Rescued Gulf camel jockeys become misfits in Pakistan

RAHIM YAR KHAN, Pakistan, Feb 20 (Reuters) Hameed Moosa is lame. Nasir Hussain's face is disfigured by burns.

But the scars these two young Pakistani boys bear from their time as camel jockeys in the Gulf are more than physical as they struggle to adjust to life back home with families who can barely afford to care for them.

Moosa, 15, was six when he began racing camels in the Gulf.

His career ended at the age of 13 when he was permanently injured from a thrashing he received after losing a race. A chunk of his thigh had to be cut away after a wound from the beating became gangrenous.

''The pain is always with me,'' Moosa said.

Moosa is one of 600 boys, some as young as seven, repatriated in 2006 as a result of pressure by rights groups and the United States on Gulf Arab governments to act against child trafficking, especially of young boys sent to work as camel jockeys.

Racing camels across the desert is a centuries-old Bedouin tradition that has become a lucrative sport in the oil-rich Gulf.

But it's also been condemned by human rights group for its use of children in a potentially deadly sport.

Repatriation of child jockeys began in 2005 after the United Arab Emirates and several other Gulf Arab states ruled that jockeys should be over 18.

For Moosa, it has been a return to the poverty of his mud and brick home in Chachraan, a village in Pakistan's rural southern Punjab province.

''What are these children going to do now. We already live hand-to-mouth and there is no work for us,'' Moosa's frail father says, while sitting on a wooden stretcher in a dimly lit room.

Moosa's friend, Hussain, returned to the village near the town of Rahim Yar Khan years earlier having been burnt in a tent fire when he was ten, and left unfit to race.

''I can't adjust. The nightmares don't go away,'' he says, pulling a red and white scarf over his face to hide the scars.

STONES IN THEIR POCKETS There are several villages, like Chachraan, close to the town of Rahim Yar Khan, where children have been trafficked to the Gulf to become camel jockeys.

Mohammad Munir, also from Chachraan, rode camels for 12 years and doesn't know another way of life.

''We are misfits,'' says Munir. ''We don't know any other work and are lost in this place.'' ''We earned between 200 and 400 dirhams a month,'' said Munir, who saw a seven-year-old boy killed in a race after his binding belt, or nizgah, became tangled in the camel's legs. Rights groups say the boys are kept in prison-like conditions where they are deliberately underfed to keep them light so the camels can run faster. The children race at speeds of up to 50 km per hour.

''At times we used to get so weak that they used to put stones in our pockets to increase our weight at the weigh-in before the races because anyone whose weight is too low can't participate in the race,'' Hussain said.

Pressure from the international community and rights group has led some countries to introduce remote-controlled robots, resembling small boys, to ride the camels. Kuwait held the first regional race using robots as riders a year ago.

FORMER JOCKEYS GET BICYCLES The UAE has eradicated the use of child jockeys, though the problem persists elsewhere in the Gulf, including Kuwait, according to Zubair Shad, director of a project run with UNICEF to help rehabilitate child jockeys.

''We have sent a report to UNICEF drawing its attention to the situation in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia,'' Shad said from his office in Punjab's capital of Lahore.

There are fears that some parents and rogue agents will send kids back to places where rules banning child jockeys are lax.

Shad is also director of the Punjab government's Child Protection and Welfare Bureau, which runs a shelter, where six repatriated children were being kept until a court secures undertakings from their parents not to send them overseas again.

In some cases DNA tests were done to confirm real parents as many children had been sold or lent to agents, who posed as parents and transported them overseas by adding the children to their passports.

Shad said the bureau monitors most children sent home, where they are paid a monthly stipend of 600 rupees and have been given gifts of bicycles under the UNICEF programme.

In the hamlet of Hamzawali, more than 100 former camel jockeys can be spotted easily, riding their UNICEF bicycles on the dusty lane to school.

Eight-year-old Muzammal remembers the long hours and scant food he and two brothers endured after their father sent them to an agent in the UAE.

''I don't want to go back. I used to cry a lot and was scared all the time. I didn't like the work. I like going to school,'' he said, surrounded by goats in the courtyard of his mud house.

Their mother, Munawara Khatoon, vows never to send her children back to the Gulf.

''Even if we have to share one roti (bread) I will not let my children go there again,'' she says.

Reuters SY DB0842