Roshan Sedhai

A Nepal Police team nabbed 13 Burmese and Bangla-deshi nationals with Nepali Machine Readable Passports (MRPs) from Sinamangal on Thursday. In November last year, two Tibetan individuals were held from aboard an aircraft with MRPs. A month before that, an Indian woman was held with a Nepali passport while returning from the Middle East.

These are but a few cases of the misuse of hundreds of Nepali passports at the hands of foreigners over a few months.

The easy accessibility of passport s, strong connections between human traffickers and government officials, large sums of money involved in the foreign employment business and unhindered entry through the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) have made Nepal a hub for transnational human trafficking. Although Nepali passports have been found to be occasionally misused by drug traffickers and wildlife smugglers, records show that Nepali documents have mostly been used by foreigners to go abroad for migrant jobs, especially in the Middle East.

“Recently, the number of Bangladeshi nationals being arrested in possession of Nepali passport s has increased,” said DSP Krishna Mahat of the foreign employment cell under the Central Investigation Bureau. “A few Bangladeshi nationals, arrested on the charges of call bypass, have also been found with Nepali passports.”

A representative of the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies (NAFEA) said there were several reasons, including a corrupt state mechanism and the open border with India, that have attracted the interest of traffickers to Nepal. “Compared to other South Asian nations, Nepali workers have a good reputation in the Gulf. Some labour-receiving countries have even barred work visas for nationals of countries like Bangladesh for their terrible records,” said NAFEA Chairman Bal Bahadur Tamang.

Other hindrances such as complicated and expensive legal procedures, past criminal records (in their own country or in labour destinations) and stringent age ban on female workers compel foreign nationals to take third country routes and fake identities with support from human traffickers. Many South Asian countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have imposed restrictions on female citizens from going to the Gulf for domestic jobs.

With money and high-level connections, human traffickers succeed in providing citizenship certificates, passport s and safe passage through TIA immigration by “setting”. Those who fail to procure an original passport, use the older handwritten ones. The NAFEA representative claimed that traffickers pay up to Rs 150,000 for a passport. Passports with visas fetch around Rs 600,000 from foreign nationals on the black market. Many fraudulent agents and manpower companies collect passport s from prospective workers and use them for illegal work. On September 20 last year, the CIB seized over 100 passport s during a raid on the Baneshwor-based Kelvin Travels.

“As workers do not understand what is going on, they do not make complaints if they receive compensation for their ‘lost’ passport s,” said the NAFEA representative.

Police spokesman SP Pushkar Karki attributes the rampant passport forgery to the hassle-free procedure to claim a lost passport. “A lot of Nepali passport s are still not machine-readable,” said SP Karki. “Due to the state’s insufficient database of old passport s, people are misusing the provisions for reclaiming lost passport s.”

Even Nepali missions in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are coming across large numbers of foreign nationals with Nepali identity papers. “As they have Nepali documents, the embassy is obliged to provide them with legal, financial and psychological help whenever they get into a trouble,” said Udaya Raj Pandey, Nepali ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Pandey said other concerned embassies refuse to take responsibility of such workers. The government’s failure to control the misuse of passport s has already started to have negative consequences on genuine Nepali workers. For instance, in June last year, eight Nepali nationals were deported by the Kuwaiti immigration on the suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals.

Published on: 24 February 2013 | The Kathmandu Post.