/* Written 8:42 PM Apr 21, 1996 by DEBRA@OLN.comlink.apc.org in igc:hrnet.asia-pac */
/* ---------- "PAK: Families Enslaved..." ---------- */
[This article has been excerpted.]

Families Enslaved by a life of casual brutality

Suzanne Goldenberg, in the Guardian,
18 March, 1996

Suzanne Goldenberg in Matli, Sind province, reports on the rehabilitation of Pakistanis freed from bonded labor

Like his grandfather and father before him, Rupo Koli was born a slave, and all his days were the same: long, hard hours in sugar cane fields, with a...rope hissing through the air towards his shoulders when he faltered under the burning sun.

Life was bearable until four years ago when Rupo, his wife and eight children were sold for 50,000 rupees (1,000 BPS) to Ali Baksh Leghari of Batin district, a landlord whose cruelty still makes them shiver with fear.

They wore leg-irons in the field and were made to squat at wooden posts before they were chained for the night. They were beaten when the landlord was drunk or had guests to entertain, and were paid only in flour, in such miserly qualities that for several days every month they ate grass.

"If we...took an onion from the field, the landlord used to beat us," Rupo said. Otherwise, they survived by gulping down a paste of uncooked flour and water and the occasional chilli; the landlord wouldn't spare the cooking fuel.

Forty-eight hours after human rights activists and police led Rupo out of bondage, the bazaar in this...town remains a source of wonder for him. Rupo has walked into town three times this afternoon...

Neither Rupo, ...about 40, nor his father can remember the original debt that reduced the family from free men to bonded laborers, but after years of back-breaking and unpaid labor on sugar cane plantations it had unaccountably grown to 118,000 rupees (2,360 BPS).

Although his story is horrifying, Rupo recounts it as if it were completely normal - and in this part of Pakistan it is. ...in the southern province of Sind, feudal landlords rule as they have always done: with casual brutality.

Bonded labor was outlawed only in 1992. Shakeel Ahmed Pathan, the Sind representative of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, argues...officials are reluctant to enforce the law, partly because they are themselves from landed families, and partly for fear of offending the most powerful people in the land.

Many of Pakistan's leading politicians are landlords, including the prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and demands for argicultural reform in the past have met with fierce resistance.

Sind's agricultural wealth depends on bonded labor, mostly tribal (meaning indigenous) or so-called untouchable Hindus, called haris, for labor-intensive and highly profitable cash crops like sugar cane which are replacing traditional agriculture.

For the haris living on vast banana or sugar estates, the landlords are akin to God: quick to anger, slow to forgive, and unanswerable to no one. They rule unencumbered by such modern niceties as land reform, taxation, trade unions or rights legislation.

"All landlords think...haris are their property," Mr. Pathan said.

So much so...landlord Ibrahim Mangrio did not worry about witnesses when he grabbed Meran Devi by the hair and dragged her into a field. "He would rape me in front of my mother, he would rape me in front of the entire world," Meran said.

Hanif, the...eight-year-old burrowed into her side, is...living proof of her shame. She said his father's only concern for his future was that Hanif bear a Muslim name.

The original debts often forgotten, unscrupulous landlords take advantage of the haris' illiteracy to ensure they can never be free. ... The haris spend their lives on the estates in conditions the Human Rights Commission describes as private jails.

There was no question of escape, said Meran's mother, Jhema Devi. The estate was patrolled by armed guards. "We died there; we were born and married there. We didn't leave his land for 22 years."

...with the intervention of human rights activists who bombard officials with complaints about bonded labor or sometimes raid estates to liberate haris, about 1,000 peasants have been freed.

For their pains, Mr. Pathan said, the activists have been beaten and threatened with reprisals; several landlords have turned up at his office in Hyderabad demanding...he pay for the haris he has taken away. Despite an encampment of freed haris a mile from the Matli police station, the local police chief denies all knowledge of bonded labor in his district.

The rude shelters...where Rupo and Jhema Devi live with 400 to 500 other recently freed haris are the local equivalent of the "underground railway" in the southern US states before the civil war.

The haris remain desperately poor. Most have only one set of clothes and afew battered kitchen utensils. But they are beginning to find work as paid farm laborers, taking home 80 rupees a day. As the fear of being recaptured by their landlords lessens, the haris chart their own physical transformation. They stand straighter...

"Now I am becoming less...black," Jhema Devi said. She had never been able to wash properly before.

The haris have a temporary protector in the local church, but the Irish priest in Matli...describes their freedom as tenuous. The haris are too unused to independence to know how to avoid falling into debt. Some of them have become trapped again.

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