Afghanistan: People are openly selling children under compulsion – Blog

KABUL: NOV. 11 – As we left the city of Herat, we found a long and empty highway followed by congested streets. The two Taliban posts we crossed were telling us who was ruling Afghanistan now.

The fighters who met at the first post were friendly. But they thoroughly checked our cars and the permits they got from the Ministry of Culture there.

As we started leaving, a man with an assault rifle hanging from his shoulder said with a wide smile, “Don’t be afraid of the Taliban. We are good people.”

The guards at the second post, however, were a little different: cold and a little dangerous.

You never know what kind of Taliban you will meet. Some of his fighters brutally beat up Afghan journalists for covering the protests. And a recent online video showed him hitting a foreign photographer with the butt of his gun.

Thankfully, we got rid of the checkpoint quickly, but with a statement that sounded like a warning to us. He had said, “It will be decided that good things should be written about us.”

The cost of a child is 65 thousand

About 15 kilometers from Herat, we reached a large settlement of one-room houses made of brown, mud and brick. Displaced by years of fighting and drought, many people moved out of their homes from far and wide to find work and security in the nearby city.

As soon as we got out of our car, dust started flying. There was a prick in the air, which in a few weeks would turn into a cold.

We went there to investigate whether people are really selling their children because of their poverty. When I first heard about it, I thought to myself: Surely there will be only a few such cases. But I was completely unprepared for what we found.

Shortly after we reached there, a person directly asked a member of our team if we would buy any of his children. He was asking for $ 900 (about 65 thousand Indian rupees) in return. On this, my colleague asked him why he wanted to sell his child. So the person said that he has 8 more children, but he does not have food to feed them.

Compulsion to raise food by selling children

We were only able to move forward when a woman came to us with a baby girl. She was talking fast and nervous. Our translator told that she is saying that she has already sold the one and a half-year-old adopted child due to dire need of money.

Before we could ask him anything else, a young man from the crowd that had gathered around us told us that his 13-month-old niece had already been sold. He told that a person from a tribe of Ghor province came from a long distance and bought it. The buyer told her family that when she grew up, she would marry her to his son.

No one can say for sure about the future of these children.

In one house, we saw a 6-month-old baby girl sleeping in her cradle. It is learned that when she starts walking, her buyer will take her. His parents have three more children – little boys with green eyes.

Their entire family has to spend many days hungry without food. The father of this girl was making a living by collecting garbage.

He told us, “Now most days I can’t earn anything. When there is an income, we buy six or seven bread. and divide it among themselves. My wife does not agree with my decision to sell the daughter. So upset, but I am helpless. There is no other way to live.

I will never forget his wife’s eyes. There was anger and helplessness in him. The money they are going to get from selling the child will help them survive. This will provide food for the children, but only for a few months.

As soon as we started leaving there, another woman came to us. Pointing to the money, she was clearly ready to hand over her children there.

‘We didn’t even expect such a situation

We did not even expect that so many families here would be forced to sell their children. Leave it alone to talk openly about this.

We contacted UNICEF, a United Nations children’s organization, to provide us with the information we had. They told us that they would try to reach out to such families and help them.

The economy of Afghanistan has been run by foreign funds. Those sources of funding were blocked when the Taliban took power in August. This means that all kinds of government expenditure, whether it is the salary of government employees or the development work of the government, all came to a halt.

This created a catastrophic situation for the people at the bottom of the economy, who were barely able to survive even before August.

It is dangerous to give money to the Taliban without guarantees to protect human rights and without investigating how the money is spent. But with no solution to the problem, as every day is passing, the Afghan people are forced to go towards starvation.

It is clear from what we saw in Herat that millions of people in Afghanistan would not be able to spend this winter season without outside help.

-BBC Hindi