Posted on 09/23/2002 7:24:28 PM PDT by Tancred
DHAKA (Reuters) - 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.
"It turned out to be painful and dangerous. I often dangled from the camel's back. Sometimes I fell on the sand," he said.
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, 10 miles 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 Allah and the group for his return.
VICTIMS OF POVERTY
As Alam spoke at the center 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.
Salma Ali, a lawyer with the association, said she kept Alam and the others in the shelter because the traffickers were asking their parents to give the boys back, and promising large amounts of money.
Ali said hundreds of Bangladeshi boys were believed to be working as jockeys in the UAE and other Gulf states, many of them after being sold for as little as $75.
"There may be hundreds out there. The boys were abducted by traffickers or their parents handed them over for money," Ali said. "They are mostly victims of abject poverty at home."
The smugglers brought some of the boys back to Bangladesh after the BNWLA and other human rights groups filed court cases against them, Ali said.
Others were sent home after they grew too big to race camels.
Boys were sometimes handed back to their parents but sometimes they were just dumped on the streets.
Many of them speak better Arabic than Bangla, or Bengali as the language is also known, and they can take years to learn to speak it again and rejoin their families and society.
"We not only restore the ex-jockeys to their families but also try to educate and train them up for better employment," Ali said.
"Reintegration poses some mental problems for the boys, but in the course of time they cope with the situation."
STRANGERS HEADING HOME
Nearly 1,700 Bangladeshi children trafficked to the UAE were repatriated during the 1990s, according to the Dhaka-based Center for Women and Children.
Now, many more might soon be returning as young strangers to their homeland because of new rules banning boy jockeys in the UAE, the International Organization for Migration said recently. The UAE has imposed a ban on children under 15 and weighing less than 99 pounds becoming camel jockeys, starting with the new season in October, the migration agency said.
Owners of camel-racing stables will have to bear the cost of sending home jockeys under 15.
"We hope the UAE will be going to enforce it to lift their image," the agency's regional representative in Dhaka, Shahidul Haque, told Reuters.
Slave-owning Religion-of-Peace BUMP.
Are they sure his name isn't Annikin?
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