HUMAN RIGHTS DAY DECEMBER 2019
HUMAIN RIGHTS DAY
Mbolatiana Raveloarimisa sent a heartfelt message to the President.
Mr. President,
A gentleman was holding her firmly by the arm at Addis Ababa airport. We could see from her walk that she was struggling to move forward. Putting one foot in front of the other seemed like an ordeal. In her eyes, it was total emptiness that says a lot about the path she had to take to get there. The passenger assistant installed her on the plane bound for Antananarivo. I am one of those who believe that there is no chance, there are only dates. This young woman was at the seat right next to me.
Her name is Doria and she was born in 1991. When it came time to fill out the landing form, she had one of those looks as if she was calling for help. Couldn't she take the pen to write? Couldn't she take the pen because she couldn't write? Couldn't she take the pen to write because she didn't know what was written on that form? Dozens of questions have been jostling in my head. I hesitated to help her because I didn't know if I had the right to do so. But her tearful and insistent eyes overwhelmed me. In spite of myself, I had to go through the necessary information to try to trace this young woman's journey in order to fill out the form as well as possible.
Doria had her passport in 2017 with the title of occupation: "farmer". In the picture of her passport she was a young woman full of life with a sparkling look, ready to go conquer the world. A second, more recent photo is stapled to the cover of his passport. She was in nikab. Between these two images of her and what remains of the person in front of me, the violence had passed through there.
Doria left Madagascar in 2017 to go to the Comoros. Then she goes back and forth between this country and Kuwait. She renewed her visa in Kuwait three times in two years and that is the end of her whole dream. The young woman, barely 28 years old, has lost all her strength and all her being. She barely spoke, and had real trouble moving even her hands. When it came time to eat, we had to ask the hostesses for a special spoon. Each bite hurt her to the point where we had to stop after a few spoonfuls when she seemed hungry. Throughout this story and the few hours of flight, she was holding her passport and an envelope that visibly contained all that she had left. But what exactly does he have left?
She has nothing left. Mr. President, in two years, this young woman has lost her motor skills, her language, her health and above all her human dignity. Mr. President, like you, I have heard cases about these women who leave and no longer return or who return like the undead. But the moment Doria couldn't eat, I cried. When she arrived at the airport, she could not get up from her seat. Mr. President, she is only 28 years old. We told her that someone will come and get her to help her. I felt the fear invade him again.
At the border a policewoman was scanning each woman's passport to find out who came from where. She was looking for four women from Kuwait. Why? A group of five women obviously got scared and did everything they could to avoid it. For me, I simply told her that someone stayed on the plane and she urgently needs care because she is in trouble.
Mr. President, this is 2019. Human trafficking continues despite all the efforts that have been made so far. Sir, what I saw was just horrible. One of our own has been abused and there are several hundred of them like her. We are talking about sixteen days of activism against violence against women, it would be important to take stronger measures not against women but against those who are at the heart of this trafficking. There is a network in many spheres for a woman named Doria to return home '' very fanahy mbola velona''.
