Immigrant Dream Shattered in Karachi

She was promised a good job, allowing her to feed her aging parents and five sisters and brothers. But her dream turned into a nightmare after she was raped and then used as bonded laborer in different places here.

"I don't want to remember those days. It seemed as if I was living in hell," Sana, 29, told IslamOnline.net at Ansar Burni Welfare Trust, an NGO providing legal assistance to illegal immigrants.

In June 2005, she was smuggled from Khulna city in Bangladesh along with 19 other women, belonging to different parts of the country.

"They (human smugglers) used to rape me frequently. Then they put me in a house, where I used to work 16 to 18 hours a day without any salary," Sana recalled with tear-soaked eyes.

She added that her salary was already paid to the agents who brought her to Karachi.

Sana believes the other women who came with her were either smuggled to the Gulf or put on bonded labor in Karachi, which has become a major transit point in human trafficking, particularly of women.

According to Ansar Burni Welfare Trust, over 5000 Bengali and Burmese women are working as maids or prostitutes in Karachi, most of them are illegal immigrants.

The number of such women in the Gulf is estimated at nearly 10,000, according to the NGO.

Fancy Dream

The prospects of better economic opportunities abroad throws many Bengalis and Burmese, particularly women, into the nest of human traffickers.

"Most of the women fall into traffickers' clutches because of poor socio-economic conditions," Ansar Burni, the founder and chairman of Ansar Burni Welfare Trust, told IOL.

"A large number of the young girls smuggled internally – in close collusion with the local police - are forced into domestic labor or prostitution."

Some pimps and smugglers sitting in Karachi deal exclusively in Burmese and Bangladeshi women, according to Burni.

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