by Cam Simpson
When rioters tore Nepal apart following the executions, the first building they ransacked held the offices of Moon Light Consultant. The businessman behind the agency was named Prahlad Giri. Had Giri still been around, it is likely the mob would have dragged him into the street and killed him, but by the time his office and his nation were ablaze, he had disappeared. Government paperwork listed Giri as the agency’s general manager and part owner, although the true ownership of the brokerage houses in Nepal often was obscured. It seemed imperative to find and speak to Giri. What did he know? What had he told the men, and the dalals he did business with, about the jobs, and about where the men were ultimately headed? Many Nepalis assumed Giri remained in hiding abroad, most likely in India, and the government had yanked the operating license for Moon Light.
Through contacts we’d developed among other brokers in the capital, we discovered Giri hiding in plain sight, operating another overseas recruitment agency on the edge of town, under someone else’s name. He worked from a single-room office built as an addition atop the flat roof of a three-story building in a strip mall just off the main road ringing the city. The agency was called Sea Link Overseas. We found Nepalese men lingering outside Sea Link’s main lobby area, hoping for one of the jobs in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates trumpeted in “Urgent Demand” notices hanging from a bulletin board on the veranda.
Giri was born into Nepal’s Brahmin, or upper, caste, which gave him a whiff of social and ethnic superiority that he could easily use to exploit people from lower classes. In a country where the men in many major ethnic groups stand little more than five and a half feet tall, Giri towered at six feet. He spoke near-perfect English, excepting his use of malapropisms of the ilk so often found in the brochures of overseas labor agents. Like Eyad Mansour, when I entered he was sitting in his office behind a high desk with the curtains drawn, the hot air swirling through the blades of an oscillating fan on a pedestal in the corner.
Giri insisted he had no idea the twelve men had been bound for Iraq, even though Eyad Mansour had said that he and Giri were working together to send Nepalese men into Iraq via Jordan—and via false paperwork that Giri had knowingly filed with the Nepalese government. Giri instead blamed Mansour, who he claimed had deceived him. “I am just the one guy who was unlucky, who faced the problem,” Giri said. In conversation, Giri often poked the air with his slender fingers, or touched the tips of all ten fingers together and propped his hands below his sharp chin, like a man who believed deeply in the profundity of his own words.
Giri said that he didn’t mention anything about Iraq to the dalals who brought him applicants or to the applicants themselves, but, he said, he did warn prospective workers that Eyad Mansour’s Morning Star “is a multinational company, and it might send you somewhere else.” In reality, Mansour operated from an office smaller than Giri’s, and earned his commissions by doing little more than arranging for foreign workers to be picked up at the airport in Amman. He scarcely had the makings of a multinational tycoon. Yet, as hard as it was to believe that Giri did not know he was sending men into Iraq via Jordan, he would clearly never admit to it, at least not to me.
It also became increasingly clear that the murders of the men he had sent into the Middle East exposed far deeper problems with workers being tricked into buying jobs in neighboring countries, only to be forced into Iraq to work for the U.S. government. After finding Giri in Kathmandu, I met Indra Tamang, a twenty-four-year-old Nepalese farmer. He had been in a compound in Kuwait with about fifty other Nepalese men when the execution of their twelve countrymen appeared on Al Jazeera. The company that operated the compound was called First Kuwaiti, and like the Jordanian company Daoud and Partners, it worked as a major subcontractor in Iraq to KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary.
Tamang said that many of the men in the compound did not know that their ultimate destination would be Iraq until after they had paid for their jobs in Nepal and arrived in Kuwait. When news of the executions spread, panic swept the compound, and many of the men demanded they be returned home. Initially, Kuwaiti supervisors watching over them, and holding all their passports, were not sympathetic. “They told us that we could not return to Nepal; we had to go to Iraq,” Tamang said. “We could not go back because we did not have a plane ticket and passport, or any money.”
Still, some of the men who were there were able to phone home, providing details about their plight to their families and urging them to contact the Nepalese government, said Lok Bahadur Thapa, the then-acting Nepalese ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He got urgent orders to fly to Kuwait, where he said he discovered a crisis situation inside the compound.
Following the broadcast of the executions, First Kuwaiti supervisors had gathered the workers together and issued an ultimatum: Agree to go to Iraq, and you will get more food and water. Refuse, and you will get nothing and be cut loose onto the streets of Kuwait City to fend for yourself and find your own way home, and perhaps face arrest. “The company was forcing them to go to Iraq,” the diplomat said. A First Kuwaiti executive, Wadih al-Absi, later acknowledged that Thapa had helped Nepalis at the firm’s compound return to their homeland in the wake of the executions, but denied that anyone from his company had tried to force or coerce workers into Iraq.
Thapa said he discovered men similarly deceived and coerced at Kuwaiti compounds run by other contractors working for the United States.
The international market in cheap human labor, already rife with human rights abuses, had taken a far more sinister turn when the United States tapped it to prosecute the war in Iraq. Deception, fraud, and coercion were widespread with regard to sending men to work in a war zone through U.S. subcontractors based in the very same countries on the top tier of Washington’s human trafficking list. The nature of the system meant that responsibility was diffuse. There was no single villain pulling every string from the top; instead, there were several individual actors making up an overall chain of conduct. It was an inherently transnational enterprise, making use of both a supply chain extending across multiple countries and an extensive transnational network to succeed. And it was run through a thick web of recruiters, contractors, subcontractors, parent corporations, and subsidiaries crossing jurisdictions, countries, and continents. Each participant undertook individual actions (such as recruitment, collecting exorbitant fees from the workers’ families, transportation, detention, and employment), all of which had to come together for the system to work. While some of these actions in isolation may not constitute human rights abuse, when taken together they amounted to something abhorrent.
The full translation of the Nepalese commission report contained a transcript of statements made by ten of the twelve men and recorded by the terrorists just days before their deaths, and this helped flesh out details of the critical forty-five to fifty days between when they left Kathmandu and when they were kidnapped in Iraq.
Each man stood before the terrorists’ black banner, one by one. Each faced the camera head-on. Each looked terrified as he gave a clearly unprepared statement in Nepalese, which the captors could not have understood. Each said he had been forcibly held in Jordan and then forcibly sent into Iraq. Each man knew these were likely to be his final words, and several indicated so.
Budhan Kumar Shah, one of the three best friends from the town in Nepal’s lowlands, the men who desperately called home after realizing they had been deceived, lashed out at the agents behind the trio’s journey. He also said, “I was held in Jordan for one and a half months. While being held in Jordan, I was repeatedly asked to go to Iraq, and ultimately, I was forcibly sent here, and now I have been handed over to [the terrorists].” He closed with the following: “I do not know when I will die, today or tomorrow.”
One of his companions from the same town, Manoj Kumar Thakur, also lashed out at the brokers, and identified one of the Jordanian middlemen involved. He said the man’s first name was “Amin,” but his effort to render an Arabic surname was incomprehensibl
e.
The farmer who would have his throat slit in the gruesome execution video said that he, too, had been kept in Amman against his will and suggested that he had been in contact with Giri, the manager of Moon Light in Nepal. “After keeping me there for one and a half months, he did not let me return to Nepal when I tried to do so. Instead, he evaded the issue and sent me to Iraq. While being sent to Iraq, we have been captured along the way and are being killed this very day.”
Jeet Bahadur Thapa Magar, who came from the hills of Gorkha, spoke sixth. “We arrived in Jordan through Moon Light, and stayed there for one and a half months,” he said. “Thereafter, we were sent to Iraq. From the day before yesterday until today, the terrorists have captured us—and now . . . now we . . .” Jeet stammered and stopped speaking, then lowered his head, unable to continue.
The final captive’s statement on the tape came from Ramesh Khadka, just nineteen. He uttered a single, broken sentence, as sorrow and fear overtook him, yet his incomplete words somehow made perfect sense many months later, as the truth about what had happened began to emerge. “Through the agency . . . trapped by Moon Light . . . in Jordan, Jordan . . .”
* * *
After journeying across Nepal for weeks, we had located and met with nearly all twelve families, but there was another person I wanted to find: the widow of Jeet Bahadur Thapa Magar. She was just eighteen when her husband had been executed, and she had a young child. We had learned from relatives that she had recently moved from Gorkha and into a home for destitute widows and their children on the outskirts of Kathmandu, but no one from the family we dealt with seemed to know where, which seemed odd. Soon I learned enough about the treatment of widows in Nepalese and Hindu cultures to understand perhaps why they didn’t know where to find her—because they didn’t care. Historically in Nepal and India, some ashrams for widows were little more than warehouses or dumping grounds, where women could be abused, including being forced into prostitution.
With a bit of effort, we identified and found the place, which consisted of a small assemblage of redbrick buildings, some dating to the property’s original development in 1926, off a dirt-and-gravel road on the backside of Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. It stood behind a high wall, the drive blocked by an iron gate. The ashram’s director said that Jeet’s widow had been there only a short time. Her name was Kamala Thapa Magar.
Dressed in the blue sari that served as a uniform for the ashram’s women, she met us at a stone-and-wooden gazebo on the grounds. Giant black crows, which Nepalis believe carry the souls of the dead, cawed in the thick trees above. Kamala had just turned nineteen years old but looked so much younger, and she carried her daughter, not yet three, in her arms and on her hip, clinging to the child as the gazebo shielded us from the summer sun. The young widow could barely utter her own name. She responded to questions with a grief-stricken silence, which seemed to last an eternity, staring down at the ground or folding and unfolding the end of her blue sari with her small hands, occasionally lifting its edge to wipe a tear or to cover her mouth as she cried. In other moments, she held her daughter tightly to her chest, almost hiding behind the child. We had no idea how the young woman, in many ways still just a girl herself, had arrived in this place or at this moment, because she could not tell us; nor could anyone else in the ashram. She seemed to be alone there.
Not long before I arrived in Nepal, Kamala had sat by herself in a sea of folding chairs, staring up at an empty stage in a silent Kathmandu auditorium. A charity was holding a benefit for family members of the twelve dead men, and Kamala had arrived hours too early. Trips to the capital gave her respite from her increasingly dolorous existence on the horseshoe ridge, but deep anxiety and worry remained her constant companions, no matter how far from home she traveled.
Her late husband’s family had received a small amount of charity from the Nepalese government in the wake of the riots, to be divided between Jeet’s mother and Kamala. Kamala had hoped her share might provide a chance to move away from the farmhouse and start afresh, but the government wired the entire sum to Jeet’s mother, effectively giving her control because widows in Nepal had no inheritance rights. The old woman locked the funds in a bank account that Kamala could not access without her mother-in-law’s signature, and claimed she did this to protect the future of Jeet’s only child, Kritika.
Seated alone in the auditorium, Kamala knew she could never return to anything resembling her status in the village on the ledge before Jeet’s death. She now realized she also could not move out on her own and provide for herself and her daughter. She would remain dependent upon whatever Jeet’s family chose for her, and whatever it chose to give her. Thoughts of being caught in an existence she could no longer bear and yet being powerless to escape it filled Kamala’s mind as she stared at the stage, waiting for the charity benefit to start.
A keynote speaker for the event, the chief executive of Nepal’s oldest social service group, arrived not long after Kamala. The woman’s name was Bhadra Ghale. Though nearly five decades older than Kamala, Ghale was as sturdy as a fist, with soft brown eyes and a broad, welcoming smile. Ghale noticed Kamala sitting alone, and she must have seen a look on Kamala’s face that she had seen cross those of hundreds, if not thousands, of other widows in Nepal, a look that told her Kamala must have been the wife of one of the men killed in Iraq. Ghale sat down beside Kamala and introduced herself, and seemingly from nowhere, she told Kamala, “I can help you find a future. I know a place. I can help.” A woman Kamala had never met had identified her needs in an instant: a future, a place, help. For the first time in so long, Kamala’s anxious mind relaxed, at least for a moment. No one she knew growing up in the horseshoe had possessed such an incongruous combination of strength and gentleness. Ghale wrote down her phone number, handed it to Kamala, and told her to come over to her house for dinner before leaving town.
Ghale ran a small society established by Tulsi Meher, a Nepalese lifetime disciple of Mohandas K. Gandhi who had studied at Gandhi’s side during an exile in India. Both men had been unpopular in their homelands for promoting human rights and equality, and for speaking out against the shameful treatment of women. In the 1970s, the disciple won a small fortune from a humanitarian prize and used it to open a campus behind Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. Ghale turned it into an ashram that served as a home for destitute women and their children. She knew the hopelessness and discrimination single mothers in Nepal faced, and she believed that teaching them skills that would help them secure a living could break the cycle. She guaranteed a good education for their children, who lived in dormitories with their mothers.
At dinner a couple of days after the benefit, Ghale tried to convince Kamala to move into the ashram, to move away from her pain, and build a new life for herself and her daughter with women who shared her experiences. The first commandment of the ashram, Ghale said, was this: although the caste system might rule the larger society, it had no quarter within the ashram, where every woman was equal to every other woman. Excepting a head cook, the women divided all the chores of daily living among themselves, and then rotated with the turn of each month. The lowest-caste and highest-caste women could sweep floors together, or chop vegetables, or tend to animals and crops side by side, a proposition that would be unimaginable, subversive, or even heretical to many in the world beyond the ashram’s walls, where those from families at the bottom of the ethnic ladder are born to serve those at the top.
Women stayed in the ashram for two years. They practiced yoga when they rose before dawn each day, and then devoted themselves to the ashram’s workshops. By the time she graduated, each woman knew how to spin yarn, weave cloth on a loom, and tailor clothing on a treadle sewing machine. Also, illiterate women learned to read and write. A widow paid for nothing, and all her material needs were met. Ghale knew that the women she recruited needed little persuading. “The women are taught to love themselves and each other,” she said. Sharing a bond wa
s the most powerful draw. The youngest widows feel this pull more than the older women, Ghale said, because of how painful their lives are inside the homes of their dead husbands’ families.
After her dinner in Ghale’s home, Kamala returned to the horseshoe and to her daily duties in the fields with Heera, the other young widow from her village. She told Heera with excitement about the possibilities offered by Ghale’s ashram. Day after day, she tried to convince Heera to apply for one of its spots—before realizing that she had actually been trying to convince herself.
Once Kamala told Jeet’s family that she wanted to move to Kathmandu and join the ashram, word began to spread in the village. Jeet’s family encouraged her to go but said she should leave her daughter with them. “Everyone in the village told me I should keep Kritika, as she was all that I had left now of Jeet, and that I should send Kamala alone,” Jeet’s mother recalled. Kamala was pained by her in-laws’ response. She had expected at least a show of resistance from Jeet’s family, even a feigned plea for her to stay, but she never expected they would want her gone and her daughter left behind. They want to take everything from me, everything I have left, she thought.* Of course, there was no way she would abandon Kritika.
Kamala moved forward with the application process, convincing Heera to apply with her. Both women were accepted, and early one morning, Kamala hoisted a bag of clothes over her shoulder, bundled her daughter in her arms, and headed down the same path Jeet had taken the day he left for Jordan, beside and below the vegetable path and through the sweet smoke of kitchen fires rising from the valley. She felt the sadness of a good-bye, but none of the hopelessness she had felt inside the family home, her isolation deepening by the day in the wake of Jeet’s murder. There was trepidation in not knowing what lay ahead, but Kamala felt lifted by a sense of relief as she and Heera, who had joined her along the path, descended the trail into the horseshoe valley.
