The Girl From Kathmandu

by Cam Simpson

  The meaning of loss, not just the loss of life but also the loss of a loved one’s remains, is acknowledged through the reconstruction of his body from the stalks of the sacred grass. Three hundred sixty stalks are to be used, a figure believed by the ancients to be the number of bones in the human body as well as the number of days in one of their calendar years. Specific prayers are recited at each stage, beginning with the same prayer that is uttered when a child is born. There is even a mantra for placing the heart of the man who is lost into the effigy.12 There were no priests on the horseshoe ridge, so Ganga did his best to adhere to the rituals as he had learned them from the old men. He prayed aloud and spoke to the effigy as he crafted it, as if speaking to his brother. The effigy was about the size of a newborn. As a child, Ganga had held his baby brother the same way after his birth. “Even though you suffered a terrible death, I hope you will find a place in heaven, and that the afterlife is more beautiful,” he said as he bound the head and arms to the body with twine.

  About two hours before sunset on the ninth day after Jeet’s death, Ganga and almost every man in the village gathered at the farmhouse. Kamala, bearing a set of Jeet’s clothes and a pair of his shoes, backed down the ladder from the room she had shared with her husband. She handed the clothes to the men and then hid herself away, unable to bear the thought of what was to come. The men placed the effigy on a small bier fashioned from bamboo poles. Ganga held the bier from the front, like a pallbearer, and a cousin took up the rear. They led the other men in a procession over the footpath and down the western side of the ledge behind the horseshoe, trekking for about an hour, until they reached the Sauney River in the valley below. There they gathered wood and made a pyre on the river’s edge. Dousing the wood with kerosene, Ganga placed Jeet’s clothes and effigy on top.

  Stalks of dried khus blacken and bend above a fire, but they do not wisp up into the wind as embers or ashes, especially when densely twisted together. Some varieties of the grass are even made into perfume, and the sweetness of the white smoke’s smell is soft but discernible in the air. The men watched the fire. As the flames twisted in his eyes, Ganga prayed again for his lost brother, wondering if there could be freedom or justice for Jeet’s soul. The fire dimmed as darkness settled into the valley.

  Ganga removed his shirt and sat on the riverbank. Hindus believe hair is an adornment and a symbol of vanity and that one must be free of vanity to grieve for a departed soul, so one of the men took a razor and shaved Ganga’s head clean by the water’s edge. Ganga rose and wrapped a white cloth around his waist, like a pauper Hindu priest. He left his chest bare and placed a white scarf on his head in the style of a bandanna. Such are the Nepalese symbols of mourning. The men began their trek back up the mountain and into the jungle darkness.

  In the bed she had shared with Jeet, Kamala tried not to think of the fire, but she couldn’t keep the image of its hungry flames out of her mind. She felt her love burning on the mountain river.

  Part II

  The Body Shops

  4

  March 2005

  Amman, Jordan

  Eyad Mansour eyed me warily from behind a large desk with a dark lacquer finish. Thick curtains drawn across the window behind him kept the fierce Middle Eastern sun from glancing off its polished surface. Mansour’s pendulous cheeks bristled with stubble, and the forearms exposed by his short-sleeved dress shirt suggested he had once earned a living somewhere other than behind a desk, perhaps swinging a pickax into something unyielding, or holding sway over a crowd. With nervous distraction, he hovered over two cell phones and two landlines, the handsets all lined up below his nose.

  I knew Mansour to be a small but critical player in two worlds I was reporting on, or, more accurately, two multibillion-dollar global industries. The two industries were opaque, in part because they had been constructed without any kind of architect overseeing a logical, easy-to-understand structure, so no single source of information held a key, and also because men with significant stakes intentionally obscured their true nature. One of these industries encompassed the side of globalization unfolding beyond the sight of the West, in the other half of the world: the “export” and “import” of cheap labor in the form of human beings. The other was the unprecedented profiteering from the privatization of warfare unfolding in Iraq. Eyad Mansour seemed to be at the intersection of these two worlds.

  On the other side of Mansour’s office curtains, Amman, long the plain sister in a region dazzled by Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad, basked in the daylight and danced into the night. In the two years since the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq, Amman had become an Arab capital on the make, a sort of Casablanca for the Iraq War, teeming with the wealthiest Iraqi refugees and awash in wartime cash from Washington. Its hotels, private housing, and commercial office stock overflowed with workers for aid organizations, contractors, and hustlers previously based in Baghdad. Many had relocated to avoid the carnage inflicted by the growing insurgency and a looming civil war. Amman also teemed with the displaced and dethroned ruling class of Saddam’s Iraq, members of the Baath Party, who had been frozen out of the new nation the Bush administration wanted to create.*

  Five-star hotels clad in white stone sprang up across Amman’s modest skyline as businessmen surged into luxury shops and new restaurants below. In nightclubs attached to the cheaper hotels, Russian women danced under lights shimmering through clouds of smoke from hookahs and Cuban cigars. New construction suddenly rose across the sleepy city at a rate of more than 10 percent a year. The boom also rippled a short drive away into the Jordan Valley, whose lush though rocky landscape had not changed much since followers of the Old Testament God ordained it a land of miracles. Now people there were getting rich growing tomatoes and milking cows. Farmers sold fruits, vegetables, and dairy products at soaring prices to help feed three squares a day to each of the more than 130,000 American soldiers stationed next door in Iraq, along with an almost equal number of civilian contractors. Foreign direct investment in Jordan jumped sixfold in the first year of the war and would increase fortyfold in only four years, becoming one of the largest sources of the country’s GDP.1 It wasn’t entirely clear where all the money was coming from, but Jordan obviously benefited from some of the estimated ninety cents in corruption skimmed out of each U.S. dollar being spent on rebuilding Iraq, even as the country continued to burn.

  I had flown to Amman to write about these changes as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and was planning to attend something called the Rebuild Iraq Expo. Owing to the spiraling violence, however, the exposition ended up having little to do with reconstruction and, instead, became more of a trade show for armored vehicle salesmen and companies peddling bulletproof and batter-resistant doors for homes. My remit was to write a feature story and try to use the expo to develop some contacts, but I took the opportunity to buy passage to Jordan, so I could find and speak with Eyad Mansour.

  The massacre of the twelve Nepalis seven months earlier had captured my attention as an investigative journalist. Maybe it was just a dark and obscure moment in this bigger global tragedy unfolding in Iraq, but aspects of the story suggested it might represent and mean much more. For months I had made little progress trying to dig into it from my desk in Washington, but then one day I had happened upon Mansour, who appeared as a disembodied quotation in the archives of the Associated Press International wire.

  An AP reporter in Jordan interviewed Eyad Mansour in the immediate aftermath of the executions and identified him as the head of a firm called Morning Star for Recruitment and Manpower Supply. Mansour had told the wire service that he had hired the twelve men “through the Nepal-based Moon Light Co. to work in factories in Jordan.”2 Factories? The story didn’t mention which ones or explain how the men had wound up in Iraq, or whom they were meant to be working for there. Nor was there any mention of Iraq in the paperwork filed with the government in Nepal, which showed that Mansour’s firm had supposedly arranged jobs for them at one
of Amman’s newest five-star hotels, Le Royal.

  Mansour made a brief appearance in another, earlier AP story, after the men were first kidnapped but before they were killed. He admitted that his firm had arranged to bring the twelve Nepalis to Amman, and he identified another company that was to be the men’s “immediate supervisor” in Iraq. It was called Bisharat,3 an Arabic word that means “good news” or “good tidings.” In fact, the kidnappers themselves, when they first announced the abductions on an extremist website, had said the men were working for Bisharat.4

  The AP story revealed nothing more about Bisharat except that a reporter could not reach anyone there for comment. Public record searches of Bisharat and Mansour’s firm revealed virtually nothing. Reporting out of Nepal was even thinner, especially given the almost total lack of Internet usage there. I couldn’t even find a comprehensive listing of the identities of the twelve men, including each of their names and home villages, something that would be critical to even asking the right questions.

  Seven months after the massacre, my desk reporting had left me with only two clues about anyone who might possibly have direct knowledge of how and why these twelve men had died for the United States of America: the names of two Jordanian companies and the name of one man, Eyad Mansour.

  Eyad (pronounced, EE-odd) was the son of a Filipino maid and a Jordanian father. He had built a successful business bringing foreign workers into Jordan from the Philippines, India, and beyond to work in factories, in hotel laundry rooms, and at construction sites, or to do housework for wealthy Jordanians. Mansour and his firm made up a tiny slice of the newly booming global trade that had lured Jeet and subsequent millions from the farm fields of Nepal and other poor countries to the Middle East and Southeast Asia for their labor. The business had just blossomed in Jordan thanks to some perverse consequences of the Arab-Israeli peace process and to the U.S. Congress.

  After Israel and Jordan officially ended their status as enemies in 1996, Congress provided an incentive to keep the peace: goods jointly produced by Israeli and Jordanian businesses could be imported into the United States duty free. Garment factory production bloomed across the Jordanian desert, churning out clothing for top-selling American brands such as Nike, Puma, and Hanes, with the program creating some forty thousand jobs by 2003. That’s where Eyad Mansour came in.5

  Factory owners set the hours so long and the pay so low that they had to import migrant workers from India, Sri Lanka, and other poor countries. Those workers accounted for almost half of all the jobs created, meaning that the U.S. program benefited factory owners far more than the multitudes of Jordanians who otherwise might have had a personal investment in peace.6 Dark realities for workers inside some of the garment factories were not yet widely known in 2005. That wasn’t the case for other, wealthier Middle Eastern nations, where endemic human rights abuses against the millions of foreign workers they were importing had been documented in a growing body of academic studies, investigations by human rights groups, special volumes published by bodies of the United Nations, and even official publications of the U.S. government.7 All agreed that this looked like human trafficking. Workers routinely were lured abroad after paying for jobs based on fraudulent contracts, discovering only upon arrival that their journeys had been launched on lies. “Recruitment agencies [in Nepal] are also known to cheat people by using fake demand letters from overseas employment agencies and duping the prospective workers,” wrote Ganesh Gurung, a Nepalese sociologist, Fulbright scholar, and head of a small migration-focused think tank in Kathmandu who wrote a chapter on Nepal in a report by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization.8

  Many endured conditions akin to slavery in a region where the most influential countries, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had not even outlawed the practice until the 1960s.9 Employers or labor brokers in the destination countries seized and held workers’ passports almost as a matter of course, eliminating their ability to leave or move about freely. Employers and brokers routinely refused to pay workers, or withheld wages for extended periods as a form of coercion. Some even refused to house or feed their migrants. Physical and sexual abuse was common, especially for women, who reported enduring rape as a routine matter of employment. Employers and brokers also used their nation’s corrupt criminal justice systems to jail migrant workers who refused to work under such conditions, who attempted to organize or flee, or who defended themselves against abuses. There were regular reports of foreign workers being executed following secret trials in which they had no legal representation.10

  The ILO expert in Bangladesh, a political science professor from Dhaka named Tasneem Siddiqui, pointed to another important change in the system that had further corrupted the transnational process, just as the new surge of migrant workers spread farther and wider. In the earliest days of migration to the Middle East, following the oil boom of the 1970s and stretching into the 1990s, employers and brokers in the “receiving” nations typically paid recruiting agencies in places such as Nepal to find them reliable workers. These agencies paid the workers’ airfares, arranged their visas, and covered all their costs. Now workers were expected to “buy” these jobs themselves in their home countries by paying massive brokerage fees, which were used to enrich brokers and cover all the business’s expenses for importing workers.11

  It’s not clear who first figured out that aspirational farmers would mortgage the lands they used to feed their families and hand over the cash based solely on the promise of a job paying a few dollars a day in a faraway land, but the shift came easily, and with extraordinary effects. It transferred the costs of importing millions of workers away from businessmen and onto some of the world’s poorest people. It also shifted all the risks to the workers. If things didn’t work out, only the workers and their families would suffer, not the businessmen in the already prosperous nation.

  Perhaps most significantly, the change also created deeply insidious conditions that made it even easier to exploit and abuse workers once they arrived. After having borrowed vast sums of money to pay labor brokers, often several times the annual per capita income in places such as Nepal, the farmers had no choice but to do what they were told upon arrival in the destination countries, to accept whatever bait-and-switch terms were foisted upon them. Brokers and other business owners knew that migrants would accept almost anything just so their families could pay back the loans they had secured in order to buy the jobs in the first place.12 In this way, it became possible for millions of people to sacrifice years of their lives away from their families in exchange for no net benefit.

  With this shift, a once mutually beneficial arrangement between wealthier nations that needed workers and poorer nations that needed cash evolved into an often inherently exploitative relationship, almost as if by design. Someone other than the employer may have been holding the debt, but this was, in effect, indentured servitude.

  Those in the international marketplace in cheap human labor also seemed to quickly realize that globalization in the developing world yielded a buyer’s market. Better communications and new airline routes to places such as Kathmandu created a nearly unlimited pool of desperate people from which one could draw “supply,” and oversupply in any market always means falling prices. Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, wage rates plummeted by more than half in Saudi Arabia. In Kuwait, employers slashed them even deeper.13

  Scholars, legal professionals, and diplomats began using a new lexicon to describe what all the pieces of this trade added up to. Phrases they employed that once might have sounded over-the-top, such as “debt bondage,” or “human trafficking for forced and coerced labor,” or even “the modern-day equivalent of slavery,” gained acceptance, and then even gravitas. This booming new trade and its dark side hardly came up in chats at most American dinner tables, yet it also wasn’t the exclusive preserve of experts and human rights lawyers.

  Officials across the U.S. government knew of these abuses, and not ju
st superficially. Diplomats working in U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East had been documenting and condemning them in human rights reports approved and published by their bosses back in Washington. By 2004, American diplomats had gathered so much damning evidence about these practices that the Bush administration was forced to publicly shame four of the United States’ closest allies in the Iraq War, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, by adding their names to the top tier of the U.S. government’s human trafficking watch list.* By 2004, inherent abuses in the system had grown so ghastly, and were taking place on such a large scale, that they could no longer be ignored.14

  The practices outlined in these investigations and reports resembled the kind of sophisticated practices and transnational criminal complexities I had seen covering organized crime and drug cartels as an investigative reporter years earlier, in Chicago. Still, I was struggling to understand how all this connected to the U.S. military in Iraq, which, for all its many and gaping faults in the war, was largely a law-bound bureaucracy. How might the Pentagon have ended up doing business with Eyad Mansour and other men like him across the Middle East to fight the war in Iraq?

  * * *

  “Get it?” Mansour said, using one of his favorite phrases. “The factory is in Nepal. I receive the goods and I pass them on.” The “goods” were the Jeet Bahadur Thapa Magars of the world. As Mansour explained it, his small firm acted as a middleman in a global supply chain. The lexicon of commerce he used, which was common to the industry—referring to people as “imported goods,” like commodities or even cattle—reached beyond the metaphorical, as I would soon learn.

  After I showed up and introduced myself as an American journalist, Mansour had welcomed me, albeit with some suspicion, into his office to discuss his business. Hospitality to visiting strangers has for millennia been in the cultural DNA of the Middle East, where survival in the desert depends upon the kindnesses of people you come across on a journey, whether for just a moment of shade inside a Bedouin shelter, a drink of water, some food, or anything else. This makes it easy for you to knock on doors as a journalist and then to get past the threshold, but it doesn’t necessarily make it any easier once you’re inside, because a cultural obligation to welcome traveling strangers doesn’t include an obligation to tell them the truth. Such was the case with Mansour.