All carefully detailed fact, it
reads a little like Homeric fiction — a young woman’s odyssey from her
Himalayan home where the villagers eat only what they can grow or raise to the
darkly polished corridors of power in Washington, D.C., and Houston.
 |
| Author and reporter Cam Simpson |
There, she must confront
contemporary corporate power as formidable as any Cyclops. It’s the predatory
Goliath KBR Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s no-bid, no-accountability
corporate pet.
In The Girl from Kathmandu, investigative reporter Cam Simpson reports
how he solved the mystery of why and how a dozen innocent young men from one of
the remotest parts of the world finished up kidnapped and murdered in Iraq, in
a war they’d barely heard of.
In the process, Simpson’s writing draws
us into Nepal’s village life, hard and precarious and primitive but honest —
particularly in contrast to the corporate machinations that would con and kill
Kamala Magar’s husband, Jeet.
As difficult as village life can
be, Kamala would learn that it’s nowhere near as cruel as the forces of
globalization powered by implacable corporate greed.
Like the other hopeful, defrauded
families from Nepal, Kamala’s had borrowed heavily to “buy” a fictional job for
her husband. What they didn’t know until too late was that A) workers were
often paid less than they were promised, B) kept under house arrest with their
passports seized and C) subjected to a bait-and-switch on the destination where
they would put in their 12-hour workdays.
In other words, they paid through
the nose to become indentured servants.
“Not only were the jobs in Jordan,
but the sons and husbands of the families I met were sent across another
international border and into a third country, a nation that was host to the
world’s deadliest war zone,” Simpson wrote.
“Bundled into an unprotected
convoy, without any security precautions, they were driven into Iraq against
all public warnings issued by the U.S. government and against all common sense
— even though they were apparently headed there to serve the U.S. government.
It is difficult to imagine a greater disregard for their lives.”
Jeet was among a dozen Nepali men between
the ages of 18 and 27 who were recruited and held against their will in this
human trafficking scheme. Baited by high-end jobs in a Jordanian hotel, they
were in fact sent to Iraq, where they were promptly murdered by insurgents — viciously
and on video.
Simpson’s writing flows clearly
and smoothly, like the water from the taps of a mountainside village well. He’s
telling three tales that converge, weaving them like Kamala at work at her loom
in a widows’ ashram.
Simpson recounts his own detective
work in piercing the corporate smoke screen that hides human trafficking. He reports
Kamala’s experience as a shunned and alienated teenage widow with a small daughter,
helped by no one, seemingly with no place left in the world. And he profiles
Matthew Handley and Agnieszka Fryszman, two workaholic human rights lawyers.
In this dark tale, light is
provided by the admirable professionalism and moral character of some of those
involved — by Kamala’s own tremulous courage, and by the determination with
which Simpson and the plaintiff’s lawyers pursue the factual truth about and
justice for people from the other side of the planet, the exploited and impoverished
human beings that U.S. corporations and contractors shipped and discarded like
so much cheap, damaged goods.
