KARACHI, Jan 15: People throughout the history of the world have been migrating from one place to another in order to attain better knowledge or greener pastures. However, circumstances after the 9/11 event took a sharp turn and the conditions were no longer favourable for the people of the Third World countries.

In this scenario, an interactive seminar to discuss “Human and Orderly Migration Benefits Migrants and Society” was organised at a local hotel by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in collaboration with the Karachi Council of Foreign Relations, Economic Affairs and Law.

The IOM, with 120 countries as its members, has been working in Pakistan for the last 25 years. It had also taken part in the relief work in the areas devastated by the October 8 earthquake.

The three-hour seminar was conducted by Chairman of the Security and Management Services, Ikram Sehgal, who is also a member of the Business Advisory Board, IOM (Geneva).

The programme was interesting in the sense that the audience was given the opportunity to put questions, bubbling in their mind, before speakers.

Sindh Chief Secretary Fazalur Rehman and a former Sindh governor Lt-Gen (r) Moinuddin Haider were the chief guests. They stressed the need for improving the immigration system and curbing human smuggling and trafficking.

Jill Helke and Anne-Marie Bushman-Petit of the IOM, besides the chief secretary, spoke during the first session.

Head of the IOM’s Counter Trafficking Department, Richard Danziger and IOM’s Regional Representative in Islamabad Hassan Abdel Moneim Mostafa, speaking in the second session, pin-pointed the causes of illegal migration — poverty, unemployment, political victimisation, poor education system, etc — and suggested the modus operandi to minimise it.

Mr Mostafa focused on the fast-spreading evil of human trafficking and smuggling. Mr Danziger stated that human smuggling and trafficking were at times mistaken to be the same. He said smuggling was kind of a business deal in which a person willing to travel abroad would be transported illegally by some agent. About trafficking, people are forced to leave their homeland, as it happens in the case of the children being trafficked into certain Arab countries to act as jockeys in camel race.

A former chief justice of Pakistan and the president of Karachi Council of Foreign Relations, Economic Affairs and Law, Justice (r) Saleem-uz-Zaman also expressed his views on the subject.

Mementos were given to the guests at the end of the programme.