No documents. No visa. But parents, brothers and sisters are in Bangladesh," says Reema.
She was barely 14, ten years ago, when she was lured away by her aunt from her family village near Dhaka. Since then, Reema has been sold so many times, married so many times that she has lost count. She does not even remember the name of her village anymore, only that her fathers name was Abdul. "After reaching Dhaka, my aunt told me to be prepared to go to Karachi, a big city with big cars, money and no hunger," she recalls.
This year´s unprecedented floods in Bangladesh brought misery and destitution to millions of families. But for the dalals, middlemen who smuggle women from Bangladesh to Pakistan, there is good business in floods. Far from the Padma-Jamuna delta, in a Karachi which received below-average rainfall this year, the pimps are rejoicing. "Let the flood waters in Bangladesh subside a little. New batches of girls will be here," says Rahim, a procurer of girls in Ali Akber Shah village, a Bengali slum near Karachi´s coast. For sure there will be more girls like Reema in the slums of Karachi next year.
Dalals like Rahim are at the end of a chain of human smuggling which still links the two separated parts of what was once Pakistan. Every year, thousands of Bengalis and even Burmese Arakanese girls (the Muslim Rohingya) are trafficked from Bangladesh, across the expanse of India, through the Thar desert into Sindh in Pakistan. Many are children when they arrive. They are forced into prostitution, sold or auctioned for marriages, or ´employed´ as bonded labour. All this happens with the connivance of police and border security forces in all three countries.