10,000 to 15,000 Nepali women and girls being trafficked to India annually remains unabated, despite major interventions from Nepali and Indian NGOs and Interpol efforts that stretch as far away as Japan, Fiji and Lebanon.
Two, Nepali poverty continues to drive the women and children to seek employment by any means to ward off extreme poverty. Nepal has a unique abhorred cultural system known as "Deukis," whereby rich zamindars (feudalistic agricultural families) having no children through a legally married wife, procure young girls from poor rural families and after initiating them into the household through the temple rites, take them as mistresses cum slave bonded laborers to produce offspring. Later on when the girl gets to be over 30 years and grows older, she is forced into prostitution. There is no respite to what the poor Nepalese girl has to suffer on in life once initiated into this system. In 2007 according to a UN report, there were nearly 30,000 deukis in Nepal compared to 1992, when there were 17,000 deuki girls according to Radhika Coomaraswamy in the UN Special Report on Violence against Women.
And three, Nepali and donor focus so far has been more on health, HIV/AIDS prevention and control, and shelter and counseling projects rather than focusing on strong legal mechanisms to goad the Nepal Government and lawmakers to think about constructive engagement at the national level to curb human trafficking. I remember a few years back while touring Maiti Nepal with Anuradha, how she complained on the political complicity, including from some senior Nepali politicians and police officials, who provided nefarious protection to some of the well known human traffickers in Nepal, and how her efforts so far had gone in vain given such obstruction. The fact is: curbing human trafficking from Nepal is possible, and here is how.
For one, the Nepal Government needs to step up cross border law enforcement seriously to include all types of trafficking, including forced child labor, bonded labor, fraudulent foreign labor quotas and open sex trafficking to Indian and South Asian cities. There must be a SAARC effort and protocol to adhere to formal procedures to identify the victims of trafficking and address their woes, including legal protection, counseling and rehabilitation of those found facing rape, physical and mental torture. Severe jail sentences must be given to traffickers caught in the act, and the media must expose their crimes relentlessly. Nepali media so far remains negligent in frequently exposing social crimes in general.
Until now, Nepal has made only transitional progress on stopping human trafficking and the civil conflict between 1996-2006 was actually a boon for human traffickers taking advantage of innocent women and children´s lives by selling them off in big Indian cities such as Mumbai, Kolkatta and New Delhi. The Nepali laws according to the 2007 Trafficking in Persons and Transportation Control Act prohibits all forms of trafficking with penalties between 10 to 20 years imprisonment and financial punishment, but most traffickers are let off the hook in a few months, given high level political intervention.
It is also well known to many foreign donor representatives and Nepali civil society leaders that most dance bars, massage and cabin restaurants in Thamel, Putali Sadak and Naya Baneswore are owned by senior army and police officials, besides those closely connected to influential Nepali politicians. For many young Nepali girls, working in these ´slavery depots´ of Nepal, performing well means the prospect of foreign employment, in effect a life led in slavery and prostitution abroad. There are other forms of exploitation as well such as domestic servants, forced arranged marriage against a girl´s will even among educated Nepali families, circus entertainers, factory workers or plain beggars who are picked up on the streets for sexual exploitation by many tourists.
These, in turn, have implications for Nepal´s increasing health sector woes, particularly the HIV/AIDS control and mitigation programs led by the Nepal Government. In Mumbai and Delhi alone, there are nearly 80 INGO and NGOs that specifically look into issues affecting the trafficking of women, primarily from Nepal and Bangladesh. With an estimated 2.3 million HIV infections in India, and the majority of Nepali trafficked women channeled into various brothels in Indian cities, it is hard not to imagine the number of sexually infected Nepalese women particularly those living with HIV who will ultimately die. If sent back to Nepal, they will re-marry and bear HIV infected children leading to a ´chain of death´ their own included.
The first known case of AIDS in Nepal was in 1986 and in the period 1996-2006, covering the decade long Nepali civil conflict, a total of 200,000 to 250,000 Nepalese young girls aged 12-29 were either sold or illegally exchanged for cash in various Indian cities by various human trafficking gangs or middlemen. The remnant accumulation of what I term ´death by self-defeat´ numbers is thus high and unreported in Nepal. About 13,700 people died in Nepal´s civil conflict between 1996-2006, but every year 15,000 Nepalis are dying of AIDS and much of it is going unreported, the majority being women and children, all related to Nepali human trafficking.
Thus, stopping official complicity means reversing Nepal´s AIDS death toll, and curbing the illegal trafficking of Nepali women and children for commercial sex purposes. As I write this article, somewhere in Jhapa, Janakpur or else in Dhangadi, there might be one young 13 year old girl being readied for her trip to India to marry "a rich husband" whereby the middleman has negotiated a deal of only 40 dollars to the poverty ridden family, still considered a large sum in Amartya Sen´s definition of poverty as abject human deprivation.
However, some aspects of the Nepal Government´s efforts to curb human trafficking are notable. Such as, the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare which has increased its project activities in some 26 high risk districts to raise awareness and mobilize entire communities against trafficking, so far with mixed results. Nepal even celebrates a National Anti-Trafficking Day but not many know about it. Nepal Tourism Year 2011 provides a good means for the government to spare a rupee or two for the cause of halting human trafficking from all tourism generated revenues, but so far, I have not heard anyone notable in Nepal mention this to the media. Increasing police patrols between the porous Nepal-India border can help curb figures, but what concrete steps have been taken so far? To counter this all, Nepali men must also stop viewing women in their households as slaves or born of lesser dignity, despite ample measures in the Nepali Constitution to protect women´s rights. This can bring a sea change in the numbers trafficked from Nepal´s rural areas.
According to Asia Foundation, an American non-profit, there need to be regional programs to target the issue more broadly. The Foundation has supported policymakers, counter-trafficking practitioners, and vulnerable communities to plan and execute local, national, bilateral, and regional initiatives to combat human trafficking in 11 source, transit, and destination countries throughout Asia including Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nepal, Japan, and Mongolia. The Foundation's counter-trafficking programs center on the achievement of four major strategic objectives: (1) Preventing human trafficking and exploitation; (2). Improving and institutionalizing systems for effective law enforcement and prosecution; (3) Enhancing services and protection for survivors of human trafficking; and (4) Developing and strengthening cross-border and regional coordination.
The sad fact is despite such well known institutions and others such as Human Rights Watch which has chronicled the legal and human rights violations in the act, Nepali women and girls continue being trafficked and sold for prostitution in India and other Asia-Pacific, Middle East destinations. The work these institutions set out to do, is not easy since most donor programs in Nepal lack a built-in component to tackle child slavery and cross-border trafficking as part of Nepal´s post-transitional initiative. The Nepali civil conflict tore down most of the country´s rural development infrastructure. What is required in 2011 is a global action plan to halt the sad plight of Nepali women and young girls being trafficked abroad and Maria Otero´s recent visit to Nepal provides definite encouragement to everyone involved in the effort.
