Manish Gautam

A spacious white building in Chundevi used to be a beehive of activities—with groups of girls enter and leaving the premises—until recently, when the police came calling.  The rooms inside the building had huge posters plastered on their walls. One of these posters featured three couples, apparently recently wed, in their wedding dresses. On top of the picture were the words: “Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.”

This house used to be the office for what the owners called a ‘marriage bureau’. The company’s purported work involved matching Nepali girls with rich foreign men looking for Nepali wives. But the company did more than that. It had been trafficking girls to China and South Korea, luring girls with promises of a better life. Once these girls reached their destination cities, however, they would usually find that they had been sold to poor men who only wanted a helper in their houses.

On March 2, the police from the Central Investigation Bureau raided this office, the “Cheru International Marriage Bureau”, and rescued six girls. Five of them were to be sent to South Korea, while one had just returned from China, unable to cope with the harsh life she had to live there.

Upon further investigation, the police were able to establish that the owners had been trafficking girls, under the guise of getting them married to rich men. Traffickers today have different modi operandi than they used to earlier in trafficking Nepalis to foreign countries. The marriage ruse is a new technique used by traffickers. Traditionally, trafficking meant luring girls with promise of work and taking them to areas in Mumbai and New Delhi and forcing them into prostitution and other such activities. This has now evolved into many other forms, where not only women but men are also trafficked.

Superintendent of Police Kiran Bajracharya of the Central Investigation Bureau has been investigating trafficking cases under a special anti-trafficking crackdown known as ‘Operation Eagle’. Under this programme, the CIB has been able to round up many trafficking scams and save victims from abuse.

In December, 42 men, many of whom were former police and army personnel, were headed for New Delhi. Some of them had even quit their jobs here in the country for a promise of a better wone abroad.

They had been promised jobs working on Nigerian gas pipelines for USD 1,200 per month. After around four months of idling, only seven people were flown to the transit point, Dubai; from there, only four were sent to Nigeria. This was when Ebola was ravaging the African nation; the brokers confined the men in a room under the pretense that they couldn’t risk going outside due to the outbreak. The four people were held in the room for a week before a Nigerian national approached them. Since they had already invested so much into the men to get them all the way to Nigeria, the Nigerian insisted that they should agree to whatever he said. He asked the men to ‘satisfy’ his clients.

“Even after months of being rescued, these people were severely distraught,” said SP Bajracharya. When the men refused to perform homosexual acts, they had been physically tortured.

Trafficking as it occurs in Nepal today is not just about extremely naive people being exploited by shady individuals.  The Human Trafficking and Transportation Act 2007 does not limit the definition to taking “a person out of the country for the purpose of buying and selling”; it also means “to take anyone from his /her home, place of residence or from a person by any means such as enticement, inducement, misinformation, forgery, tricks, coercion, abduction, hostage, allurement, influence, threat, abuse of power and by means of inducement, fear, threat or coercion to the guardian or custodian and keep him/her in one’s custody or take to any place within Nepal or abroad or handover him/her to somebody else for the purpose of prostitution and exploitation.”

Africa has emerged as a new destination where Nepali women who are lured by promises of jobs end up being exploited. The police say that a group of people under the guise of a travels and tours company had, over the years, been sending Nepali women to various restaurants in African countries such as Kenya, to work as dancers. While their job descriptions mentioned dancing, most of them ended up ‘satisfying’ their clients; and along with that came abuse and violence.

When police started investigating these cases, they were startled with the findings.
In one case, girls were brought from various dance schools and dance bars from around the country. They were given money and other gifts. The girls then underwent a series of photo-sessions. These pictures were sent to restaurant owners or brokers based in Kenya, Tanzania, Dubai and Malaysia. Upon confirmation, the agents based in Nepal received Rs 100,000 to Rs 200,000 as advance payments.

The girls were then sent to the African countries via various routes including New Delhi, Dubai and Malaysia. Once they started their work, they would have to meet an earning target each day. If they failed to achieve the target, they would be forced into sexual activities to make extra money.

The police investigation also revealed that the leader of this racket in Nepal, Rajendra Subedi of Lalitpur, had investments in dance bars in Dubai and Nepal. Another arrestee, Subin Shrestha, had diversified into Kenya and Tanzania. All of them are still being remanded in custody.
“Many of these people used travels and tours businesses as fronts to make sure they could book tickets themselves. Some of them owned hotels and cosmetic shops. These were all tactics to show that they were legitimate businesses,” says DIG Hemanta Malla Thakuri, chief of the CIB.

DIG Malla says that the CIB has also been investigating human trafficking from Nepal into the US and other destinations.

In the majority of these cases, the traffickers are found to have used the air-routes, which makes the police think that the airport officials in and around the trafficking route could have also been working with the traffickers. They have also been changing the tactics used in ferrying the victims to various countries.

About a month ago, four women were rescued from the TIA, from inside an airplane scheduled to fly to New Delhi. It was later learned that ‘family members’ were accompanying these girls in order to avoid suspicion from authorities.

Just this Thursday, seven Nepali girls were arrested from Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, as they tried to board a plane to Dubai. Interrogations revealed that these girls were travelling with fake documents. The airport police authorities have also arrested two Air India officials for their involvement in the scandal.

“The involvement of government officials and the police is disturbing fighting,” says DIG Malla. He says that it has always been tough to encourage trafficking victims to file complaints with the police since the traffickers deceive them into thinking that the police will simply imprison the victims themselves.

DIG Malla says that it is essential to work with multiple government agencies to curb the ongoing trafficking. “The police can only enforce the law. But there are other agencies such as the Ministry of Women and Children Welfare, the Immigration Department and others who must be involved in this operation. But they are currently working without any coordination among them,” says DIG Malla.

Published on: 25 July 2015 | The Kathmandu Post