The Grey Man (30 page)

At some point, Dula was sexually assaulted, perhaps repeatedly, and he contracted HIV-AIDS. When he became too sick to work he wasn't tossed overboard, but rather dumped on the coast of Malaysia. He was picked up by the police and, as he was an illegal alien, sent to a detention centre in Kuala Lumpur.

A Malaysian man got in touch with Kru Ngaow – the closest person Dula had to family – and said that if he paid a bond of 20,000 baht (A$800) Dula would be taken to the Thai-Malaysian border and sent across. Kind-hearted Kru Ngaow paid the money, but Dula never arrived. Instead, the man who offered to send Dula back pocketed Ngaow's money, and then put Dula back to work on another fishing boat, against his will.

Once more Dula was worked until he could no longer function, and was again dumped on the coast of Malaysia, in May 2010, and told to find his own way home. Again he was picked up by the police and put into detention. He got in touch with Kru Ngaow once more and Ngaow, fearful of being ripped off again, came to us for help. I put Dennis on the case, as Kru Ngaow needed someone on the ground to make sure Dula was brought home to Thailand and not siphoned off again into the underground slave market.

Dennis was great. He visited Dula in the detention centre and brought him food and clean clothes. He then spent countless hours trying to arrange a passage to Thailand for Dula. It was a complicated case. Dennis contacted the UN's Refugee Agency, UNHCR, on several occasions, but each time he was shunted to a different person and it seemed that Dula's case was destined to stay at the bottom of everyone's too-hard basket. We considered applying for temporary travel documents from the Myanmar embassy, but even if he'd got these it was unlikely Dula would be allowed to enter Thailand legally and be able to stay there.

Dennis also entered into lengthy negotiations with the Malaysian police and, in the end, convinced them to release the boy into his custody. The Grey Man transported Dula back to Burma and his family, where he now appears to be doing well in spite of his ordeal and disease.

Looking beyond south-east Asia, the next logical region for us to branch out into, based on the prevalence of child trafficking and abuse, is India and Nepal.

I tasked one of our more methodical volunteers, a girl with an army background, to do some research on south Asia and the stats she turned up were staggering. Somewhere between 5000 and 12,000 kids are trafficked from Nepal to India each year to work in the sex trade or as virtual slave labourers. There are currently an estimated 200,000 Nepalese women and children working in Indian brothels, and the vast majority of their customers are Indians rather than foreign sex tourists.

In April 2010, Misao and I went to Nepal on a fact-finding mission to contact other western and local organisations working in the region. I figured it would be easier starting in Nepal, the source country, as the size of the trafficking and abuse problem in this part of the world was so huge.

We learned that, as well as the sex trade, kids are also sold into a form of indentured household slavery. Under a system known as
kumlari
, poor families will sell a child to a wealthy Indian, who employs the child as a domestic worker. The story fed to the families is that the employer will also care for the child and pay for their education, but this rarely happens. Instead, the kids are worked eighteen hours a day and sometimes physically and sexually abused. A child can be sold for as little as fifty US dollars and there are actual markets held in Nepal where wealthy Indians travel to buy a new servant.

Bizarrely, there is also a trade in the use of kids in circuses in India, a problem that's become worse since the Indian government banned the use of animals under the big top. It seems that it was cruel to exploit animals in circuses, but the same rule didn't apply to underage kids. There are stories of child performers – acrobats and the like – being physically and sexually abused during training, of kids having melted wax dripped into open sores caused by too much time on the trapeze, and of motorbike engines being revved to cover the sound of children's screams from the beatings they receive.

In India, trafficking is also carried out under the auspices of religion. Children known as
devadasis
are ‘married' to a Hindu god and kept in a temple, but the reality is that the girls become playthings of the temple priests or the local business elite.

Despite my vow not to work under the umbrella of other NGOs again, it did seem that the best way for us to get the lay of the land in Nepal and India was to meet with some experienced local operators and, by way of easing our way in, perhaps offer some financial support to in-situ programs. We met with some people from Sathi-India, an organisation which gets kids off the streets around train stations, where many hang out and are preyed upon; and Every-child, a British charity which repatriates Nepalese kids back from India and especially targets the
devadasis.
Finally, we decided to partner with the Esther Benjamins (EB) Trust. I met with their no-nonsense boss, Philip Holmes, who was a former British Army Colonel, and we hit it off. I liked his style and felt we could work together. They have rescued hundreds of kids from the circuses and their facilities for the kids are excellent. We are working on an MOU with the Nepalese government and have had tea with their ambassador in Australia.

I loved Nepal, and the Nepalese people were fantastic. It was nice for me to travel somewhere other than south-east Asia for a change, and I found the authorities quite open to us, and interested in learning more about our covert operations, training and equipment. Misao and I met with the second-highest-ranking policeman in Kathmandu, as his boss was away, and he welcomed our involvement in the country. We also met with an expert on child trafficking who told us that part of the problem with policing underage prostitution in Nepal and India was that it was fairly common for retired police officers to be offered a financial stake in brothels, and for them to organise and oversee protection. It was explained to us that Nepal was a small country and even if underage girls were rescued from a brothel the pimps and older working girls usually knew in which shelter to find them. Many kids, the expert said, had been saved but then put under intense pressure to return to work.

The Grey Man went into India in early 2011 to support an operation by the Esther Benjamin's Trust to rescue Nepalese girls who were being trafficked as domestics into Saudi Arabia. Luckily, an Australian corporation had donated a couple of airline tickets for our people who were there to provide expertise and act as bodyguards to the Nepalese team from EB Trust. The actions of the traffickers were illegal in Nepal but not India, so we couldn't get the support of the Indian authorities and had to let it go. The cost of doing operations in Mumbai was prohibitive as well. We sent a three-person team into Nepal to see what we could do there, with one volunteer slotted to stay for five months to gather intelligence. They were later joined by a Grey Man intelligence operative.

By March 2011 we had four Grey Man personnel in India and Nepal and conducted our first successful operation on the Indian subcontinent with our partner agency, the EB Trust. We were supported by FSI Worldwide, an international security firm and ethical labour force recruitment agency that uses former Ghurka soldiers in many roles. The result was the arrest of a circus owner who was a major trafficker of young children. Nepalese police had been searching for this man for four years. In this operation The Grey Man provided an intelligence operative to assist the local team and he was withdrawn just prior to the arrest.

The Trust had fifteen signed statements from girls who the man had trafficked in the past. After the circus was raided, in Rajasthan, two girls who had been reported as missing in Nepal were found. Our worry was that the circus owner might be released after forty-eight hours if serious charges could not be laid. Our people and the EB Trust's people worked frantically behind the scenes, calling in favours in India and Nepal to ensure a prosecution eventuated. To clinch it, a human rights lawyer was brought in and the EB Trust ended up transporting the families of girls who had previously been trafficked by the man to Rajasthan so they could testify. In the end, the man was charged with kidnapping and will hopefully do gaol time in India and, if extradition can be organised, in Nepal as well. This was a good start to our work in India and we hope to have more arrests and rescues there in the future.

We had been relying on our volunteers bringing their own skills to the table and then giving some training to them on the job, but over time I realised this wasn't good enough. We decided we needed to run formal inductions for all potential Grey Man operatives, so I brought in a guy named Graham Brammer to give us some advice on training. Graham was a friend and former Australian SAS officer who had served in Vietnam. Another friend, Sam, a former Royal Marine Commando, and two senior former-AFP people contributed ideas to the mix and we started putting together a Grey Man induction course.

In order to ensure our operatives are able to take care of themselves in tricky situations, we decided to offer self-defence training. Fortunately a Melbourne-based close personal protection company called ‘538' which trains bodyguards offered to deliver this part of the course for free. We also needed to bump up the intelligence side of our work and I enlisted Simon, a former British Special Forces warrant officer to run the induction courses and set up a dedicated Grey Man intelligence cell. Simon had served in undercover roles for nineteen years and had already done some work for us as a volunteer. He was an interesting guy and had written a book that applied Special Forces principles to life in general.

We've also had several more women join our ranks. Nisha, a young mum, came on board to handle various functions from fund-raising to public relations and did a great job for us. Lara, a former army captain, volunteered for the intelligence role in one of our target countries and I also set up a separate administration function for our rescue arm and put Laurel, an expat Briton and mother of two, in charge of it. As well as individual people making donations and giving up their time, we have also had support from companies. Russell contacted the large Australian law firm Clayton Utz to see if they would be interested in supporting Grey Man in some way and the firm promptly decided to provide pro-bono advice for us. It was an offer we have greatly appreciated, as was the offer by Accru Rawsons to do our charity audit each year.

There are very few perks in being the president of The Grey Man, but one turned up in January 2010. Lieutenant Commander Shane Doolin, the captain of an Australian Navy patrol boat, the HMAS
Glenelg
, and his crew of AWARE 2 (a rotating crew system for our patrol boats), had come on board a year or so earlier as active supporters of our charity.

The crew had raised around $8000 for us in that time. To further boost their already impressive fundraising efforts, Shane offered us the chance of auctioning off a cruise for two on board his ship on a three-day journey to the rugged Coburg Peninsula, north of Darwin. The perk for me was that he invited Misao and me along as his guests. The Grey Man held a fundraiser in November with the Attorney-General of Queensland as the guest speaker and two lovely girls, Kim and Ally, put in the highest bid ($3000), so, in January, all four of us arrived in Darwin and joined the ship. The crew was great, the food excellent, and we were impressed with the outstanding work our navy people do, without enough recognition I think.

Although The Grey Man is a rescue organisation and our focus is children, I sometimes think that we are really there more for inspiration for what is possible. I received an email one day from a school teacher called Bill who knew of some Thai girls who had been trafficked to South Africa and he wanted to get advice and/or help to get them out. I advised against it, as we didn't have the resources to go into Africa. I did say if he did anything himself to involve the relevant embassies and we passed on some contacts. About a month later, Bill called to tell me that not only had he got the girls out but that he had also contacted the Office of Home Affairs in South Africa and had been instrumental in closing down a trafficking ring. Although I don't recommend something like this as a standard course of action, it goes to show that individuals can do amazing things.