Pakistani girl snatched away as payment for family debt

MIRPUR KHAS, Pakistan -- The girl called Jeevti was 14 when she taken from her family in the night to be married off to a man who says her family owed him $1,000.

Her mother, Ameri Kashi Kohli, is sure her daughter paid the price for a never-ending debt.

Ameri said she and her husband borrowed about $500 when they first began to work on the land, but she throws up her hands and says the debt was repaid.

It's a familiar story here in southern Pakistan: Small loans balloon into impossible debts, bills multiply, payments never are deducted.

In this world, women such as Ameri and her young daughter are treated as property: taken as payment for a debt, to settle disputes or as revenge if a landowner wants to punish his worker.

Sometimes parents, burdened by an unforgiving debt, even offer their daughters as payment.

The women are like trophies to the men. They choose the prettiest, the young and pliable. Sometimes they take them as second wives to look after their homes. Sometimes they use them as prostitutes to earn money. Sometimes they take them because they can.

"I went to the police and to the court. But no one is listening to us," said Ameri, who is Hindu.

She said the land manager made her daughter convert to Islam and took the girl as his second wife.

"They told us, 'Your daughter has committed to Islam and you can't get her back."'

More than 2 million Pakistanis live as "modern slaves," according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, which ranks Pakistan in the top three offending countries that enslave people, some as farm workers, others at brick kilns or as household staff. Sometimes the workers are beaten or chained to keep them from fleeing.

"They have no rights, and their women and girls are the most vulnerable," said Ghulam Hayder, whose Green Rural Development Organization works to free Pakistan's bonded laborers.

An estimated 1,000 young Christian and Hindu girls, many underage and impoverished, are taken from their homes each year, converted to Islam and married, stated a report by the South Asia Partnership organization.

Hayder said, "They always take the pretty ones."

The night Jeevti disappeared, the family had slept outside, the only way to endure the summer heat in southern Sindh province. In the morning, she was gone. No one heard anything, her mother said.

The family turned to activist Veero Kohli to help free the girl.

Kohli, who isn't related to the family, was born a slave. Since fleeing bondage in 1999, she has devoted herself to challenging Pakistan's powerful landowners, liberating thousands of families from bonded labor.

Kohli's defiance incenses many men in a country dominated by a centuries-old patriarchal culture.

"I know that they would like to kill me, but I will never stop fighting to free these people," she said.

Five months ago, she went with Ameri to the Piyaro Lundh police station to find her daughter. They said the girl went willingly, Kohli said.

"I told them: 'Let me talk to her. Let her mother talk to her if she went freely.'"

They refused.

Instead, they called in the man who Ameri said had taken her daughter. Hamid Brohi came alone, without the girl. "He said, 'Anyway, she is payment for 100,000 rupees ($1,000) they owe me,"' Kohli recalled.

Kohli returned to the same police station, where police officer Aqueel Ahmed thumbed through a dozen files, barely containing his anger at the activist.

Finally, he pulled out an affidavit. In it, the girl, who now goes by the name Fatima, said she had converted freely and married Brohi of her free will. She also said she couldn't meet her mother because she was Muslim and her family was Hindu.

Hindu activists say the girls are kept isolated until they have been forced to convert and are married --and then it's almost too late to do anything.

Under pressure, police in a machine-gun-mounted jeep took Kohli and a foreign reporter to visit the girl. Her mother didn't come, too afraid, she said, to confront the police in person again.

Brohi, a sullen-looking man with a thin mustache, greeted the police with an embrace. He angrily denied he took Jeevti as payment for the family's debt, despite his earlier boast to the activist he had done just that.

Inside, Jeevti sat on a double mattress on the floor, her head wrapped in a black shawl. She wore heavy eyeshadow and exaggerated bright red lipstick, like a child who had put on her mother's makeup -- or one who was trying to look older.

Although she didn't seem afraid, her eyes darted to the door where her husband hovered. When she spoke, her words seemed rehearsed.

"I married him because I wanted to," she said. "I myself asked him that as we are lovers, we should get married. So he said, 'Let's get married,' and I said yes."

She denied she hasn't seen her mother since leaving. But she wouldn't say when she saw her mother last or even where she lives, now that the family has fled its old home. She remained quiet when asked why her court affidavit stated she refused to talk to her mother because she had converted to Islam.

She said she doesn't know what is in the court documents, although each one the police showed said Jeevti had spoken the words herself.

The next day, the visitors returned -- without a police escort.

Inside the compound, there were only women, and no one knew Fatima. The door to the room where she sat the day before was padlocked. It was as if the compound was but a stage set for a young girl's performance.