ONE - A Face Behind The Numbers

I believe that statelessness is one of the biggest atrocities facing the third world today!

Where are you from?  What nationality are you?  These are pretty common questions.  Imagine not being able to give a straight answer.  Imagine a life where no country will claim you as its own.  This is a situation called Statelessness.

“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality, nor denied the right to change his nationality.”
– 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights

Follow the process.  A young expecting mother flees her war torn homeland for economic and political exile.  Two weeks after arriving in her new home country, her child is born.   That child is not given a birth registration of any sort.  That child, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, does not exist.  The worst is yet to come as this little boy will not have the ability to go to school to get a proper education.  No education and no birth certificate means no real job opportunities.  Some realistic options are bonded labour or crime.  After a long life of manual labour and the frustration of not having a real identity, the final slap in th face is dealt.  No death certificate, no real burial plot, no lasting proof of existence.

In the Mirpur area of Dhaka, twenty-two-year-old Han spends his days in a small two-floor wooden structure completely filled by two huge looms and a set of narrow steps leading upstairs.  Sitting for long hours at the machine is not physically difficult for him because he has worked like this since he was age ten.  He can produce about three saris in a nine or ten hour work day, with a break every three hours.   A six-meter garment made by two people is sold for about 300 Taka, approximately $5.00.  Most of this earning is used to rent the equipment from a local Bangladeshi owner, and the rest Han uses to help support his parents and siblings.  Han acknowledges that the camp where he lives needs education and a technical institution, but he says that what Biharis really need is a solution.  “We are not citizens of Bangladesh or Pakistan.  It’s like being in a ‘hanging position.”

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