The larger tragedy…Huma Yusuf
TRAGICALLY, though not unexpectedly, there are more Pakistani bodies in the waters off Greece this month. They include a 13-year-old boy from Pasrur, who insisted on the dangerous trip, enticed by social media images of life in Europe posted by other boys from his village who had illegally emigrated. Up to 40 of our compatriots are feared dead in this horrific accident.
The prime minister has declared such incidents damaging for Pakistan’s global image. Surely, we should be concerned about more than PR when our youth believe their best hope lies in foreign lands, across treacherous waters, and their parents pay millions to fund what could be a fatal misadventure.
To be fair, the PM also called for action against human traffickers, including against those FIA officials who facilitate this illicit movement. Writing in these pages, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar reiterated why a crackdown against people smugglers would be futile: as long as elite privilege persists, desperate youth will do what they can — however perilous — to improve their lot in life. A crackdown would also fail because of a broader sense of complacency and callousness towards human trafficking.
Recent boat tragedies have led to a narrow conception of people smuggling and human trafficking in our political discourse and policy enforcement. The FIA focuses on transnational trafficking and agents that illegally facilitate emigration. The line between migrant smuggling and human trafficking often blurs: 19-year-old Muhammad Sufyan who also lost his life on Greek shores, chose to leave for Europe, but found himself trafficked. According to BBC reporting, he was detained in Libya for two months, forced to subsist on one inadequate meal per day, until his fateful departure for Greece.
But trafficking is a wider issue than illegal emigration. It is defined as any form of deceitful or coercive recruitment or movement of people with the aim of exploiting them for profit. Trafficking is considered a form of modern slavery, which also encompasses other exploitative activities such as forced labour, debt bondage and sex trafficking. Through this wider lens, the scale of trafficking in Pakistan becomes immense: more than 10 out of every 1,000 Pakistanis were in modern slavery in 2021, according to the Global Slavery Index 2023.
According to the US’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, the most prevalent form in Pakistan is forced labour, particularly in sectors such as agriculture, construction (brick kilns), and micro-industries like carpet and bangle-making. For women and children, domestic servitude, often in violent or exploitative circumstances, is the most common form of trafficking. How many readers of this paper employ children, or know others that do? And how many of those would consider themselves part of the scourge of modern slavery or human trafficking? In that gap, lies the real challenge, one that cannot be solved by slapping the wrists of a few FIA officials.
Although human trafficking falls under the centralised oversight of the FIA, local police are responsible for tackling domestic trafficking. Unfortunately, these forces lack training and awareness on what constitutes modern slavery or trafficking, and how to identify victims or gather sufficient evidence for trafficking prosecutions. As a society, we will never successfully clamp down on people smuggling unless we more widely acknowledge the injustice and rights violations that trafficking of all forms entails.
Research suggests that migrants are three times more vulnerable to being trafficked, meaning the incidence of trafficking in Pakistan will continue to soar. Rural-urban migration rates in the country, among the highest in the world, are being further exacerbated by increasing levels of conflict, state repression and climate change.
As Wasim Riaz has written for South Asia Voices, climate change in particular is an overlooked driver of vulnerable migration, and so trafficking. Following floods and droughts since 2010, subsistence farmers in Punjab and Sindh have been increasingly vulnerable to forced labour and debt bondage. Those who flee climate disasters become victims to agents who coerce them into forced labour or sex trafficking, taking advantage of their desperation.
After the 2023 boat capsize that killed 262 Pakistanis, there were calls for boosting youth employment and opportunity. This latest incident has sparked scrutiny on FIA corruption that facilitates illegal emigration. The number of structural issues driving human trafficking is daunting and no one can be blamed for writing off the issue as intractable. But any hope for change must be rooted in the willingness to recognise trafficking in all its aspects, and not just when venal agents smuggle young hopefuls onto death boats.
The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.
COURTESY DAWN