What happened to iqbal masih
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Now Iqbal is a debt slave and Ghullah is in charge of his life. The loan, or ‘peshgi’, is in Iqbal’s name. That means that Iqbal owes Ghullah the 5000 rupees (ca 600 US dollars) that his mother’s operation cost. When Iqbal gets home from the carpet factory in the evenings, he collapses into bed and falls asleep. Sometimes Ghullah wakes him around midnight. “We have a carpet delivery that has to be finished. Come on, get up.”
Iqbal worked in a carpet factory similar to this one, where young boys and girls work from morning to noon. ©WCPF
The peshgi debt means that Iqbal has to go with Ghullah, who drags a sleepy Iqbal through the narrow streets to the carpet factory. If Iqbal falls asleep at work, he is woken up by a blow from the carpet fork.
One day, a little boy in the carpet factory has a high fever. Ghullah, the owner, ties the boy’s feet together and hangs him upside down from the ceiling fan. “I’m the one who decides when you work,” roars Ghullah.In that instant, Iqbal decides he’s had enough. He starts to run away from work as often as he can. Iqbal and his friends t
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Iqbal Masih remembered on International Day Against Child Slavery
By Robin Gomes
It’s 25 years since the murder of Iqbal Masih who himself was a slave of Pakistan’s “carpet mafia”. And for 25 years the Christian Cultural Movement, based in the Spanish capital, Madrid, has been campaigning against child slavery worldwide in the name of Iqbal Masih.
The movement insists that the April 16 International Day Against Child Slavery is not the same as the United Nations’ World Day Against Child Labour that is marked on June 12. Child slavery, it says, is different from child labour.
A slave of bonded labour
Iqbal Masih was born in 1983 in Muridke, a commercial city outside Lahore, in a poor Christian family. A victim of bonded labour, he was put to work at the age of 4 by his parents to pay off their debt of Rupees 600 borrowed from an owner of a carpet factory.
In the factory, Iqbal and most of the other children had to work long hours under cramped conditions, tightly bound with chains to the carpet looms to prevent them from escaping. Re
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Iqbal Masih
Pakistani activist against child labour and bonded labour
Iqbal Masih (Punjabi: اقبال مسیح; 1 January 1983 – 16 April 1995) was a Pakistani Christian child labourer and activist who campaigned against abusive child labour in Pakistan.
He was assassinated on 16 April 1995. On 23 March 2022 (Pakistan Day), he was posthumously awarded the Tamgha-e-Shujaat by the government of Pakistan.[1][2]
Family background and bonded labour
Iqbal Masih was born on 1 January 1983 in Muridke, a village outside of Lahore in Punjab, Pakistan, into a poor Catholic Christian family.[3][4][5] His parents were Saif Masih, a laborer, and Inayat Bibi, who worked as a house cleaner. The former later abandoned the family leaving Inayat to work and Iqbal's older sisters taking care of him and his siblings.[6]
In 1986, Saif Masih was to marry off one of his sons but he lacked savings and was unable to finance this: banks would not provide loans while government aid programs were few. He took a loan of 600 rupees from a t
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