Pakistan Cards - a journey in a feudal country.

This serie of photographs was printed and put together to an exhibition after Iqbal Masih was shot down by a gunman Eastern 1995. He was only 12 years old but still the carpet factories owners was challenged by Iqbals courage and decided therefore to kill him. Officially the carpet industri had nothing to do with the murder of Iqbal.

I went to Pakistan 1992 together with the journalist Maria Dommelöf to collect material to a story about bonded labour and child labour. We met people from all the social stratas, carpet weavers, brick kiln workers, farmworkers, judges, journalists, imams and feudal lords. In Lahore at the office of Bonded Labour Liberation Front, BLLF, we met Iqbal Masih.

Iqbal started as a very small boy to work in a carpet factory. One day he heard about BLLF, that there were people helping children away from bonded labour. He went to the office and met Ehsan Ullah Khan who started the organization. Iqbal learnt by Ehsan how to confront the carpet boss and went to his working place, looked the boss straight in the eyes and told him that child labour is illegal in Pakistan and said he would never come back. He also handed over a freedom letter that BLLF had given him.

Instead Iqbal got involved in the freedom movement and started to hold speeches to children forced to work at many different places. He was internationally recognized when he went on a tour to Europe and USA to inform the world of the situation for both children and adults working under slave conditions. In USA he got a grant from Reebook to study law at the university.

This serie of photographs was made in the form of collecting cards that usually shows sport heroes. Iqbal and all his fellow working children and adults still living, the BLLF activists that had to leave the country after the murder of Iqbal: They are the heroes and the victims in this story and sadly very little have changed in Pakistan I think.