Pakistan has recently passed
laws greatly limiting child labor and indentured
servitude--but those laws are universally ignored,
and some 11 million children, aged four to fourteen,
keep that country's factories operating, often
working in brutal and squalid conditions.
NO two negotiations for the
sale of a child are alike, but all are founded on the
pretense that the parties involved have the best
interests of the child at heart. On this sweltering
morning in the Punjab village of Wasan Pura a carpet
master, Sadique, is describing for a thirty-year-old
brick worker named Mirza the advantages his son will
enjoy as an apprentice weaver. "I've admired
your boy for several months," Sadique says.
"Nadeem is bright and ambitious. He will learn
far more practical skills in six months at the loom
than he would in six years of school. He will be
taught by experienced craftsmen, and his pay will
rise as his skills improve. Have no doubt, your son
will be thankful for the opportunity you have given
him, and the Lord will bless you for looking so well
after your own."
Sadique has given this speech
before. Like many manufacturers, he recruits children
for his workshop almost constantly, and is
particularly aggressive in courting boys aged seven
to ten. "They make ideal employees," he
says. "Boys at this stage of development are at
the peak of their dexterity and endurance, and
they're wonderfully obedient, they'd work around the
clock if I asked them." But when pressed he
admits, "I hire them first and foremost because
they're economical. For what I'd pay one second-class
adult weaver I can get three boys, sometimes four,
who can produce first-class rugs in no time."
The low cost of child labor
gives Sadique and his fellow manufacturers a
significant advantage in the Western marketplace,
where they undersell their competitors from countries
prohibiting child labor, often by improbable amounts.
Not surprisingly, American and European consumers are
attracted to low price, high quality products, and
imports of child made carpets from Pakistan have
trebled in the past two decades. Pakistan's carpet
makers have satisfied this surging demand by
expanding production at existing factories and
opening new ones wherever they can. To maximize their
returns, virtually all these factories employ
children, and an increasing number do so exclusively.
Somewhere between 500,000 and one million Pakistani
children aged four to fourteen now work as full-time
carpet weavers. UNICEF believes that they make up 90
percent of the carpet makers' work force.
Sadique delivers his speech
at volume and accompanies it with an assortment of
gestures--nods, waves, raised eyebrows that are as
theatrical as they are out of place in his shambles
of a workshop. He concludes with a smile and, just in
case Mirza does not appreciate his generosity, adds a
wistful coda: "I wish my father had given me
such an opportunity." Mirza seems doubtful,
perhaps because his son is seven years old, perhaps
because he has seen too many of his neighbors'
children suffer through similar opportunities. But he
returns Sadique's smile and says in a faint voice
that he hopes Nadeem will learn enough to work one
day as a journeyman weaver or, better still, to open
a workshop of his own. Whatever misgivings Mirza has
at the moment are overshadowed by his poverty, which
is extreme and worsening. He supports a family of
five by working at a nearby kiln, molding bricks by
hand for up to eighty hours a week. The work pays
poorly at the best of times, and on occasion it does
not pay at all. Three weeks earlier a monsoon
destroyed several thousand unfired bricks that had
been left drying on factory grounds. The kiln owner
held the workers accountable for the damage and
refused to pay them for the two weeks they had spent
making the bricks. The "fine," as the owner
called it, proved ruinous. Already months behind on
their rent and in debt to the village merchants,
Mirza and his wife concluded that the only way to
avoid eviction was to bond their eldest child to one
of the district's manufacturers. Sadique was their
first choice: he was prosperous, his workshop was
near their home, and he was rumored to have an urgent
need for child laborers, which they believed would
translate into a high price for Nadeem. They were
half right. The workshop has a perpetual need for
children, but Sadique is unwilling to pay a premium
for them. For that matter, he is unwilling to pay
market rates. Having dispensed with the niceties, he
offers Mirza 5,000 rupees ($146) for five years of
his son's labor. It's a paltry sum--roughly two
months' earnings for an adult weaver. Mirza was
expecting an offer at least three times as high.
"Business is off this year," Sadique says,
by way of preempting Mirza's objections. "When
things improve, I may be able to give you another two
or three hundred. Many fathers would be glad to get
half this amount."
Mirza is distressed. He is a
small man, stooped and wasted from his years at the
kiln, his skin and tunic flecked with soot. Like most
laborers, he is acutely aware of his caste, and in
the presence of those whom he deems his betters is
deferential to the point of abjectness. Bravely he
asks Sadique for another thousand rupees, though he
couches the request in the most self deprecating
terms he knows. "Sir, my family's survival
depends on your charity. You will always be
remembered in our prayers as our savior from beggary
and destitution." To his relief, Sadique agrees
at once, extending a manicured hand with a speed that
suggests he was prepared to pay more and got a
bargain. In any event, he can afford to be generous.
The money he offers Mirza, called a peshgi, will be
paid in installments, and he will deduct from it all
costs associated with Nadeem's maintenance and
training. Many of the deductions are contrived and
inflated. Parents are charged for their children's
food and tools, the raw materials they use, the
errors they make, the amount of time the master
spends "educating" them. Throughout
Pakistan parents consider themselves fortunate if at
the end of their child's service the master has paid
them one third of the peshgi.
Mirza is unaware of these
deductions and, eager to make his escape, does not
ask questions that might complicate the proceedings.
He consummates the deal by shaking Sadique's hand
(after wiping his own on his tunic) and accepting
from him a first installment of 200 rupees. The
parties are bound only by their word: no contracts
are signed; no witnesses are present. "Your boy
now belongs to me," Sadique says as Mirza
pockets the banknotes. "Please understand that
so long as he works under my roof he is answerable
only to me. Inform him that the needs of my shop take
priority over those of his family, and he must do all
he can to please me. If he does not, we will all be
disappointed, him most of all." Mirza thanks the
master for his kindness, bows low, and runs off to
relay this information to his son.
An
Inexhaustible Labor Pool
CHILD labor has assumed
epidemic proportions in Pakistan. Statistics are
unreliable, but the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan (HRCP) last year estimated the number of
Pakistani working children to be "realistically
in the region of 11-12 million." At least half
these children are under the age of ten. Despite a
recent series of laws prohibiting child labor and
indentured servitude, children make up a quarter of
the unskilled work force, and can be found in
virtually every factory, every workshop, every field.
They earn on average a third of the adult wage.
Certain industries, notably carpet making and brick
making, cannot survive without them. One World Bank
economist maintains that Pakistan's economic
viability correlates with the number of children in
its factories. The child labor pool is all but
inexhaustible, owing in part to a birth rate that is
among the world's highest and to an education system
that can accommodate only about a third of the
country's school age children. Each year millions of
children enter the labor force, where they compete
with adults--often even with their parents--for what
little work is available. In many regions the surplus
of cheap child labor has depressed the already
inadequate adult wage to the point where a parent and
child together now earn less than the parent alone
earned a year ago. As long as children are put to
work, poverty will spread and standards of living
will continue to decline.
To be sure, child labor is an
institution throughout the Third World, and its
incidence has been increasing in countries that are
usually described as advanced. The worldwide
population of children under fourteen who work
full-time is thought to exceed 200 million. But few
countries have done less to abolish or to contain the
practice than Pakistan. And fewer still have a ruling
class that opposes workplace reform and human rights
initiatives as vigorously. Given its relative
prosperity, its constitutional prohibition against
child labor, and its leaders' signatures on every UN
human and child rights convention, Pakistan's de
facto dependency on child labor is troubling and to
its critics inexcusable.
"Inaction speaks louder
than words," says I. A. Rehman, the director of
the HRCP. "This government is in continuous
violation of the Convention on the Rights of the
Child, and has consistently refused to enforce those
very laws it enacted to protect its most vulnerable
citizens. We have far more in the way of resources
and legal remedies than China, India, and Indonesia,
and we do far less for our young than they. The
problem is lack of political will. The problem is
greed."
The median age of children
now entering the Pakistani work force is seven. Two
years ago it was eight. Two years from now it may be
six. In the lowest castes, children become laborers
almost as soon as they can walk. Much of the nation's
farmland is worked by toddlers, yoked teams of
three-, four-, and five-year-olds who plough, seed,
and glean fields from dawn to dusk. On any given
morning the canal banks and irrigation ditches in
rural villages are lined with urchins who stand no
taller than the piles of laundry they wash for their
wealthier neighbors. Even the world class industries
of Islamabad, the modern capital, are staffed in
large part by children and adolescents; politicians
traveling to the National Assembly can't help
noticing the ragged youths entering and exiting the
brick factories, steel mills, and stone crushing
plants at all hours of the day and night. These
children work with a minimum of adult supervision. An
overseer comes by periodically to mark their progress
and to give them instructions or a few encouraging
blows, but for the better part of the workday they
are left to themselves. "Children are cheaper to
run than tractors and smarter than oxen,"
explains one Rawalpindi landowner. He prefers field
hands between seven and ten years old, "because
they have the most energy, although they lack
discipline."
In rural areas children are
raised without health care, sanitation, or education;
many are as starved for affection as for food. As
soon as they're old enough to have an elementary
understanding of their circumstances, their parents
teach them that they are expected to pay their way,
to make sacrifices, and, if necessary, to travel far
from home and live with strangers. "When my
children were three, I told them they must be
prepared to work for the good of the family,"
says Asma, a Sheikhupura villager who bonded her five
children to masters in distant villages. "I told
them again and again that they would be bonded at
five. And when the time came for them to go, they
were prepared and went without complaint."
Bonding is common practice
among the lower castes, and although the decision to
part with their children is not made lightly, parents
do not agonize over it. Neither, evidently, do the
children, who regard bonding as a rite of passage,
the event that transforms them into adults. Many look
forward to it in the same way that American children
look forward to a first communion or getting a
driver's license. They are eager to cast off
childhood, even if to do so means taking on adult
burdens. Irfana, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl who
spent four years as a brick worker before she was
freed by an anti-slavery organization, remembers
feeling relieved when her father handed her over at
age six to a kiln owner. "My friends and I knew
that sooner or later we'd be sent off to the
factories or the fields. We were tired of doing
chores and minding infants. We looked forward to the
day when we'd be given responsibilities and the
chance to earn money. At the time work seemed
glamorous and children who worked seemed quite
important."
She soon learned otherwise.
"For the masters, bonded children are a
commodity. My master bought, sold, and traded us like
livestock, and sometimes he shipped us great
distances. The boys were beaten frequently to make
them work long hours. The girls were often violated.
My best friend got ill after she was raped, and when
she couldn't work, the master sold her to a friend of
his in a village a thousand kilometers away. Her
family was never told where she was sent, and they
never saw her again."
Early in this decade the
Pakistan National Assembly enacted two labor laws
meant to curb such practices. The first, The
Employment of Children Act of 1991, prohibited the
use of child labor in hazardous occupations and
environments. The second, The Bonded Labor Act of
1992, abolished indentured servitude and the peshgi
system. As progressive as these laws were, the
government failed to provide for their implementation
and enforcement. It also neglected to inform the
millions of working children and indentured servants
that they were free and released from their debts.
"We prefer to leave enforcement to the
discretion of the police," says a Ministry of
Labor official. "They understand best the needs
of their community. Law is not an absolute. We must
expect a certain flexibility on the part of those who
enforce it. Could this sometimes mean looking the
other way? Absolutely."
A
Diminutive Entrepreneur
THE farther authorities are
from a major city in Pakistan, the less likely they
are to pursue violators of the child labor laws. To
leave Lahore, the nation's intellectual and
commercial center, is to enter a land populated and
run by children. The change is as abrupt as it is
extreme. The roads just beyond the city limits are
congested with donkey carts, all of them driven by
teamsters of eight or nine. Boys seem to have a
monopoly on roadside attractions: gas stations, auto
repair centers, restaurants. When I pull into the
Star Petroleum station on the Ferozpur Road, five
miles from Lahore, three boys rush out of the garage
to service my car. They are twelve, eight, and seven,
and wear uniforms intended for men twice their size.
The eldest has rolled up his pants and sleeves, but
his colleagues helplessly trail theirs in the dirt.
While the older boys fill my tank with a rusted hand
pump, the youngest climbs onto the hood and cleans
the windshield with a dangling sleeve. When I pull
away, the boys rush back to the garage and to a
diesel engine they are attempting to rebuild between
fill ups. No adults are visible on the premises.
Adults are also in short
supply at the crossroads markets that provide
villagers with everything from prayer mats to
surgical instruments. Twelve of the fifteen stands at
the Tohkar Road market are managed by children under
fourteen. The fruit stand is run by a tyrannical
eight-year-old boy and his four- and five-year-old
sisters. The boy spends his morning slicing melons
with a knife half his size, while behind him the
girls sort cart loads of fruit. At the next stall two
eleven-year-old cousins fashion sandals out of
discarded tires. They work from dawn to dusk six days
a week, and make more than 1,200 pairs each week.
Behind the last stall another boy is struggling to
unload a stack of carpets from his donkey cart. He
weighs seventy pounds. The twenty-odd carpets in his
cart weigh sixty pounds apiece, and it takes him ten
minutes of yanking, hefting, and cursing to get each
one into the stall. The stall's proprietor watches
him with interest, but his concern is strictly for
the merchandise. He is a tall, heavyset
forty-year-old who looks as if he could unload the
entire cart in fifteen minutes without breaking a
sweat. But he makes no move to help the boy, and
seems to regard his exertions as routine. So do the
passersby. And, for that matter, so does the boy.
His name is Faiz. A lively
nine-year-old, he has been working as a hauler since
he was six. He attended school for two years, but
dropped out when an elderly neighbor offered him an
advantageous lease on the cart and donkey. He runs
the business alone, and spends his days scrounging
for hauling jobs and shuttling produce, scrap metal,
and crafts around six villages. He averages sixty
miles a week--no easy feat with a donkey that trots
at three miles an hour. "The work is painful and
the days are long, but I earn enough to feed myself
and tend the donkey," Faiz says with an
entrepreneur's pride. The key to his success is
underbidding the competition; his rates are a tenth
of his predecessor's. "It is reasonable that
people should pay me less. My equipment is the same
as an adult's, but I am small and have a fraction of
an adult's strength. I take longer to make
deliveries, so I must charge less. My hope is that
the more goods I move, the stronger I will get and
the more I can charge." Soon after I arrived in
Pakistan, I arranged a trip to a town whose major
factories were rumored to enslave very young
children. I found myself hoping during the journey
there that the children I saw working in fields, on
the roads, at the marketplaces, would prepare me for
the worst. They did not. No amount of preparation
could have lessened the shock and revulsion I felt on
entering a sporting goods factory in the town of
Sialkot, seventy miles from Lahore, where scores of
children, most of them aged five to ten, produce
soccer balls by hand for forty rupees, or about
$1.20, a day. The children work eighty hours a week
in near total darkness and total silence. According
to the foreman, the darkness is both an economy and a
precautionary measure; child rights activists have
difficulty taking photographs and gathering evidence
of wrongdoing if the lighting is poor. The silence is
to ensure product quality: "If the children
speak, they are not giving their complete attention
to the product and are liable to make errors."
The children are permitted one thirty minute meal
break each day; they are punished if they take
longer. They are also punished if they fall asleep,
if their workbenches are sloppy, if they waste
material or miscut a pattern, if they complain of
mistreatment to their parents or speak to strangers
outside the factory. A partial list of
"infractions" for which they may be
punished is tacked to a wall near the entrance. It's
a document of dubious utility: the children are
illiterate. Punishments are doled out in a storage
closet at the rear of the factory. There, amid bales
of wadding and leather, children are hung upside down
by their knees, starved, caned, or lashed. (In the
interests of economy the foreman uses a lash made
from scrap soccer ball leather.) The punishment room
is a standard feature of a Pakistani factory, as
common as a lunchroom at a Detroit assembly plant.
The town's other factories
are no better, and many are worse. Here are brick
kilns where five-year-olds work hip deep in slurry
pits, where adolescent girls stoke furnaces in 160
degree heat. Here are tanneries where nursing mothers
mix vats of chemical dye, textile mills where
eight-year-olds tend looms and breathe air thick with
cotton dust. When confronted with questions from a
foreigner about their use of child labor,
industrialists respond in one of two ways: they
attack the questioner or they deliver a lengthy
lecture about the role of children in Pakistan's
development. The attacks are not always verbal. Last
June a Norwegian trade union delegation was attacked
at the Sialkot sporting goods factory by three or
four armed men who were believed to work for the
factory's owner. The delegation's guide and cameraman
were severely beaten and the latter required
hospitalization. The police characterized the
attackers as "civic minded" and warned the
delegation against inspecting other area factories
and "unnecessarily antagonizing factory
owners."
More common, though, is the
industrialist who ushers the foreign investigator
into his office, plies him with coffee and cake, and
tells him in his friendliest manner that child labor
is a tradition the West cannot understand and must
not attempt to change. "Our country has
historically suffered from a labor shortage, a
deficit of able-bodied men," says Imran Malik, a
prominent Lahore carpet exporter and the vice
chairman of the Pakistan Carpet Manufacturers and
Exporters Association. "Children have
compensated for this shortage. They have worked when
adults could not. They have helped construct
Pakistan's infrastructure and advanced its industry.
For thousands of years children have worked alongside
their parents in their villages. The work they now do
in factories and workshops is an extension of this
tradition, and in most ways an improvement on it. The
children earn more than they would elsewhere. They
contribute significantly to their family's security
and raise their standard of living."
The industrialist's argument
is accurate only in its assertion that Pakistani
children have traditionally worked with their
families. But children seldom worked outside the
family until the 1960s, when the Islamic Republic
made a dramatic effort to expand its manufacturing
base. This led to a spectacular and
disproportionately large increase in the number of
children working outside the home, outside the
village, at factories and workshops whose owners
sought to maximize profits by keeping down labor
costs. The rise in child abuse was as meteoric as the
rise in child labor. The children working in these
factories were beyond the reach or care of their
families and were increasingly the victims of
industrial accidents, kidnapping, and mistreatment.
A Mixed
Curse
"IF employers would
apply as much ingenuity to their manufacturing
processes as they do to evading labor laws, we'd have
no child labor problem," says Najanuddin Najmi,
the director general of the Workers Education
Program, a government agency. "There's little
doubt that inexpensive child labor has fueled
Pakistan's economic growth. Entire industries have
relocated to Pakistan because of the abundance of
cheap child labor and our lax labor laws. At the same
time, child labor has hindered our industrial
development, especially in the use of advanced
technologies. Why should a manufacturer invest in
labor-saving technology when labor-intensive
mechanisms are so much cheaper? We are discovering
more and more factories that have been redesigned and
retooled so that only children can work there."
Child labor has been a mixed curse for all of
southern Asia, expanding its industrial capacity
while generating an unprecedented assortment of
social problems. Not surprisingly, Pakistan's leaders
are of two minds on the subject. Speaking officially,
they deplore the practice and have nothing but pity
for the roughly 11 million children working in
factories, in fields, and on the streets. Speaking
pragmatically, they regard the practice as a
distasteful but unavoidable part of an emerging
economy which time and prosperity will end. They are
quick to take offense (and quicker to take the
offensive) when human rights activists suggest that
they have ignored the problem.
"Westerners conveniently
forget their own shameful histories when they come
here," says Shabbir Jamal, an adviser to the
Ministry of Labor. "Europeans addressed slavery
and child labor only after they became prosperous.
Pakistan has only now entered an era of economic
stability that will allow us to expand our horizons
and address social concerns. Just as we are catching
up with the West in industrial development, so we are
catching up in workplace and social reforms. We are
accelerating the pace of reform and have resolved to
create viable welfare and educational structures that
will eradicate child labor in the foreseeable
future."
Foreseeable may be a long way
off. At the moment Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
seems more interested in outfitting her army than in
reforming Pakistani society; her government has
embarked on an ambitious military buildup that has
already imperiled the region. Its first victims have
been Pakistan's lower castes, the working poor who
are accustomed to receiving little in the way of
social services and must now make do with less. In
1994 military spending was 240 percent as high as
spending on health and education combined; the
disparity is expected to widen in years to come.
Spending on education remains among the world's
lowest. Only 37 percent of Pakistan's 25 million
school age children complete primary school--as
compared with a world average of 79 percent and a
South Asian average of approximately 50 percent. By
the year 2000 less than a third of Pakistani children
will attend school. The rest will enter the work
force or become beggars.
Behind these statistics lurks
an unpleasant truth: despite its modern views on
warfare and industrialization, Pakistan remains a
feudal society, committed to maintaining traditions
that over the centuries have served its upper castes
well. The lords--factory owners, exporters,
financiers--reflexively oppose any reforms that might
weaken their authority, lower their profit margins,
or enfranchise the workers. "There is room for
improvement in any society," the industrialist
Imram Malik says. "But we feel that the present
situation is acceptable the way it is. The National
Assembly must not rush through reforms without first
evaluating their impact on productivity and sales.
Our position is that the government must avoid
so-called humanitarian measures that harm our
competitive advantages." On those rare occasions
when a reform does squeak through, the backlash is
fierce. For example, when the legislature last year
approved a modest tax on bricks to fund an education
program, brick-kiln owners staged a ten-day
nationwide protest and threatened to suspend
production, crippling construction, until the tax was
repealed. Trade associations have used similar
strong-arm tactics to fight minimum wage legislation,
occupational safety regulations, and trade union
activity.
"The
Charter of Freedom"
WITH a government that is at
best ambivalent about social issues and an industrial
sector resistant to workplace reform, the task of
abolishing child labor has fallen to the human rights
community. But in a country where corruption is
pervasive and education scarce, social activists are
everyone's natural enemy. The ruling class despises
them for assaulting its profitable traditions. The
lower castes suspect them of ulterior motives.
(Laborers are forever asking activists, "Why
would an educated man trouble himself with the
poor?") Consequently, activists are frequent
targets of slander, police harassment, and lawsuits.
They are beaten just as frequently, and on occasion
they are killed. Yet they persist, and sometimes they
prevail. If human rights organizations are judged by
the number of people they have helped, the Bonded
Labor Liberation Front is probably the most
successful in Pakistan. Since its founding, in 1988,
the BLLF has led the fight against bonded and child
labor, liberating 30,000 adults and
children--frequently entire families--from brick
kilns, carpet factories, and farms, and placing
11,000 children in its own primary school system (its
motto: "Struggle against slavery through
education"). At the same time, it has won 25,000
high court cases against abusive and unscrupulous
employers, and helped to push the recent labor
legislation through the National Assembly.
"Our victories amount to
a hardship," says Ehsan Ulla Khan, the BLLF's
founder and guiding force. "The state has done
nothing to enforce the anti-slavery laws or even to
inform the public that child and bonded labor have
been outlawed. It's evident that if the enslaved
workers are to be delivered from bondage, private
citizens will have to do the delivering. That is, we
will have to proclaim the end of slavery, educate
workers, monitor employer compliance, and take legal
action when necessary, because the state lacks the
will and resources to do so."
With little funding, the BLLF
wages a two-front war against enterprises that use
child and bonded labor. While its legal advisers
engage the courts and the legislature, its field
staff shuttles around the country, informing workers
of their recently acquired rights and distributing a
pamphlet known as "The Charter of Freedom,"
which enumerates those rights in simple language. If
a bonded laborer--child or adult--asks for its help,
the BLLF takes whatever legal action is necessary to
secure his or her release.
These days a surprising
number of workers are refusing the pamphlet and
turning their backs on BLLF staff members. This is an
expression less of ingratitude than of fear.
Employers throughout Pakistan are cautioning their
workers against consorting with reformers who spread
"false rumors" about the end of bonded
labor. Many workers have been threatened with
dismissal or violence if they speak with "the
abolitionists" or are caught with "illegal
communist propaganda." So effective is the
factory owners' disinformation campaign that workers
literally flee when approached by BLLF staff members.
This happened recently outside a Muridke brick
factory to a BLLF leader I'll call Tariq. The fifty
odd kiln workers leaving the factory at the end of
the workday scattered in all directions when they
noticed Tariq lingering outside the factory gate,
pamphlets in hand. One soot covered girl of eight,
left behind in the confusion, burst into tears when
Tariq asked if she needed help. Between sobs the girl
pleaded, "Please, sir, I have nothing to tell
you. Please let me go."
Tariq did, albeit
reluctantly. He has witnessed scenes like this
countless times; they happen more and more often. If
they discourage him (how could they not?), he takes
care not to let anyone know. He describes his work as
"an outgrowth of my patriotism." "What
we do is meant not to shame Pakistan before the world
but to create a Pakistan that respects the rights of
all its peoples and encourages human potential."
Tariq is a tall, pensive thirty-nine year old, an
artist by training and by temperament. He traces his
interest in child labor to an afternoon five years
ago when an anti-slavery activist entered his graphic
design studio in need of a brochure for his
struggling organization. "Ehsan Ulla Khan had
little money to spare, and he intimated that he'd
rather not pay at all for the design work,"
Tariq told me. "I was just starting out in
business and had no interest in politics or human
rights. But I was moved by his photos of the children
and agreed to do the work." Within six months
Tariq was preparing all of the BLLF's documents;
within a year he was overseeing its operations. Today
he is its factotum: equal parts tactician, recruiter,
instructor, fundraiser, morale booster.
Some days he is also part
spy. In addition to their assigned duties, the BLLF's
600 staff members are encouraged to spend their free
time scrounging for leads on factory owners who are
especially abusive to children. All rumors are passed
on to the BLLF's Lahore headquarters. Tariq does what
he can to substantiate the worst of them, usually by
touring the factories. It's a duty he dislikes. For
one thing, it's exhausting: there are too many leads,
too many rumors to verify. For another, it's
dangerous: he's had numerous clashes with publicity
shy employers and their thugs. He prefers to travel
alone, reasoning that one man is less conspicuous and
less of a threat than is a group. And despite his
reservations he is adept at subterfuge, at gaining
entry to factories by masquerading as a laborer, a
wholesaler, an exporter. "I do not misrepresent
myself," he says. "But if a foreman
mistakes me for a businessman or a wholesaler, I
don't correct him."
His first stop one day last
summer was a carpet workshop in a village twenty-four
miles from Lahore. The village amounted to thirty
brick huts, and the workshop was small in proportion.
about the size of a subway car, and about as
appealing. The long, narrow room contained a dozen
upright looms. On each rough-hewn workbench between
the looms squatted a carpet weaver. The room was dark
and airless. Such light as there was came from a
single ceiling fixture, two of its four bulbs burned
out. A thermometer read 105 degrees, and the mud
walls were hot to the touch. A window promised some
relief, but it was closed against fabric eating
insects.
Tariq entered quietly, in
slacks, shirt, and patent leather loafers. This
outfit is uncommon in the provinces; he hoped it
marked him as a person with Western tastes, and his
vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser (donated to the BLLF
by UNICEF), which he had parked conspicuously close
to the entrance, marked him as a man of means--a
buyer, a broker, an exporter. The weavers smiled at
him, and a few bowed, but no one dared speak to him.
Tariq took advantage of their reverence--and the
master's absence--by circling the room, noting its
conditions. After two circuits he began guessing the
ages of the young weavers: "Are you
twelve?" The boy nodded. Tariq pointed to the
next. "Fourteen?" Another nod and a smile.
"Ten?" This time the nod was shy, and
someone mentioned that the day before had been the
boy's birthday. Tariq wished him health and
happiness.
Of the twelve weavers, five
were eleven to fourteen, and four were under ten. The
two youngest were brothers named Akbar and Ashraf,
aged eight and nine. They had been bonded to the
carpet master at age five, and now worked six days a
week at the shop. Their workday started at 6:00 A.M.
and ended at 8:00 P.M., except, they said, when the
master was behind on his quotas and forced them to
work around the clock. They were small, thin,
malnourished, their spines curved from lack of
exercise and from squatting before the loom. Their
hands were covered with calluses and scars, their
fingers gnarled from repetitive work. Their breathing
was labored, suggestive of tuberculosis. Collectively
these ailments, which pathologists call captive-child
syndrome, kill half of Pakistan's working children by
age twelve.
Tariq and I watched Akbar in
silence for some time. A hand knotted carpet is made
by tying short lengths of fine colored thread to a
lattice of heavier white threads. The process is
labor-intensive and tedious: a single four by six
foot carpet contains well over a million knots and
takes an experienced weaver four to six months to
complete. The finest, most intricate carpets have the
highest density of knots. The smaller the knot, the
more knots the weaver can cram into his lattice and
the more valuable the finished carpet. Small knots
are, of course, made most easily by small hands. Each
carpet Akbar completed would retail in the United
States for about $2,000--more than the boy would earn
in ten years.
Observing a child carpet
weaver at work generates in an American alternating
currents of admiration and anger. At one moment the
boy seems a prodigy, his carpet a lesson in geometry
and colors. His patience is remarkable; his artistry
seems effortless and of the highest order comparable
to, say, that of a great medieval tapestry master.
The next moment he fumbles with his scissors, and one
notices a welt on his forearm. Suddenly the monotony
of tying thousands of threads each hour seems like
torture of the worst sort--like a death sentence,
which in a way it is.
After ten minutes Tariq knelt
by Akbar's side and said softly, "You're very
good at this. The master must be quite pleased with
you." The boy shook his head and grimaced.
"The master says I am slow and clumsy."
Tariq placed a sympathetic hand on the boy's
shoulder. "Have you been punished for poor
work?" he asked. The boy shrugged and tied a red
knot. Tariq repeated the question. This time the boy
tied a dozen knots before answering him, in a
conspiratorial whisper. "The master screams at
us all the time, and sometimes he beats us," he
said. "He is less severe with the younger boys.
We're slapped often. Once or twice he lashed us with
a cane. I was beaten ten days ago, after I made many
errors of color in a carpet. He struck me with his
fist quite hard on the face." By way of
corroborating this, Akbar lifted a forelock,
revealing a multicolored bruise on his right temple.
Evidently the master did not consider the blow
sufficient punishment: "I was fined one thousand
rupees and made to correct the errors by working two
days straight." The fine was added to Akbar's
debt, and would extend his "apprenticeship"
by several months.
"Do you like working
here?"
"Oh, no, sir, staying
here longer fills me with dread. I know I must learn
a trade. But my parents are so far away, and all my
friends are in school. My brother and I would like to
be with our family. We'd like to play with our
friends. This is not the way children should
live."
Tariq listened to this
outpouring without emotion. He has cultivated what he
calls a surgeon's insensitivity to ravaged flesh,
"because otherwise my heart would break ten
times a day." Neither Akbar nor the others knew
that child labor was illegal, that they were free to
leave the workshop whenever they wished.
Tariq left the factory and,
on a whim, headed for the district police
headquarters. As a rule BLLF members are closely
observant of legal procedure, lest they be accused of
subversive activity. The organization's legal
advisers typically spend weeks drafting a formal
complaint against a factory, based on members'
espionage, before they register it with a high court
magistrate. Right now, however, Tariq was as
interested in testing the responsiveness of the
police as in penalizing the factory owner. The
nearest police station is a colonial relic on the
Lahore road in Muridke. Tariq was caught up in the
usual bureaucratic chaos on entering. The foyer was
packed with police officers, soldiers, crime victims,
and criminals, half of them shouting, the other half
covering their ears against the noise. Every now and
then the soldiers tried to impose order on the crowd,
but with tattered uniforms and clip-less rifles their
authority went only so far. Familiar with such
outposts, Tariq took his place in a line and forty
minutes later was face to face with the district
sergeant. It was ten in the morning. The sergeant had
been at his post for two hours, but it could have
been 200 for the way he looked. Tariq told him about
the conditions in the workshop, about the children.
The sergeant was perplexed. "Is this a
crime?" he asked. "No one has ever
complained before. What do you want us to do about
it?" Tariq suggested sending officers to
investigate, along with a medical services crew for
the children.
The sergeant left to consult
his superior. Two minutes later he returned with the
superintendent, a gracious, mustachioed man of fifty.
"We are not unsympathetic to your
complaint," the superintendent informed Tariq.
"But the place you describe is registered as a
home enterprise. It is run by a small landowner, and
the workers are his immediate family. Family
businesses are exempt from the labor laws. This
enterprise is not illegal." The superintendent
opened a binder and showed Tariq the workshop's
registration certificate. Tariq attempted to correct
him, but the superintendent said, "What you say
may or may not be true. Unfortunately, our
jurisdiction does not include child labor. I have no
authority to investigate a private workplace. I have
no evidence that the children are working there
against their will or that their lives are in
jeopardy. The mechanism for doing what you ask simply
does not exist here."
Tariq was not disappointed,
nor was he surprised. He expected no better, and was
even pleased that he had rated an audience with the
superintendent. Corruption is pervasive in the
justice system: for a small consideration the police
will look the other way when employers misuse their
workers. In several districts the police are
notorious for colluding with employers--supplying
factories with children who have been abducted from
itinerant poor families, orphanages, schools. Not
long ago a boy of nine escaped from an abusive
landowner and sought help from a police sergeant at
this very station. The boy claimed that he had been
held captive and tortured; he begged the police to
return him to his parents. Instead the sergeant
ordered the "fugitive" returned in shackles
to the landowner. The sergeant later made the
landowner a gift of the shackles, suggesting that
they be used on other disruptive children.
The
Death of Iqbal Masih
IN 1992 Pakistani carpet
exports fell for the first time in two decades. The
fall was slight in absolute terms, no more than three
or four percentage points. but it indicated that
Western consumers were shying away from luxury goods
made by Third World children. Carpet makers' fears
were confirmed when in 1993 and 1994 sales fell
sharply in several of the largest markets for
Pakistani exports. Since carpets were an important
source of foreign currency, the decline sent shock
waves throughout the Pakistani economy. At a 1993
conference, officials of the Pakistan Carpet
Manufacturers and Exporters Association blamed the
decline on "subversive domestic organizations
which are conducting misleading and false
international media campaigns abroad about the use of
child labor in our manufacturing processes." The
conference concluded on an optimistic note: "The
memory of Western consumers is brief and our enemies'
meager resources cannot sustain their destructive
campaign for much longer."
Whatever hopes the carpet
makers had for a reversal of their misfortunes were
dashed in 1994, when human rights organizations
around the world acclaimed a twelve-year-old former
slave named Iqbal Masih for his crusade against child
labor. A small, sickly boy, Iqbal had been bonded at
age four to a village carpet maker. He spent much of
the next six years chained to a loom, which he worked
fourteen hours a day, six days a week. He was fed
just enough to keep him functioning, and was beaten
more often than the other children at the workshop,
because, unlike them, he defied the master time and
again, refusing to work and on occasion attempting to
escape. At ten he slipped his chains and sought the
help of the BLLF, which secured him his freedom and a
place in a primary school.
Frail as he was, Iqbal was a
child of rare gifts, possessed of an intellectual
maturity beyond his years and a precocious sense of
justice. He applied these gifts to the anti-slavery
movement, and achieved results that would be
impressive for a Nobel laureate, let alone a
schoolboy. By his twelfth birthday he had helped to
liberate 3,000 children from bondage at textile and
brick factories, tanneries, steelworks industries at
the heart of the Pakistani economy. He was
subsequently honored by the International Labor
Organization, in Sweden; by Reebok, which presented
him with its prestigious Human Rights Youth in Action
Award (for "his courage and ingenuity in
righting a centuries old wrong") in Boston in
December of 1994; and by ABC News, which featured him
as its Person of the Week. He used his unlikely
celebrity status to remind consumers that "the
world's two hundred million enslaved children are
your responsibility." Subsequent to his travels
millions of people in the United States and Europe
searched their souls and decided that they could do
without products of doubtful origin from Pakistan,
India, and Bangladesh.
Iqbal attained a
corresponding notoriety in Pakistan, particularly
among the politicians and industrialists whose feudal
practices he opposed. They responded with smear
campaigns and the occasional threat of violence.
Iqbal dismissed these threats, telling his friends
that they encouraged him to work harder. He reasoned
that grown men would harm a child only as a last
resort, when their own position proved vulnerable.
On the evening of April 16,
1995, Easter Sunday, Iqbal Masih was shot dead while
visiting relatives in a rural village. Immediately
afterward Ehsan Ulla Khan declared that the slain
youth was the victim of "a mafia
conspiracy." In the days that followed, Khan
embellished his conspiracy theory for anyone willing
to listen. "I emphatically say that the carpet
mafia is responsible for this brutal killing . . .
Iqbal has become a symbol of our struggle against
slavery and was not afraid to expose the inhuman
practices prevailing in the carpet industry. I have
no doubt that the police are also a part of the
conspiracy." However, Khan did not support his
fulmination with evidence. "I do not rely on
evidence," he told his critics. "I have my
instinct. How else do you explain how, in a village
where no murder has occurred for a decade, the one
child who poses a threat to the carpet owners is
gunned down? Coincidence is never so cruel." To
the claim of the local police that Iqbal's murder was
an isolated incident Khan retorts, "The evidence
can be found if the police could be bothered to
look." The killing remains unsolved.
Eight hundred mourners
crowded into the Muridke cemetery for Iqbal's
funeral. A week later 3,000 protesters, half of them
under twelve, marched through the streets of Lahore
demanding an end to child labor. A few days after the
funeral Khan left Pakistan to consult with children's
rights activists in Europe. There he repeated his
accusations to great effect at conferences, on
television, before lawmakers. Iqbal was proclaimed a
"martyr for the cause of bonded labor"; his
murder became a cause célèbre among the
intelligentsia. Khan called upon the Human Rights
Commission of the United Nations to ban the import
and sale of all products made by children, especially
carpets. "I appeal to importers and consumers:
say no and only no to child made carpets," he
said. "This is the last message of Iqbal. It
would be an insult to his blood and memory if people
continue to buy child made products in any part of
the world."
Western consumers have
responded to Khan's plea. Sales of imported carpets
have fallen precipitously in recent months. Bowing to
public pressure, importers in the United States,
Sweden, Italy, Britain, France, and Germany by last
June had canceled carpet orders collectively valued
at $10 million. At the same time, human rights groups
and individual sympathizers have donated large sums
to support and expand BLLF operations. Ironically,
Iqbal's death opened doors and purses that were
previously closed to Khan.
Westerners, who have seen
economic weapons used to achieve social reforms,
might expect canceled orders to result in negotiation
and, with luck, accommodation between industrialists
and activists. Pakistan's industrialists, however,
have chosen the questionable tactic of denying the
existence of bonded labor in their factories. Shahid
Rashid Butt, the president of the Islamabad Carpet
Exporters Association, told his colleagues, "Our
industry is the victim of enemy agents who spread
lies and fictions around the world that bonded labor
and child labor are utilized in the production of
hand knotted carpets. They are not and have never
been." He condemned the BLLF and its allies as
Jewish and Indian enemies who had launched a
systematic campaign to damage the reputation of
Pakistan's carpet industry for their own profit. His
remarks were enthusiastically endorsed by the
Pakistan Carpet Manufacturers and Exporters
Association and echoed in the National Assembly.
"These charges flew in
the face not just of reason but also of an
extraordinary amount of evidence," says I. A.
Rehman, the director of the Human Rights Commission
of Pakistan. "Anywhere else they would have been
laughed at and dismissed. Here they were accepted as
fact and acted on." At the urging of politicians
and industrialists, Javed Mahmood, the assistant
director of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency
(FIA), last May launched an inquiry into the BLLF on
the strength of information he had received from
highly placed sources suggesting that the
organization was supported by "Pakistan's
enemies." He later said, "I consider the
information credible and will do all I can to protect
our country's commercial interests from unscrupulous
enemies." At the same time, Pakistan's leading
newspapers began running "exposés" of
abolitionist leaders, the nicest of which
characterized Ehsan Ulla Khan as a philandering
bigamist with "indisputable ties to Jewish and
Indian agencies hostile to Pakistan." The
publishers of these newspapers are suspected of
having large financial interests in industries
employing child labor.
The FIA is a secret police
force, and one of its best kept secrets is whom it
works for. Nominally an organ of the state, it is not
above accepting freelance assignments from prominent
individuals and commercial groups. The extent of its
extralegal activities is anyone's guess, but a highly
respected human rights investigator believes that
"there is close cooperation between carpet
interests, feudal lords, segments of the police
force, and the administration district commissioners,
the courts, and government officials. Financially
resourceful drug barons are also a part of the
scene." Whoever the client, the FIA provides an
assortment of services straight out of the KGB
handbook: wiretaps, tails, searches, arrests,
harassment, and varying degrees of corporal
punishment.
These services were very much
in evidence on a Thursday afternoon in late June,
when the FIA raided the BLLF's Lahore headquarters.
The detail consisted of ten men, all in plain
clothes, who scrambled up four flights of stairs to
the tiny office in no time flat. These were not
ordinary policemen; this was not the usual surprise
"inspection" (read
"intimidation") to which all non government
organizations are periodically subjected. These were
professional agents, lithe and expert, commanded by a
severe officer in a freshly pressed safari suit.
After lining the BLLF workers up against a wall, he
ordered his troops to "confiscate anything that
may incriminate them." The agents took a liberal
view of "incriminate," and packed up
computers, filing cabinets, fax machines,
photocopiers, telephones, stationery, posters,
bicycles--and the cash box containing the monthly
payroll. Their depredations were supervised by a
small man who was distinctly not a policeman. He
represented, it turned out, the Pakistan Carpet
Manufacturers and Exporters Association. His purpose,
he said, was "to protect the interests of
legitimate businessmen." Every so often he
consulted with the commander.
When one BLLF worker tried to
protest, an agent threw her against a wall and held a
rifle butt inches from her face. When another worker
demanded to see a search warrant, the commander
informed her that none was necessary, because
"we are acting to prevent terrorism." The
association representative nodded in agreement.
Fifteen minutes later the
detail was gone, along with the office equipment and
furnishings. All that remained was a heap of broken
furniture, a "worker's rights" poster, and
a BLLF flag dangling out an open window. Several
staff workers had been taken away as well, to an FIA
holding center, where they were interrogated for
three days.
Two days later another FIA
detail raided the BLLF's "Freedom Campus"
training facility in Lahore, along with several of
its primary schools around the country. Once again
the agents were undiscriminating. They seized
everything movable ("items used to obstruct
valid commercial interests") and mistreated the
staff without respect for position or age. Teachers,
drivers, secretaries, and peasant families seeking
refuge from violent employers were interrogated along
with administrators, advocates, attorneys, and
fundraisers.
After an earlier raid on BLLF
headquarters Fatima Ghulam, the director of the
BLLF's women's education program, was held for two
days. "An officer promised to release me
immediately if I agreed to inform against Ehsan Ulla
Khan and some of the others," Ghulam says.
"He wanted me to testify that Khan is a
subversive, an enemy agent, and that the BLLF
receives money from foreign governments. He said he
had tapped my telephone conversations and had
recordings of me discussing treasonable acts. If I
wanted to avoid prosecution, I would have to
cooperate with the FIA. I refused, and he kept me
without food or water. When I wouldn't speak to him
the next day, he slapped me and dragged me around the
room."
Not to be outdone, the
Pakistani press stepped up its campaign against the
BLLF. Last summer a number of newspapers whose
editorial pages conceded that they were
"troubled by the carpet export crisis"
reported the following "facts": Khan
himself had murdered Iqbal Masih to win sympathy for
the BLLF; Khan had misappropriated BLLF funds to
support his own decadent lifestyle; Khan routinely
used BLLF schoolchildren as sex partners and house
slaves; Iqbal Masih was a twenty-one-year-old midget
whom Khan paid to masquerade as a carpet child; the
BLLF was an outpost of India's intelligence agency;
Khan was an Indian agent working to disgrace the
Pakistani carpet trade. These same papers also
"revealed" that carpet workers enjoy a
higher standard of living than the average citizen,
along with better working conditions. "The few
children working on carpets," one editorial
assured its readers, "do so after school, in
their own homes, under the supervision of loving
parents."
In the wake of these attacks
BLLF operations, child-welfare programs, schools,
training and education programs--nearly shut down for
lack of funds and staff. Membership has suffered, and
many of the legal advisers and support staff, fearing
reprisals, have fallen away. Those who remain are
subject to almost constant harassment: the fortunate
ones have their telephones tapped; the less fortunate
are shadowed around the clock. At the same time, the
courts have ignored their complaints about child
labor and abusive treatment by employers.
Just in case the intention of
the Federal Investigation Agency was unclear,
Assistant Director Mahmood in early June charged
Ehsan Ulla Khan, who was still abroad, and a BLLF
strategist named Zafaryab Ahmad with sedition and
economic treason, capital offenses punishable by
death. According to Mahmood, "The accused men
conspired with the Indian espionage agency to exploit
the murder of Iqbal Masih . . . causing a recurring
huge financial loss to Pakistan's business interests
abroad and paving the way for India to wage economic
warfare against Pakistan." Ahmad was arrested
and taken to a Lahore jail, where, after repudiating
the charges (he called them "foolish and
absurd"), he was denied bail. The FIA has since
refused to provide BLLF attorneys with evidence
supporting the charges, although Mahmood assures them
that it consists of "videotapes and recordings
of telephone conversations that amount to firm
proof." Mahmood has vowed to arrest Khan
"the very moment he returns to Pakistan, the
moment his aircraft touches down."
Ehsan Ulla Khan remains in
Europe, an unhappy exile. "They will jail me if
I return to Pakistan," he told me shortly after
he left his country. "Our attorneys tell me I am
of greater use to the BLLF here, speaking out against
the authorities, than I would be inside a Lahore
cell. I fear for my people. The police have harassed
many of them, and so many more have left us out of
fear. We are demoralized. We cannot pay our bills and
our staff. Our schools may close and our thousands of
students may end up in the very factories we saved
them from. Our offices and homes are under
surveillance. Our telephones are tapped. We are
fighting for our survival. If the attacks do not stop
soon, it is possible that the BLLF will perish. That
would be tragic
What
will become of the children of Pakistan?
Sent to us
by unknown source
