Pakistan ranks number three in the world with the highest prevalence of child and forced labor. To top it all, authorities failed to conduct any fresh child labor survey since 1996 making it difficult to ascertain the correct details of children working in different sectors around the country.
Today, Pakistan experiences the worst form of child labor as the future of this nation is stuck in bonded labor due to poverty and social instabilities. The poor population continues with the practice of selling their children into labor slavery, children as little as four and five experience traumatic forms of violence while being slaved into harsh labor conditions.
In 1992, Pakistan made international headlines on child slavery in carpet industry as a local Angel rose to the marks by escaping his master. Who can forget little Iqbal Masih - the spirited one. Born in abject poverty to a religious minority’s family, Iqbal Masih was sold into bondage by his own parents to pay off a debt.
Like the thousands of other children sold by their own families, Iqbal’s life changed over night. A daily nightmare resulted into severe malnutrition and stunted were testaments of the years he spent into cramped immobility in front of a loom.Iqbal knew that his parents couldn’t help him so it was left upon him to do something, so in 1992 he and some of his other slaved colleagues escaped the carpet factory.
Soon there was no stopping; Iqbal Masih became our national hero. He went on giving public speeches against child servitude and criticized the on going human rights violations. He had the willingness and courage to take on a subject that even elders shied away from. Through his activism he was able to help several hundreds of other illegally bonded children from the clutches of cruel and inhumane masters.
Iqbal Masih’s testimonies inside Pakistan and internationally could help highlight the plight of religious minorities within our society. More over, it exposed the double standards of our society that finds its normal that religious minorities’ children are working as child slaves across commercial industries and in homes of educated families.
Unfortunately, this young activist left us too soon, when an unknown assailant’s bullet ended his life. Though that bullet ended the life of Iqbal Masih, he left behind a legacy that continues. In his short life, Iqbal became a global icon with many supporters that joined the cause of freeing slave children across the world.
Interestingly, Iqbal wanted to live in his own country where he continued raising his voice against bonded children in labor industry and believed his mission was more important than his life. He lived and died while believing in his principles.
When talking with international media, Iqbal Masih would time and again raise the minority rights issues and expose how many more under privileged boys like him were suffering at the hands of capital mafia. His convincing experiences and bold words showed the debatable parallels existing in our societal intolerance and discrimination based on religion, ethnicity and language.
Today the problem of bonded child labor has doubled in South Asia particularly Pakistan and India. Millions of children continue working in carpet factories, mud bricks, jewelry and other industries – all suffering similar horrible conditions as Iqbal experienced.
The fact that Iqbal was sold for less then seven dollars by his own parents is truly tragic. The fact being sold robbed him of his childhood and turned him into a child slave worker, forcing adulthood is more tragic. The most tragic is that it was his parents who forced Iqbal Masih to lose his freedom, his youth and his health.
No child on earth deserves such a fatal end as Iqbal and countless unknown Iqbals, therefore his death should have a deeper meaning for Pakistan. His experience cannot be explained into black and white as poverty and economic hardship only as it is our continuous disregard for child rights and bonded labor patterns that put children at grave risks.
In his death, Pakistan’s Iqbal Masih continues to inspire people across the world; recently he was mentioned by Nobel Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi is his award speech at Oslo, where Satyarthi dedicated his win to Iqbal Masih and other martyrs of the child rights cause.
And at the heart of the matter is the mind boggling reality that Pakistan needs to step up effective programming for eradication of poverty and provide its desperately starved populations better economic choices in coming time. As only parents in abject poverty put their children to work rather then sending them to schools.