ISLAMABAD, 22 June 2005 — Forty Pakistani children smuggled to United Arab Emirates (UAE) to work as camel jockeys returned to Lahore yesterday. Most of them belonged to Rahim Yar Khan area of Punjab province.

They returned under a UN-sponsored program. The government of Punjab province also played a key role in their repatriation, sources said.

The children, aged between three and 15, were flown to Lahore from the Gulf state and put in the care of the Center for Protection of Children.

“We are happy that the first group of 22 children have returned to Pakistan and we are expecting some 270 more in the coming weeks,” Tariq Azim, the minister for overseas Pakistanis, said. He said the repatriation was made possible after a trilateral agreement between UNICEF and the governments of UAE and Pakistan.

“The 270 children are in camps set up by the UAE government and will be repatriated once their travel documents are ready,” Azim added, Pervez Elahi, the chief minister of Pakistan’s largest province of Punjab, said the government would seek to track down their families and reunite them.

“We will also provide them with free education if their parents are unable to do so,” Elahi told reporters.

Trafficking in children has been a problem in Pakistan where poor families are paid by agents to send their children abroad for use in traditional camel racing, a popular sport in the Gulf.

Rights groups say several thousand boys work as jockeys in Gulf countries.

They say the boys are kept in prison-like conditions where they are deliberately underfed to keep them light so the camels can run faster. The children race at speeds of up to 50 km per hour.

Rights group say the children are sold to camel owners by agents while UAE authorities say it is their parents who bring them to the country, find them work on ranches and then leave them. Most of the children come from Pakistan, with smaller numbers from Sudan, Bangladesh and Mauritania, UAE officials say.

Tariq said about 80 percent of the 2,500-3,000 children jockeys in the Gulf are from Pakistan. The government launched efforts to bring home the children after a Pakistani boy was trampled to death by a camel last year, he said.