Published Sunday, August 29, 1999
Dexter Filkins / Los Angeles Times
DUMBALO, PAKISTAN -- After centuries of living like slaves, the serfs of southern Pakistan are finally rising up.
Thousands of people locked by debt and chains to the country's biggest landlords are setting themselves free and demanding better lives. Laborers who for generations have been swapped and sold like animals are fleeing plantations, marching in the streets and attacking their owners with rocks and sticks. They are challenging one of world's largest remaining bastions of feudal serfdom, where the richest landlords include some of the country's most powerful politicians.
"I was chained to a rock, so I picked it up and put it on my shoulder and ran away," said Chetan Bheel, a laborer who escaped from a planation near Dumbalo. "I had to get out of that place."
The revolt of the serfs has sparked a backlash by the landlords, who are moving to crush the rebellion before it gets out of hand. After about 7,500 bonded laborers fled their farms or were freed by authorities, enforcement of a law abolishing bonded labor has all but ceased -- allegedly under pressure from the big landlords.
Armed men are entering colonies of freed serfs and dragging runaways back to the plantations. Bonded laborers suspected of contemplating escape are being chained, raped, tortured and killed.
"I bought that man. I paid the money and I have a proper receipt," plantation owner Ayaz Virk said of Bheel, the laborer who ran away. "I could have sold him to someone else."
'Landlords cannot win'
The clash between the serfs -- estimated to number as many as 50,000 -- and the landlords is radiating throughout impoverished Pakistan, where politics and economics have long been dominated by a handful of land barons. Some economists and human-rights workers say that the conflict could prove to be a turning point in Pakistan's evolution toward a more modern society.
Now that the bonded laborers have seen the first signs of liberty, they say, the landlords will not be able to hold them down.
"The landlords cannot win," said Akmal Hussain, a Pakistani economist and social worker. "The peasants are ready for change, and nothing that the landlords can do will stop them."
In Pakistan, the revolt against serfdom is unfolding in the southern half of Sindh, an arid province whose agricultural bounties flow from the canals that snake to the Indus River. Fields of wheat stretch for miles and miles, dotted by the grass shacks and mud huts that house the laborers who work the land.
Historically, farming in Sindh has been sustained by sharecropping, an antiquated system in which laborers receive little or no wages but split the harvest with the landlord. Most of the laborers are Hindus -- a minority in Pakistan.
According to lawyers and human-rights workers, the landlords of Sindh have long exploited their workers by lending them money and holding them prisoner until the loans are repaid. High interest rates ensure that the peasants rarely pay off their debts. Peasants move from one plantation to the next as their loans are sold from one landlord to another.
Some of Sindh's landlords employ more extreme methods to ensure that their debt-ridden workers don't slip away: They lock them up.
Under the prodding of human-rights workers, police in 1995 raided a plantation in southern Sindh and freed 67 laborers who were tied up and chained together. Of the estimated 7,500 bonded laborers who have escaped or been released since then, human-rights workers say, they have found several hundred tied up or in chains.
"Here, the landlords are the kings," said Aftab Ahmed of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent group that helps bonded workers.
'Always afraid'
Raju Bheel, 25, said he and his family were chained night and day for years while working on a plantation until police liberated them six months ago.
"We were never paid anything," Bheel said of the seven years he spent on the plantation. "Only flour and chilies."
Now, Bheel lives in a colony of runaway serfs. He has the leathery palms of a laborer and the crazy eyes of a man on the run.
"We are always afraid of being recaptured," he said.
The man who owns the farm where Bheel worked is Arbab Ghulam Rahim, a member of Pakistan's National Assembly. Rahim acknowledged that Bheel once worked for him but dismissed his claims of mistreatment.
"It's a big lie," Rahim said in his parliamentary residence in Islamabad. "There is a conspiracy against the agricultural class."
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved.
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