LAHORE, Jan 20 (OneWorld) - Thousands of innocent people, including hundreds of young children, are subjected to unspeakable torture in slave camps in the lawless tribal areas of Balochistan province and the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan.
"Kidnapped children are kept in fetters and forced to break rocks and work in road and bridge construction," says 39-year-old Zakir Hussain who escaped and arrived home after 29 years in a Balochistan camp.
Hussain maintains that many of these camps, commonly called Kharkar Camps, in remote and inaccessible areas of far-flung Pakistan are run in collusion with local law-enforcing agencies.
Still in a state of shock, Hussain gives details about the slave camp, which he says had 250 girls and 500 boys.
"Girls and women are sold in the flesh markets of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Among them was the daughter of a police officer of the southern Punjab city of Bahawalpur. The 25-year-old, attempted to flee twice but failed," narrates Hussain.
Hussain's harrowing tale began in 1976 when he went to the Pakistani port city of Karachi with a mason Allah Bakhsh Awan to find work. Awan sold him to a trafficker from the tribal area who took him to Naushki, a remote town in Balochistan.
Imprisoned in a bonded labor camp, Hussain was chained to a donkey. "Later I was forced to crush stones for the construction of a road near Quetta, the provincial capital," he says.
It was a Dickensenian nightmare from the start. "The inmates had to work 12 hours and were served only once a day - bread and pickle," says Hussain.
"To prevent us from escaping, the traffickers put some kind of drops in our eyes before going to bed, rendering us blind for the entire night," he says.
Torture was routine and inmates were subjected to electric shocks to blunt their memory. Tongues were chopped off so that the inmates would not communicate.
"When an inmate died, they removed his kidneys and threw the body to wild animals," Hussain shivers as he speaks of the horrifying incidents. "The punishment for escape was death."
Hussain was lucky. He fled the camp along with seven others, but four were shot dead by the captors. He walked barefoot for 16 days to reach the Afghan-Pakistan border town of Chaman where the border militia detained him and gave him warm clothes.
He was shifted to Quetta where he was handed over to a police inspector. The officer, Riaz Shah, who belongs to Faisalabad in Punjab province, sent him to his hometown of Khanewal in southern Punjab.
"Kharkar Camps are slave labor camps where kidnapped children are housed and trained as human zombies to perform odd jobs," laments the secretary-general of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), Zafar Malik.
Three categories of persons are involved in the trade - the kidnappers, the go-betweens and the camp-manager. "The kidnappers sell the children to the go-betweens, who sell them to the camp-managers where children are trained and used as slave labor," Malik points out.
In theory, all bonded laborers should have been freed under the Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, 1992 and those responsible for keeping them in bondage should have been prosecuted.
But in practice, the political and financial strength of tribal lords in Balochistan and NWFP allows them to continue using bonded laborers with impunity, feels legal expert Naveed Saeed Khan.
He adds that such camps exist because the writ of the federal and provincial government is weak in semi-autonomous tribal regions.
According to NCCL data, over 15,000 children are lost every year and at least 2,000 of them are victims of kidnappers. Malik says, "These children are between ages five-15. Kidnappers prowl the low-income and working-class localities and lure children from their homes and schools."
Of the 600 inquiries made by NCCL regarding lost children, the police responded only in 189 cases, which shows the callous attitude of the administration Malik says.
A senior police official put the blame squarely on parents. He says people do not report cases of missing children on time because they try to find the children on their own, which gives kidnappers ample time to flee with their prey.
Malik adds, "Many children are in labor camps for so long that they forget their addresses which makes it difficult to re-unite them with their families."
Psychologist and social activist Nadeem Malik says joint efforts by parents and authorities could save thousands of children from the agony of Kharkar Camps. His advice, "Surveillance by parents and rapid police reaction to kidnapping complaints is necessary."
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