Where are they now?

Panna Akter remembers only one date of her life.

She can't recall the date of her birth or marriage, and she isn't sure on which dates her two sons aged around five and six were born.

“These dates are written in a diary,” she says, and springs from her seat to bring it.

It's not unusual that she doesn't remember any of these dates. It's common in a village setting where traditional Bangalee culture yet runs strong, and not many people mark these occasions. But more than that, the social and financial realities she was born and raised in, life is a burden rather than a celebration.

There is, however, one date that Panna, 30, can't forget: June 4, 2013. It's the day she “lost” her husband Monir Hawlader to people smugglers.

“I can't forget this date,” she says despondently. “I can hardly think of anything else. Since then I've been counting days…”

It's been three difficult years since then for Panna, who grew up in Phote Jonghapur of Shariatpur's Naria upazila. First she waited for his call with news that he has reached Malaysia, where the local broker, Mobarak Khan, promised to send him.

Days became weeks and then months, but the call never came. Every time she went to the broker, she got conflicting information. Then one day, he said Monir died in a shipwreck.

In all probability, he lied; just as he lied about the “highly paid job” in Malaysia.

According to a list prepared by the Special Branch (SB) of police in October last year, Monir and at least six other Bangladeshi trafficking victims are in various prisons in Myanmar. Two of these six are from Monir's village, three from Cox's Bazar and one from Nababganj in Dhaka.

Like Panna, families of these victims first waited for the news from their loved ones. When no news came, they came to fear the worst without actually knowing their fate.

THE LIST

On October 15 last year, the SB prepared a 48-name list (ref no. 2821) of Bangladeshi citizens languishing in Myanmar's prisons.

The list referred to a 22-digit home ministry reference number that ends with 12/2824, dated October 4 the same year.

The Daily Star has spoken with the families of 36 listed victims during the past three months. Of them, 29 confirmed that their loved ones returned home, while seven, including Monir, did not.

Families of the remaining 12 victims could not be contacted since the phone numbers on the list are wrong, invalid (10 or 12-digit numbers rather than the standard 11 digits) or switched off.

The photos and details of the seven victims who this newspaper can confirm are yet to return were emailed to the Bangladesh embassy in Myanmar and also to the Myanmar embassy in Dhaka, requesting information about their whereabouts.

Both the missions said none of these seven matches their existing list of Bangladeshi prisoners in Myanmar. 

From right, mothers of three trafficking victims -- Monir, Rubel and Harun -- and Harun's wife and two children. One of the two kids holds a group photo that has their father in it. The photos were taken in June. Photo: Amran Hossain

“Nonetheless, if the embassy could trace their whereabouts anytime in future, it would take necessary measures,” said Md Reyad Hossain, the first secretary (labour) of the Bangladesh mission in Myanmar.

Currently, there are 57 “verified and unverified” Bangladeshis in Myanmar prisons, most of them facing charges of illegal entry or serving jail terms, he added. The Myanmar embassy in Dhaka put the number at 58 -- 56 male prisoners, one female prisoner and one detainee.

The International Organisation for Migration, which facilitated the repatriation of some of the 29 victims named on the same list, has no information about the seven either. It said it would take up the matter with the relevant authorities.

But that's no consolation for any of the victims' families. All these months and years, they didn't even know that the names of their loved ones were on the SB list. Now that they know, they want their people back.   

'MUTTON AND FOOTBALL MATCH'

At the time he was duped, Monir was struggling to earn a living in his Chitu Matbar Kandi village on the bank of the Kirtinasha river, which cuts through Naria upazila and separates his village from Panna's. 

He'd tried selling cattle feed and running a tea stall, but income was forever scant, especially with the additional responsibility of supporting his aging parents. With the arrival of their second son in 2011 the financial situation became yet more precarious.

It was then that Mobarak Khan approached Monir with an offer of good employment in Malaysia.

As a manpower broker, Mobarak has vast experience. He and his younger brother Ziaur Rahman, who is in Malaysia, have been doing this for years. He can easily spot his victims and knows how best to exploit them. Like Monir, two other youths -- Rubel and Harun -- from the village were struggling to make ends meet.

“You will need no papers, no advance payments,” Mobarak told them. They would only have to pay after reaching Malaysia. It's a common ruse.

The three hesitated. They'd heard of the dangers of the sea journey on wooden boats.

“This is no ordinary ship. It's one of those ships where they serve mutton for lunch and you can play football on deck. It's that big! They will treat you like a bridegroom!” Mobarak told them, according to family members and neighbours with whom the three men shared the conversation.

The bait worked. They must have heard of such ships; now excited about the prospect of seeing one and riding one, they took the gamble.

“They took my son with a false promise and then made him disappear,” says Halima Begum, 45, as tears rolled down her cheeks. She's the mother of Rubel, who was only 15 years old when trafficked on the same day as Monir.

'BEAT US LIKE ANIMAL'

No doubt that was a false promise.

Although the details of Monir's experience are unavailable, those who have returned from Myanmarese prisons and travelled around the same time, though not together, speak of deception, hunger and torture.

Ramjan Sheikh, 19, from Jhenidah's Shoilakupa who has since returned to work as a mason's helper, is one. He, along with three others from his area, left from Teknaf, a major trafficking port. A total of 18 men were put in a flimsy dinghy in the dead of night.

Further out to sea a medium-sized vessel waited. There were about 300 people aboard, he says, including women and children aged as young as two.

They weren't taken anywhere near Malaysia.

Rather, the gang confined them for over a month near Myanmar's border with Thailand. There, the boatman named Monnaf Majhi sold 118 of the fortune-seekers to another boatman called Sukur Majhi, for between Tk 10,000 and 30,000 each. 

The four from Shoilakupa were among those sold. When they protested, demanding to be sent home, Sukkur Majhi's men beat them until they bled, before holding guns to their chests and threatening to shoot. They begged for their lives.

“They beat us as though we were animals,” recalls Sohel, another of the Shoilakupa survivors. “There aren't words to describe it.”

He still takes painkillers as a result of his treatment at the hands of the traffickers.

The vessel continued to float around for about another month, looking for an opportunity to anchor. Then on one night, they were disembarked near a hill on the Myanmar border.

It was time for torture, recalls Ramjan. There was almost no food and water during the 30-40 days they were held in the jungle. They often ate wild fruits or tender parts of bamboos and other trees, which they boiled.

As anticipated, the ransom demands began. Victims' families were called with demands for sums ranging between Tk 1.5 lakh and 2 lakh each for their relative's release.

Mobarak, the broker in Shariatpur, took Tk 4.8 lakh from the families of Monir, Rubel and Harun, saying they were taken hostage by a gang and that he needed the money for their release.

However, he later returned the money in the face of pressure from villagers, after he himself spread the news of their deaths. Facing a case for trafficking he now hides in Dhaka. His wife, who still lives in the village, refused to give his phone number.

Back in the Myanmar hills, law enforcers raided the camp one day, catching 45 people, while others fled.

After their capture, they were beaten with sticks and rubber belts, and taken to a prison camp so close to Bangladesh that they could hear the call to prayer, said Sohel. 

From there, the four Jhenidah victims along with several others finally came home with assistance from the government and the IOM.

THE TRAFFICKING TRADE

Their plight is only a glimpse of how irregular labour migrants and their families suffer with hardly anyone to care for them.

Lured by the hope of escaping poverty, thousands of jobseekers become victims of irregular maritime migration syndicates every year. While some make it to their desired destinations, others perish at sea or die of torture and hunger in jungle camps en route.

Only in May last year, the Thai authorities discovered several mass graves in Sadao district of Songkhla province, with 26 bodies believed to be those of trafficking victims from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

NGOs and returnees say several transnational smuggling gangs are spread over Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia and these syndicates routinely hold people hostage in the bordering areas of Myanmar and Thailand for ransom.

According to the UN, about 53,000 people from Bangladesh and Myanmar travelled by sea to Thailand and Malaysia in 2014, in a trade Brac estimates was then worth $100 million per annum.

But some would-be migrants, like Monir, don't make it as far as mainland Thailand or Malaysia. They're captured instead by Myanmar's authorities and wind up incarcerated.

THE ENDLESS WAIT

It is because of such ordeals of irregular labour migrants and their families as well as the failure of the government to check it that Bangladesh fares poorly in terms of migration governance in the Migration Governance Index 2016, prepared by the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit.

The three areas where the country lags are: institutional capacity for regular migration, migrants' rights and safe and orderly migration.

Yet migrant workers remain the main engine of Bangladesh's economy despite slow growths in countries where they toil to send money home.

Between 1976 and 2015, more than 10 million Bangladeshis have migrated to 159 countries in search of better opportunities -- over 81 percent of them labour migrants, according to the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training.

In Fiscal Year 2014-2015, they sent home $15.31 billion in remittance,   which is equivalent to nearly 14 percent of the total GDP (Bangladesh Bank Report 2015).

Despite their immense contribution, the labour migration process is riddled with legal and structural constraints, according to a recent study -- Irregular Labour Migration from Bangladesh: Crises and Ways Forward -- by Manusher Jonno Foundation.

Irregular labour migration is the outcome of governance failure of both the sending and the receiving countries. More specifically, either the government is unable to tackle irregular migration because of institutional inefficiencies or is unwilling to do so for political-economic concerns, analysis shows. 

Ultimately, these setbacks lead to migration through illegal channels, forcing thousands to face the sea.

Because of their irregular status, these migrants get little or no legal protection at destination countries, and their stories are seldom told.

Like the stories of these seven and possibly thousands more as well as their relatives back home who wait for their fathers and sons and brothers and husbands.

Panna still counts her days. June 4, June 5, June 6…. Sometimes she feels she's been doing this for a lifetime. And with each day that passes, she is one day farther away from the day she said goodbye to Monir.