Solma waits for repatriation

Siblings aged eight and 10 could hardly remember when their mother had made and served them a meal or how she had asked them to turn in at night.

It has been four years since they last saw their mother Solma Begum and red tape and inefficiency of ministries are delaying the reunion of mother and children.

Shakil Islam, 8, and Shima Akhter, 10, now sort of take care of themselves in their Taluk Shorbananda of Sundarganj in Gaibandha home.

Their father Shawkat Ali, once a labourer, now begs door to door. He has not been mentally stable since his wife went missing.

“I have to cook … I have been doing it since my mother went missing,” Shima, a student of class-V, told The Daily Star over phone.

“We miss our mother so much … ,” said Shakil, “Please bring back our mother.”

Solma, 39, had psychological issues four years ago. She was taken to a local doctor but that did not help much, said her brother Asgar Ali.

“She would sometime bite people and could not stand anyone around her,” he told this correspondent from Sundarganj.

In an afternoon about three months after she became sick, Solma went to a nearby pond but did not return.

They looked for her everywhere with no result.

Asgar Ali said local union parishad member Abu Bakar, after his communication with Shampa Basu, an activist of Socialist Party of Bangladesh, contacted him early February this year to say that Solma was at a shelter home in Hooghly, of West Bengal.

Shampa got to know about Solma through an Indian friend working at the home, Janasiksha Prochar Kendra.

According to Hooghly police, in the evening of April 4 last year, police found Solma wandering around in Sarati village. They could not ascertain her identity as she did not speak.

Police then had her medically examined and her mental disorder was confirmed.

Hooghly police then sent her to Janasiksha Prochar Kendra for temporary shelter where she was provided with regular counselling and treatment. After six months, she partially recovered and was able to remember that she was from Bangladesh.

Solma remembered that she was very excited and young when she got married and that she lost her parents. She also told people there that she was suffering from a mental illness in Bangladesh and she was having medicine there, according to the communication between two NGOs in the two countries.

Solma mentioned a woman who was either her co-passenger or who facilitated her travel to India from Bangladesh.

“She said she was dropped off at the border on a bike,” according to the email correspondence between the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), an international NGO based in New Delhi, and the Bangladesh Legal Aid Services Trust (BLAST) in Dhaka.

Solma maintains that she went straight to the Hooghly shelter home after crossing the border into India and has no recollection of being anywhere else since leaving home.

“The conversation with her did not indicate towards sex trafficking, but one cannot be sure whether she was a victim of organ trafficking,” said Mrinal Sharma, an official of India's CHRI.

REPATRIATION TAKING LONG!

Shampa Basu said Solma's brother Asgar Ali submitted all the documents about Solma to BLAST in Dhaka and sought help for her repatriation.

Failing to make any headway, she said she gave the documents to the Prime Minister's Foreign Affairs Adviser Gawher Rizvi's office early April this year.

“We don't know what happened afterwards,” Shampa said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, officials of Indian CHRI learnt about Solma's case and emailed the national ID card details of Solma, her husband Shawkat Ali, a certificate from Shorbananda Union Parishad, and photographs of her family members they got from BLAST and the Hooghly police report to the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in Kolkata on May 25 this year.

Contacted on Monday, BM Jamal Hossain, counsellor (political) of Bangladesh mission in Kolkata, told this correspondent that he instantly sent Solma's documents to the South Asian desk of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Dhaka.

According to officials concerned, if any Bangladeshi is stranded abroad and seeks repatriation, the Bangladesh mission overseas writes to the ministry, which then forwards the letter to the home ministry.

The home ministry then sends a letter to the Special Branch of Police asking it to verify the person's identity through its district offices and local police stations. Similar paper work is needed once the person has been identified as a Bangladeshi and the mission abroad is informed of the matter.

The mission then issues travel documents for repatriation.

“We are yet to receive any verification report from Dhaka,” counsellor Jamal said over phone.

“It is taking longer than usual,” he said, adding that he even reminded the ministry about the case.

Enquired on Monday, a foreign ministry official in Dhaka told our diplomatic correspondent that the ministry immediately forwards files like that of Solma to the home ministry.

Asked on the specific file of Solma, the official said they would try to find the file, but could not do it as of yesterday.

Contacted, Delwar Hossain Sarkar, MIS Officer of Rescue, Recovery, Repatriation and Integration (RRRI) Taskforce Cell of the home ministry, could not say the status of Solma's case. “Please give me the memo number to know Solma's file status,” he said.

Our Gaibandha correspondent Rezaul Haque contacted Gaibandha's Superintendent of Police Ashraful Islam, Special Branch Officer-in-Charge Mahbubul Alam and Sundarganj Police Station Officer-in-Charge Israil Hossain on Tuesday.

All of them said they had no idea about Solma's case.

Asgar Ali, however, said two police officials visited him around a month ago and took photocopies of the national ID cards of Solma and her husband.

Bangladesh National Women Lawyers' Association (BNWLA), which was approached by the CHRI recently with Solma's case, said it asked the home ministry, but its officials responsible could not say for sure if there was any case of Solma at all.

BNWLA Executive Director Salma Ali said there must be missing links and a sheer lack of coordination among government actors dealing with Solma's case.

“There must be digital mechanism to immediately trace any file and learn their status in the cases of repatriation,” she said.

Solma's children don't understand such bureaucracy.

Asgar Ali said Hooghly's shelter home officials arranged phone calls between Solma and her children several times. “Whenever they talk, they started crying. I try to calm the children down saying she would come home soon.”