After two years isolated from the outside world, a group of traditional Magar villages located in the shadow of the gigantic Dhaulagiri, in the central hills region of Nepal, timidly welcomes life from elsewhere when the occasional foreign walker passes through or stops to rest his weary limbs.
Outfitted from head to toe in brand-name garments, these visitors are like rare birds spotted from afar, bearers of hope, encouraging villagers to dust off community shelters and light stoves.
Covid-19 decimated tourism in Nepal, but this was not the only sector that suffered.
According to a UN study, seasonal and temporary workers, who represent 60% of the workforce, were left without income, and the prediction that the World Bank made in 2020 that 31.2% of the population of the country would sink into extreme poverty has been successful.
"Now many people are in a much more vulnerable situation than before covid-19 and try to leave the country in search of any job," says Bishwo Kadkha, director of the anti-trafficking organization Maite Nepal, which sometimes has partnered with Action Help.
Nepalis are on the move again, but emigration has its own dangers, embodied in unscrupulous recruitment agencies and trafficking sharks.
Those who find work through irregular means and in invisible sectors, such as private homes, are particularly exposed to modern slavery and sexual exploitation, as highlighted in a 2019 report by the Foundation's Walk Free initiative. Minderoo and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Several of the minors sheltered in an orphanage of the NGO Mati Nepal, which works to protect girls and women and prevent them from being victims of traffickers, in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Jonas Gratzer (Getty Images)
On the eve of the pandemic, the Nepal Human Rights Commission presented its latest data.
According to their estimates, in 2018, 35,000 Nepalis – 15,000 men, 15,000 women and 5,000 children – were victims of trafficking, and 1.5 million (5%) were at risk of being trafficked.
While male migrants are recruited for forced labor on projects such as the construction of the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, women and children are often destined for the sex trade.
There are now fears that the economic fallout from Covid-19 will exacerbate an already critical problem, most notably that of young Nepalese women lured out of the country across the open border with India.
“It is something that has continued to be practiced even during the pandemic,” says Kadkha.
“Nepali girls are very successful in Indian brothels because of their lighter skin and slanted eyes.
If they are very young, they are injected with hormones to make them appear more sexually mature.
With the arrival of AIDS, a great demand for young virgins began.
Having sex with them was believed to cure the disease.”
Manita Chaundray (not her real name), 21, was subjected to such treatment when, aged nine, she was abducted from the remote western region of Sudurpaschim and taken to a Calcutta brothel by two women who picked her up on the street.
“They told me that they would treat me as if they were my mothers.
They seemed kind and affectionate to me”, says the woman.
“When they gave me the injections I didn't realize what was happening.
For the first three months they just fed me and gave me medicine every day.
Later, they forced me to go with men.
When I refused, they beat me and starved me for weeks.
I began to wonder why she was alive."
At age 13, Chaundray ran away from the brothel, but since his parents had made sure he couldn't find them, he fell for the traffickers again.
A 19-year-old Nepali woman who pretended to be her friend sold her to brokers who took her to a brothel in Delhi.
After a year and a half, she was rescued in a raid by the Indian police and repatriated to Nepal, where she received help and education through Shakti Samuha, an NGO run by survivors of trafficking.
She is now a dance teacher in Kathmandu.
Lila Pun, local teacher and midwife: "If someone tried to trick one of our children into trafficking, I would drive them out of here with a stick."Heather Galloway
According to Kadkha, almost all human trafficking involves sexual exploitation.
"Even when they emigrate to work as domestic workers, 90% are victims of sexual abuse," she denounces, adding that this means that the emigrants who return carry an enormous stigma, particularly related to AIDS, although she assures that this attitude is changing little by little.
In Nepal, human trafficking is a very complex and widespread phenomenon.
The Indian brothels that Nepalese women and girls end up in are often run by women from the same country who, in turn, were trafficked in the past and have set up their own business.
They have contacts with the inhabitants of the villages and rural areas of Nepal, where 79.4% of the population lives.
These contacts act as intermediaries and convince families that a good education or a good job awaits the young women.
Within Nepal, as there are no actual brothels, women and girls are sold into the so-called entertainment sector, where they work in massage parlors and adult dance clubs.
Recruitment agencies also collaborate with intermediaries who offer jobs in rural areas and then, in exchange for a large amount of money, provide documents to work abroad, mainly in Malaysia and the Gulf countries.
"Many women go to the Gulf countries to work in domestic service, where they are physically and sexually abused," denounces Benu Maya Gurung, whose federation of organizations Alliance Against Trafficking in Women and Children in Nepal (AATWIN, for its acronym in English) has recently organized a conference with 25 survivors of trafficking.
“When they arrive at their destination, not only do they not know the language, but they usually don't know how to use the appliances.
The bosses get angry and punish them, burning their bodies with a hot iron, beating them, feeding them leftovers, and forcing them to work from 4:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., with no days off.”
The Nepalese government is striving to end trafficking, but covid-19 has slowed down any progress.
According to the US Government
Trafficking in Persons Report 2019
, Nepal is at level two of a three-tier system under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, due to the fact that it is “not fully compliant”. the minimum requirements for its elimination.
One of the study's recommendations is that "official complicity in trafficking crimes" be investigated.
"The government has to do more," says Benu Maya of AATWIN.
“Recruitment agencies are all powerful.
When they refuse to give employer information to the Executive, the Executive does nothing.
Bans and telling women to stay home is not a solution.
They leave anyway, but with less chance of being rescued by the authorities if things go wrong.”
Photographs of missing women accumulate at police posts along the Nepalese borders, like this one in Thankot.
It is suspected that many of them are captured by trafficking networks.
Jonas Gratzer (Getty Images)
One area where the government has made significant progress is the trafficking of orphans, which accounts for less than 5% of trafficking in Nepal.
According to Samjyor Lama, director of Next Generation, an NGO that deals with the problem of children kidnapped and taken to orphanages to attract donations, the control system has been strengthened.
“In 2019, there were 535 asylums registered with more than 15,000 minors.
Now there are 489 with about 11,000.
46 orphanages have been closed and the children have been returned to their families.”
Lama explains that at least two-thirds of Nepal's orphans are not really orphans.
The intermediaries deceive the parents in the towns, – “the intermediary is like an angel for that family”, he affirms – with the promise of a good education for his son in the city.
The family then finds that they are cut off from all contact with the child.
“It is no coincidence that 75% of orphanages are among the top five tourist attractions in Nepal,” Lama denounces, emphasizing that Next Generation is strongly opposed to volunteering in orphanages, which only serves to fuel commerce.
The United Nations defines trafficking as any recruitment that involves transport, exploitation or control.
Many of their victims in this stunningly beautiful Himalayan country come from areas with little infrastructure and little development and access to decent education.
If they return, they may be shunned by their family and neighbors, because "for people, human trafficking is equivalent to prostitution," says AATWIN's Benu Maya.
The victims are left to their own devices and, as in the case of Manita Chaudhary, the cycle repeats itself.
For the town of Nangi, home to a community tourism initiative nestled at the foot of Dhaulagiri, 2019 was an extraordinary year, with up to 500 visitors a month in high season.
As planned, the proceeds went, as always, to bolster the government's rickety education and health program in the area and improve communications.
They now have Wi-Fi, as well as a dizzying dirt track down which an SUV chugs along in second gear for three hours each day carrying basic manufactured goods.
Social entrepreneur Mahabir Pun, at his National Center for Innovation, based at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu.Heather Galloway
Although the tap on tourism was abruptly turned off in early 2020 due to covid-19, sending villagers back to the 1990s when they relied only on subsistence farming, a relatively progressive outlook has allowed the local population weather the storm and resist emigration.
The locals are aware of the scams of this and the traps laid by the intermediaries of the all-powerful recruitment agencies that endlessly roam the undeveloped mountainous regions in search of families desperate for an income.
They know that recruited people are often diverted into the sex trade or forced labor.
“If someone tried it here, I would kick him out with a stick,” threatens Lila Pun,
The architect of grassroots development in this remote corner of Nepal has been the Nepalese social entrepreneur Mahabir Pun, a native of Nangi.
“Ours was the first town in the country to have Wi-Fi,” he explains.
"Another thing I was looking forward to was taking tourists to the towns, since I realized that if you want to prevent young people from emigrating, you have to create job opportunities and encourage them to start an activity."
But not all Nepal has been lucky enough to have a social entrepreneur of the caliber of Mahabir Pun, and emigration is more attractive than ever for many people.
According to Pun, five million Nepalese work in 80 countries around the world because in Nepal there is no system to support the talent and innovation that would generate local jobs and help curb emigration that is often synonymous with human trafficking. of people.
In an attempt to begin to fill this gap, the businessman has created the National Innovation Center in Kathmandu, aimed at promoting talent and sponsoring viable initiatives.
He even hopes to set up a smaller version of the center in his hometown of Nangi.
“As much as possible, my goal is for people to stay in Nepal,” he says.
"If we can create jobs, we can get it."
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