[In June, Pakistani investigators started to prepare the case, which the AP has extensively reported on. There was real momentum to stop the alleged trafficking to China, where there’s big demand for brides from abroad, as males far outnumber females because of the previous one-child policy and prevalence of female infanticide.]
By Miriam
Berger
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Sumaira,
a Pakistani woman, shows a picture of her Chinese husband in Gujranwala,
Pakistan.
Sumaira, who didn't want her full name used, was raped repeatedly by
Chinese
men at a house in Islamabad where she was brought to stay after her
brothers
arranged her marriage to the older Chinese man. (K.M. Chaudary/AP)
|
The evidence was overwhelming.
Investigators had a list, exclusively viewed
by the Associated Press, of 629 girls and women from across Pakistan who since
2018 had been allegedly trafficked to China and forced to marry Chinese men.
Once there, many victims were isolated and physically and sexually abused.
Others, investigators found, were forced into prostitution.
The exploitation was lucrative for the
Chinese and Pakistanis involved. Less so for the impoverished families from
Pakistan’s marginalized Christian community that the trafficking rings
reportedly targeted, assuming they would be vulnerable and powerless to stop
it.
“The Chinese and Pakistani brokers make
between 4 million and 10 million rupees ($25,000 and $65,000) from the groom,
but only about 200,000 rupees ($1,500), is given to the family,” one Pakistani
investigator, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal,
told the AP.
In June, Pakistani investigators started to
prepare the case, which the AP has extensively reported on. There was real
momentum to stop the alleged trafficking to China, where there’s big demand for
brides from abroad, as males far outnumber females because of the previous
one-child policy and prevalence of female infanticide.
Then
came the pressure from above: Shut it down
Cash-strapped Pakistan relies on China for
aid, trade and military assistance. In 2015, China launched the China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $75 billion project to fund the construction of
roads, power plants and other infrastructure and development initiatives. It’s
part of China’s broader vision of rejuvenating the Silk Road and China’s ties
to the rest of Asia through what it calls the Belt and Road initiative.
The assistance, like any aid, comes with
conditions both explicit and implied. In October, according to the AP’s
investigation, that meant that a court in Faisalabad acquitted 31 Chinese
citizens charged with human trafficking. What was the largest case against the
alleged trafficking ring had swiftly fallen apart: Pakistani media curbed its
coverage, while several women originally set to testify suddenly refused
“because they were either threatened or bribed into silence, according to a
court official and a police investigator familiar with the case,” the AP
reported.
Why? Pakistani officials were afraid that
pursuing the case would anger China and threaten its lucrative investments and
economic cooperation, officials and activists interviewed by the AP found.
“No one is doing anything to help these
girls,” one senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear
of reprisal, told the AP. “The whole racket is continuing, and it is growing.
Why? Because they know they can get away with it. The authorities won’t follow
through, everyone is being pressured to not investigate. Trafficking is
increasing now.”
He said he had decided to come forward
“because I have to live with myself. Where is our humanity?”
Saleem Iqbal, a Christian activist involved
with helping the victims and families, said that some officials from Pakistan’s
Federal Investigation Agency had been “transferred” and put under “immense
pressure” by the government to halt their work on the case.
“When we talk to Pakistani rulers, they don’t
pay any attention,” he told the AP.
Both Pakistani and Chinese officials have
denied the allegations.
Pakistan
is not the only victim of what Human Rights Watch has dubbed China’s “bride
trafficking problem”
The New York-based human rights group has
recorded cases of women from northern Myanmar being trafficked to China, where
they are sold for $3,000 to $13,000 dollars. Other news reports have documented
how thousands of women and girls from Cambodia, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam
have also been sold into exploitation in China.
“Mum — they don’t give me a penny. They just
keep me in the house. Maybe things will change when I give them a baby,” a
woman from rural Cambodia messaged her mother after being lured to China on the
false hope of work and wealth, the Reuters news wire reported.
A Vietnamese teenager misled and then
kidnapped in Vietnam and trafficked to China told Singapore’s Channel News Asia
in no uncertain terms what this fate meant.
“If you are trafficked, of course you will be
raped. Probably everyone was raped,” she said. “I became a wife there [in
China]. At that house, I had to obey everything they said or else I would be
beaten. They beat me without fear because I am not Chinese.”
Thousands of women and girls from North
Korea, some as young as 12, have been forced into marriages and prostitution,
and subjected to other brutal abuse in China, in what the London-based Korea
Future Initiative says is a multibillion-dollar industry there. Women and
teenagers looking to flee the repressive state are a particular target.
Regionwide, traffickers prey on victims from
impoverished, marginalized and minority communities, who usually have little
information on what really lies ahead when a trafficker, middleman or even
family member or acquaintance in on the scheme comes knocking and offers work
or a new beginning abroad.
The number of single men China who in part
drive these illegal networks is only growing. As The Washington Post’s Simon
Denyer and Annie Gowen reported in 2018: “Out of China’s population of 1.4
billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent
of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find
wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect
from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of
couples were determined that their child should be a son.”
But because the victims are often from
marginalized communities within their home countries, the phenomenon of bride
trafficking isn’t an issue leaders are keen to discuss as part of their
bilateral relationship with China, said Heather Barr, the acting co-director of
Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights division.
“There’s no country in Asia that has a
symmetrical relationship with China,” Barr said. “The scale of influence and
economic and political power is just so different between China and other
countries in the region, and particularly the countries that are, so far, on
the list of where trafficked brides are coming from.”
Now with China’s Belt and Road initiative,
these countries “are more indebted, often literally, to China,” she said,
adding, “It’s so increasingly clear that this is an issue across the whole
region.”
