Murders in a distant land
Mohammad Enamul had gone to South Africa 16 years back. After one year of hard work, he started a grocery shop with his savings and additional capital from home in Comilla.
Over the years, he turned the shop into a super store and set up a café. His monthly income was quite good -- Tk three to five lakh.
All was well until March 7 when he came under a gun attack.
“My father was talking over the mobile phone in front of his super store in Port Elizabeth when some South African youths shot him dead,” Enamul’s son Mohammad Manik told The Daily Star by phone on September 13.
He said he had no idea why his father was murdered, but he got an impression from the Bangladeshi community in Port Elizabeth that some Bangladeshis were behind it.
“Maybe my father was doing good business making other people jealous,” said Manik.
Officials from the Bangladesh High Commission in South Africa and the foreign ministry in Dhaka say such killings of Bangladeshis in South Africa are quite common.
Until September 17 this year, 88 bodies of Bangladeshis were repatriated from South Africa. The number was 106 in 2018; 80 in 2017; 89 in 2016, and 95 in 2015, according to the Bangladesh mission.
“These are the numbers of bodies brought back,” Shabbir Ahmad Chowdhury, Bangladesh high commissioner to South Africa, told The Daily Star on September 17.
“However, information from the Bangladeshi community suggests that every year around 50 to 60 cases of deaths are not reported to us. They are buried here.”
Of all the deaths, about 95 percent are murders, he said.
The foreign ministry has reports that rivalry over business among Bangladeshis and conflicts over relationship with South African women often result in the murders. And kidnapping for ransom often leads to killings.
Abdul Awal Tansen, a Bangladeshi community leader in Johannesburg, said murders of Bangladeshis in South Africa have become a matter of serious concern.
“Suppose a Bangladeshi has a shop and his business is good. Another Bangladeshi then sets up one more shop close by. Eventually, the two shop owners become enemies because one’s shop hurts the business of the other. In that case, one hires African goons to kill the other.”
Besides, there are cases of affairs between Bangladeshi men and South African women, some of whom maintain more than one relationship.
If the African boyfriend of the woman learns of his fiancé’s relation with a Bangladeshi, he turns furious leading serious consequences like killing, said Tansen.
The high commissioner said in most incidents, Bangladeshis are found to be linked. They hire South Africans as hit men, taking advantage of lax law enforcement.
“Bangladesh High Commission can do little to prevent such killings. This is alarming and seriously tarnishing the image of Bangladesh here,” he said.
There is also little scope of getting justice.
“There was no way we could file a case against anyone over the murder of my father. We had no clue,” said Manik, son of Enamul.
According to an official of the foreign ministry’s Africa wing, South Africa is not a labour-hiring country and it has no deal with Bangladesh on labour recruitment.
However, an estimated three lakh Bangladeshis live there. A tiny section of them are professionals, and the rest are mostly victims of human trafficking.
“There are rackets of human traffickers and smugglers based in Bangladesh and South Africa and its surrounding countries like Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe,” he told The Daily Star, preferring anonymity.
It’s very difficult for Bangladeshis to get tourist visas for South Africa. But trafficking gangs arrange tourist visas of other African countries and then transport them to South Africa, using the country’s porous borders.
“On an average, each of the Bangladeshis pays Tk 10 lakh to reach South Africa,” he said.
The law related to asylum in South Africa is quite flexible, and many of the Bangladeshis secure political asylum there while some get refugee status.
Some Bangladeshis also arrange contract marriages with local women as a pathway to secure legal documents, which allow them to work or do business there. Some are also involved in business without approval of the authorities, said the official.
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