September 24, 2002	Tuesday	Rajab 16, 1423

DHAKA: Alam was kidnapped five years ago, taken to the Middle East and forced to race camels. Now the 12-year-old is back home in Bangladesh but faces a whole new set of problems, such as trying to recognize his mother.

“Police say Bedena Begum is my mother and I was taken away from her,” Alam says shyly.

“I also feel she is my mother, but I can hardly remember her face,” the boy says, mumbling in broken Bangla, a mother tongue he is having to learn all over again.

Alam is staying at a camp set up to help boy camel jockeys returning to Bangladesh from the Middle East.

The youngster appears nervous of strangers, apparently fearful that the gang who tricked his mother and took him away might try to grab him again.

“I knew no one there and was scared to death as someone put me on the hunched back of a camel, tied me tightly and whipped the animal to make it run,” Alam said of his first race in the United Arab Emirates.

His mother is overjoyed to get her son back but worries about the effects on him of his years away from home.

“Alam still seems suspicious of whether I’m his real mother or not,” said Begum, a domestic helper and the wife of a rickshaw puller.

She said the boy had been taken by some recruiting agents who promised her he would get a good job in Dhaka, 16 kms from their home in the town of Narayanganj.

Only later did she learn that Alam had been taken to the Middle East to race camels. She approached a group — the Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association (BNWLA) — for help to get him back. She thanks God and the group for his return.

VICTIMS OF POVERTY: As Alam spoke at the centre run by the women lawyers’ association, half a dozen other young, former camel jockeys gathered round.

They all had similar stories to tell, of being picked up by human traffickers and sent to the United Arab Emirates.

HEADING HOME: Nearly 1,700 Bangladeshi children trafficked to the UAE were repatriated during the 1990s, according to the Dhaka-based Centre for Women and Children.—Reuters