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| August 17, 2005 | Wednesday | Rajab 11, 1426 |
Parents of 30 child jockeys held: Human trafficking
LAHORE, Aug 16: The Federal Investigation Agency took on Tuesday 24 persons into custody on the charges of transporting children to the United Arab Emirates for camel race.
Officials told Dawn that the arrested persons — 14 women and 10 men — who claimed to be the parents of the 30 child jockeys arrived here from the UAE.
The children were sent to the Child Protection Welfare Bureau for rehabilitation and getting them reunited with their parents from the Allama Iqbal Airport.
The arrested people were later shifted to the FIA’s passport cell, where a case was registered against them under Human Trafficking Ordinance-2002.
The FIA officials said that all the arrested men and women were the real parents of the children in question. “Extreme poverty has compelled them to make their own children camel jockeys,” an official quoted the parents.
Most of them belonged to Sindh, Rahim Yar Khan, Faisalabad, Muzaffarghar and Bahawalnagar.
The FIA investigation created a complication for the CPWB whose function was to reunite the child jockeys with their parents. “The bureau will provide the educational, health and other facilities to the children who cannot be reunited with their parents owing to different reasons,” said a bureau official.
Some child jockeys told reporters that they used to earn between 700 and 1,500 Dirhams per month, besides receiving from 50 to 100 Dirhams for winning a race in the UAE.
They said their fathers, who too mostly worked in the Middle East as labourers, received their salaries from the camel owners. In some cases, the children’s parents came from Pakistan twice a year to collect their salaries.
Mohammad Wasim, 12, of Rahim Yar Khan said that he was too small to remember when his parents had taken him to the UAE. Narrating his ordeal, Wasim said: “After getting about two-month training on how to ride a camel I got on to the job. I, along with other boys, had to wake up early in the morning. We then fed and cleaned the camels and got ready for a race at sharp 9am which continued for two hours. Our owners provided us with meals (a non-solid stuff) twice a day to maintain our weight less than 35 kg which was said to be suitable for the job.”
Wasim was worried about his parents’ future and urged the authorities concerned to let them go as he wanted to live with them in his native town.
According to a UAE preliminary survey report, some 3,000 children, under the age of 16, are working as camel jockeys. Of them, at least 2,000 are Pakistanis, while the remaining belong to Bangladesh, Sudan and Maurtius.
The UAE government reportedly had banned the children under 16 in the camel race. The UAE had started handing over the recovered children to their respective countries.
As many as 150 child jockeys had been handed over to Pakistan since the UAE government started the process in June this year.
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