Daily Times

The recent news stories about the women, men and children trafficking in Afghanistan have become a hot topic in the print and electronic media across Europe. From Northern Afghanistan, recently, I received some heartbreaking e-mails about war criminals and US military contractors’ involvement in human trafficking. These e-mails raise many questions regarding the US-led war on terrorism, human rights and the credibility of the Afghan government.

Every month, hundreds of Afghan children, women and unemployed young men are kidnapped, imprisoned or trafficked to the international market and local prostitution industry. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, war criminals have left a shameful record of children trafficking, kidnapping and play boy business. In Northern Afghanistan and parts of north-western Pakistan, majority of orphan, poor and maroon children became the victim of these sex-hungry beasts who not only abuse them but share them with friends as well.

With the transfer of power to the criminal Afghan Army, drug-lords and warlords in Afghanistan, the import and export of children and women is likely to boost as the state drivers have a good experience in this business. On RAWA website, Heidi Kingston reported some important cases of brutalities against women. Heidi reported the selling of women in an open market in Shinwari district of Jalalabad province: “Big chadors cover their heads and just the women’s hands show. Like animals they are bought and sold,” according to Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) report. “Two women were sold with their children and one woman was sold to five different people and returned back to the original man who sold her, then killed her,” AIHRC reported.

The sold women are kept in lock-ups, raped again and again and then killed. The police and judiciary have not launched any formal investigations to determine the causes and motivations of suicide and self-burning by women. AIHRC and RAWA reported that a 14-year-old Afghan girl, Samia, was the victim of gang rape by warlords in Sar-e-Pul province in Northern Afghanistan. She told an Afghan TV channel that warlords not only raped her but imprisoned her father and brother when they publicised the issue and asked for juzstice.

The story of Shafiqa is not too different. She was married to a Tajik warlord family where she was treated as a slave, beaten with electric cables, stoned, her limbs broken with an axe handle and doused with boiling water. She told reporters that her father-in-law tortured her further by literally rubbing salt into her wounds. Amnesty International report has quoted some incidents of the massacre of innocent women in their homes by war criminals. In Northern Afghanistan, scores of young women have been kidnapped and then raped. Hundreds of raped women committed suicide or were killed by their relatives. Thousands maroon and poor women and girls have disappeared and several have been stoned to death.

In rural areas, selling of women and children and debt bondage businesses are growing but are often disguised as marriage. Extreme poverty, ignorance and warlordism are among the problems that have pushed many minors — boys and girls — into situations of peonage. Some poor parents often offer their young daughters as loan brides. Recently, in Herat province, more than 150 cases of the selling of children, especially girls, were reported.

AIHRC recently voiced about the surge in women and child trafficking in the country. In its latest report, it has warned that: “Human traffickers used coordinated methods to allure women and children to take them outside the country. Poverty, unemployment, corruption and insecurity as the factors behind an increase in human trafficking. After women and children are trafficked out of the country, they get sexually abused and face other sorts of violence.”

The US State Department in its report on trafficking in persons for 2010 has revealed that trafficking of human being in Afghanistan is more prevalent than transnational trafficking, and the majority of victims are children. Poor and unemployed Afghan children are being trafficked within the country and sent to male prostitution centres and business of forced begging is controlled by mafia groups within and outside the government circles. Begging is considered to be the most profitable industry in Afghanistan that finances insurgency, ethnicity and weapon industry.

In all 34 provinces of the country, thousands of men, women and children are begging on behalf of underground mafia groups. Organised and professional criminal gangs in big cities collect millions in Afghan currency from across the country and share it with their friends within the government departments. The begging women perform two jobs: prostitution and fund raising. Young girls visit the houses of dignitaries, parliamentarians, police officers, army generals and foreign contractors.

A US report warns that some Afghan families willingly sell their young children in prostitution, including bacha bazi (‘boy for play’) and dancing clubs. The US human trafficking report has revealed that “brothels and prostitution rings are sometimes run by foreigners, sometimes with links to larger criminal networks. Tajik women are also believed to be trafficked through Afghanistan to other countries for prostitution. Trafficked Iranian women transit Afghanistan en route to Pakistan.”

In monthly Cutting Edge, Nick Schwellenbach and Carol D Leonnig (July 26, 2010) have painted a painful story about the involvement of US contractors in sex trafficking in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq: “Nearly a decade after DynCorp International LLC employees were implicated in Bosnia for buying and selling women from throughout Eastern Europe — and not prosecuted — the US army was told this February that supervisors of an army subcontractor in Iraq had sexually assaulted women who were held in involuntary servitude.”

On the involvement of US contractors in child sex in Afghanistan, Joseph Farah’s G2 bulletin has reported a US military contractor’s involvement in child sex (bacha bazi) who dressed up young boys in women’s dresses so as to present for dance parties and potentially to be sold for sex. All these diseases are fuelled by drug addiction across the country.

The writer is the author of Afghanistan Beyond 2014 and Punjabi Taliban. He can be reached at zai.musakhan222@gmail.com