Port Vila, Vanuatu – When Bangladeshi businessman Mustafizur Shahin left for a job opportunity overseas he did not expect to be held captive on a Pacific island, forced to work without pay, physically abused when he complained and saved only after he made a daring escape.
What had promised to be a chance of a lifetime, working with a millionaire entrepreneur and his chain of clothing boutiques, turned out to be a case of modern-day slavery where the threat of physical injury and even death hung over 50-year-old Shahin.
Shahin said he felt he was “a living dead body” when recounting events that brought him from the streets of Bangladesh to the shores of the Pacific nation of Vanuatu to toil in slavery with little food and in constant fear.
“I couldn’t speak. My heart was broken,” Shahin would tell police after his escape.
“All my dreams and expectations were mixed with dust,” he said.
Shahin is just one among more than 100 Bangladeshi men brought to the tiny nation between 2017 and 2018 as part of a scheme headed by fellow Bangladesh national, Sekdah Somon, a trafficker who posed as the owner of an international chain of fashion boutiques.
Article from www.aljazeera.com