Criminals dedicated to trafficking in women were identified nearly four years ago in China and Pakistan. The episode made quite a splash in the Asian media at the time. But since December 2019 there is no more talk about it.
The topic was recently unearthed in the United States by the Brookings Institution, a renowned Washington-based think tank. One of its researchers, Madiha Afzal, got help from the State Department and the Institute for War and Peace for an investigation into the scandalous disappearance of a subject that bothered many people. The study is available on the internet in Spanish.
It is unclear how many victims were claimed by this organized crime group. A Pakistani police survey cites 629 adult women and teenagers, but that figure, released some time ago by the Associated Press, is certainly underreported.
There are basically two types of victims. On the one hand, obviously prostitution. Pakistani families of modest means accept a dowry of up to US$5,000 for their daughters to “marry” Chinese people, who then cross the border and deliver them to prostitutes’ houses.
The second type of bride is intended for true marriages, for a reason that is easy to understand. From 1980 to 2016, the policy of one child per couple was in effect in China, a draconian and stupid way to contain the population explosion.
In this long period, families preferred to have men over women, and for that they resorted to abortion and, exceptionally, to infanticide. The result is that China today has 36 million men for whom, when looking for a bride, there are no women available. The solution is, then, to import them.
Pakistan is not the only country that provides them. They also come from Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam and Myanmar, according to human rights NGOs. The traffickers, disguised as marriage agents, turn to the small minority of Pakistani Christians. Muslim women are much more work, because they require at least a simulacrum of the bridegroom’s conversion to Islam.
But let’s look at the reasons why the network of drug traffickers was not dismantled. One of the reasons, says researcher Madiha Afzal, lies in the possible overzealousness of the Pakistani authorities in discreetly treating the image of its female population. That image would be marred by ongoing scandals over the sale of brides or prostitutes.
A second reason is much more resonant and refers to the US$ 62 billion (R$ 320 billion) of a trade corridor that passes through Pakistan before ending up in China. The two countries lovingly preserve their relations, which would be scorched in the event of a sex scandal.
It is true that the Chinese embassy in Islamabad denounced the criminal dimension of a first episode that reeked of prostitution. That’s when a TV station in Lahore, a city of 11 million, reported that a group of “brides” were preparing to leave the country in the company of alleged Chinese peers.
In the following weeks the broth numerically thickened. Pakistani police arrested 52 traffickers and took them to court. But then, for mysterious reasons, the local authorities ordered the release of everyone and even recommended to the media not to make any more fuss about the matter.
What is assumed is that the dollars in the trade corridor between China and Pakistan spoke louder. The next topic — we are in 2019 — discussed in Beijing by the Pakistani military.
And notice that the relations between the two countries are not at all symmetrical. The Chinese have much greater economic weight and can discreetly tone their policy in favor of young wives or prostitutes.
This lack of symmetry is also reflected in Pakistan’s suspicious silence regarding China’s persecution of its Muslim ethnic minority. Remember a little about the history of decolonization in Asia. Pakistan separated from India because it only accepted to survive as an independent country, if officially linked to Islam.
One last detail. China and Pakistan appear very poorly in the photo of the State Department’s latest report (2021) on human trafficking. The Chinese get a three, the worst available, and the Pakistanis, a two. They have a dirty hand in the trade in human beings across the common border.
This picture has only one mitigating circumstance. If the importation occurs for purely marital reasons, Pakistani culture allows the bride’s family to receive a dowry that compensates for the lack that the young bride will make as domestic labor.
