Masih, Iqbal << mah SEE, IHK bahl >> (1982?-1995), was a Pakistani campaigner against child slavery. At an early age, he was put to work as a weaver at a carpet factory to pay off his family’s debt. Iqbal worked at the factory for five to six years and was often treated badly. When Iqbal was about 10 years old, a human rights group helped free him from slavery. Iqbal brought attention to the evils of child labor and helped give thousands of other children the courage to leave bondage (slavery). In 1995, at about the age of 12, Iqbal was shot and killed. Following his murder, people around the world voiced support for his cause.
Iqbal Masih was born to a poor Christian family in Murdike, probably in 1982. Murdike is a village on the outskirts of Lahore, a large city in the province of Punjab in northeast Pakistan. Iqbal’s father abandoned the family when Iqbal was very young. When Iqbal was about 5 years old, his family decided to put the boy to work at a carpet factory to earn money, because they could not afford food. Soon after, Iqbal’s mother took out a loan from the factory owner to pay for a necessary surgery. The loan was in the boy’s name. Thus, Iqbal became a debt slave—that is, the factory owner controlled the boy’s life. Later, the family held a wedding feast they could not afford. The carpet factory owner added the cost of the wedding to the Masih family’s debt. Iqbal earned a small amount of money each day, but the loan continued to increase because of the family’s growing debt and the high interest on the debt. Iqbal worked 120 hours a week. He tried to escape several times, but Iqbal and other children were sometimes chained to the carpet looms to prevent escape.
In 1992, a man from the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF) secretly met with bonded children at the carpet factory. The BLLF is a nongovernmental organization based in India that works to end bonded labor. The man told the children that bonded and child labor was illegal under Pakistani law. Soon after, Iqbal attended a BLLF meeting in Pakistan, and the group helped rescue the boy. He began to attend a school organized by the BLLF for former debt slave chldren. Iqbal spoke to friends and children in other carpet factories and told them that they did not have to stay with their owners. Thousands of debt slave children began leaving carpet factories in the Murdike area.
Iqbal began to visit other countries, including Sweden and the United States, to share his story and to fight for the rights of debt slave children. In December 1994, he traveled to the United States, where he received a Reebok Human Rights Award for his work. On April 16, 1995, Iqbal was shot and killed in Pakistan. Some sources reported that he had been killed by a heroin addict while the boy was cycling with friends. But the BLLF reported that Iqbal had received death threats by individuals connected with the Pakistani carpet industry. The BLLF and other groups believe that Iqbal was assassinated.
In 2000, after his death, Iqbal was awarded the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child. The award is given annually to recognize exceptional efforts to protect the rights of children. In 2009, the United States Congress established the annual Iqbal Masih Award for the Elimination of Child Labor. In 2014, Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children’s rights activist, dedicated his prize to Masih and others “who made the supreme sacrifice for protecting the freedom and dignity of children.”
