Nineteen migrant workers staged a sit-in demonstration in front of Probashi Kallyan Bhaban in the capital’s Eskaton area yesterday, demanding compensation from the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment for alleged frauds committed by four recruitment agencies.
The recruiting agencies are Meghna Trade International Agency, Morning Sun Enterprises, East Bengal Overseas and Idea International Overseas.
The protesting migrant workers placed complaints about the recruitment agencies to Khandkar Mosharraf Hossain, the minister, in January this year, after returning from Iraq empty-handed.
“The ministry assured us of compensation, but we have yet to get any,” Mozammel Hoque, one of the victims in the demonstration, said. “Around seven months have passed since we were promised the compensation.”
Mozammel said: “I, along three others, met Nurul Islam who told us to call off the sit-in, assuring us that we could be compensated soon. The joint secretary threatened to hand us over to the law enforcers unless we stopped the protest.”
The workers threatened to continue the sit-in until their demand was met.
“We have taken the due time for the procedure and we have to follow rules,” Nurul Islam told the Dhaka Tribune. “But we will reach a solution soon,” he added.
The licences of the recruitment agencies would be cancelled in a week, said the joint secretary, adding that money deposited at the agencies would be forfeited. The agencies, in association with some middlemen, sent 27 migrants to Iraq in March 2013 with jobs at a construction company.
After reaching Iraq, they were confined in a house near Najaf, and they did not get jobs for about 11 months.
Following protest by the migrants’ families, the government brought 22 of the migrants back home. The remaining five fled from confinement.
Out of the 22, only three migrants received compensations from East Bengal Overseas and Idea International Overseas. The migrants claimed that each of them had to pay around Tk3 lakh to go to Iraq.