Contract slavery
19/01/2014
All countries must live within their means.But the west would not allow
it.They covet the wealth of other nations because their multinationals
want.Armies are sent or unrest is created to make them comply.
from: Nasar
Jan 1, 2014 at 21:29 IST
<
http://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/contract-slavery/article5486507.ece#c
omments> MORE
With its economy dependent on remittance payments from the Gulf region,
Ethiopia has remained mute to the vicious mistreatment of its citizens in
Saudi Arabia, which is cynically targeting migrant labourers in order to
quell growing unrest among its poor citizens. By VIJAY PRASHAD
BETWEEN mid-November and mid-December, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)
deported 120,000 Ethiopians. International and Ethiopian agencies received
the deportees at Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport. "People are
arriving exhausted, but also emotionally traumatised by the ordeal of having
to leave Saudi Arabia," said Frehiwot Worku, Secretary General of the
Ethiopian Red Cross. "Many of them are arriving with very little. Some have
had to leave all of their belongings behind." Red Cross workers report that
some of the migrants get off the night flights disoriented, some without
shoes.
Amongst the deportees are over 200 unaccompanied children. These children
had, like many of the adults, travelled overland from Ethiopia to Saudi
Arabia via one of the world's most treacherous routes-through Djibouti,
Puntland, Somaliland, the Gulf of Aden, and Yemen. Sharon Dimanche of the
International Organisation for Migration told me: "Traffickers and/or
smugglers do influence the children and lure them into irregular migration
by promising them better opportunities in the KSA." The situation is not
much more different for the adults, many of whom are only a few years older
than the children. They go to Saudi Arabia with the hope that its oil wealth
will drip down into their pockets. Difficult work conditions matched with an
unfair labour system drive many of the workers into desperation. The
deportations, which have slowed from 7,000 a day to 2,000 a day, are a sign
that something is not right with the relationship between the Saudi
employers as well as the KSA and the Ethiopian workers.
Saudi Arabia's nine million migrant workers make up a third of the kingdom's
population, but they have none of the rights of the King's subjects. Every
few years, when economic crises strike the King's subjects, the KSA resorts
to its nitaqat, or Saudisation, programme-with the government deporting
migrant workers with the empty plea that the private sector will now hire
Saudi subjects to replace them. Rather than go after all the migrant
workers-which would lead to the collapse of the Saudi economy-King
Abdullah's government targets the undocumented workers, many of whom came to
the kingdom with paperwork (iqama) but lost it when they changed employers.
Over the course of the past six months, the Saudi government has removed
nearly two million migrant workers from the kingdom-mostly from Bangladesh,
Nepal, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Yemen ("Work Woes", Frontline,
June 28, 2013). But nothing has been as vicious as the attack against
Ethiopian workers.
Kafala system
The Saudi kingdom sits on the second largest oil reserves in the world. That
is, as the businessman Turki Faisal al-Rasheed put it, not the whole
picture. Over three million rural-based Saudi subjects live below the
poverty line. "Three million is a lot," he points out. The numbers are
similar in urban areas. One estimate suggests that 22 per cent of the Saudi
King's subjects live in poverty. During the Arab Spring, the King opened his
coffers to forestall any uprising in the country and refurbished the Hafiz
system, which allows indigent Saudi subjects to get paid for their
nationality. Saudi economists complain that these political payments
undermine the incentive for Saudi subjects to do the kind of jobs that are
then outsourced to migrant workers.
Migrant workers come under a system-kafala-that the scholars Ray Jureidini
and Nayla Moukarbel call "contract slavery". Workers are bound to employers,
who hold their passports and control their mobility. This is a system rife
with abuse, as the employer has all the power and the workers have none at
all.
The 2008 Human Rights Watch report As If I Am Not Human: Abuses Against
Asian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia details the kind of abuse that flows
from this system. Criticism from human rights groups and unrest inside the
kingdom led the Shura Council of Saudi Arabia to pass a Bill in July 2009 to
set limits to the kafala programme. The new Bill "would require employers to
give domestic workers at least nine hours of rest every day, suitable
accommodation, and rest breaks". But there remained worry that the law did
not produce a mechanism to monitor the homes for abuse. The 2009 law also
says that workers have a "duty to obey employers' orders" and that workers
cannot break the kafala contract without a "legitimate reason".
The strictures of the kafala orders drive many legal migrant workers into
the shadow labour market. Halima (a pseudonym) went to Saudi Arabia from her
home in Wegdi, a small village in northern Ethiopia. She worked in
Haferbatir, near Kuwait, for a very large family, and because of the
enormous workload she left her job. Relatives in Jeddah allowed Halima to
find work there, but because she had to work outside the procedures of
kafala she entered the illegal economy. Halima's illegality is a function of
the draconian kafala system. People like Halima get deported while the
system is preserved.
The Nitaqat
The periodic deportation of migrant workers from Saudi Arabia comes with a
great deal of tension and turmoil. Wild rumours about the migrant workers
stalk the country-with the most frequent canard being that Ethiopian maids
are particularly rough with their charges. Videos of brutality by Saudi
employers against their Ethiopian employees can be seen on YouTube, although
the authenticity of these is always hard to determine. Complaints against
employer abuse are met with stonewalled silence from the authorities. When
employers complain about worker infractions, the state acts swiftly, report
human rights activists in Saudi Arabia. Earlier this year, 24-year-old
Rizana Nafeek was beheaded when a child in her care died. The Sri Lankan
worker said that the child had accidentally choked, but the courts did not
accept her view. Sri Lanka and Indonesia have warned their nationals against
going to work in Saudi Arabia.
On November 12, in Manfuhah (Riyadh), as Ethiopian migrant workers waited to
board buses to take them to the Shumaisi detention centre, a fracas broke
out. The Saudi police ended up killing at least three Ethiopian migrant
workers, according to human rights activists (and YouTube videos). In one
video, a police officer is beating an Ethiopian man while a dead man lies on
the street with a bullet wound in his chest. Sixty-eight people were injured
in this violence. Saudi Arabia makes it virtually impossible for journalists
to enter the country, which is why it is hard to verify independently some
of the claims of human rights organisations, who for security reasons do not
want to go public with their names.
Over the course of November, as buses with deportees arrived at the Shumaisi
centre, groups of frustrated and angry Ethiopians tried to protest (on
November 29, a number of them threw rocks at cars on the Mecca-Jeddah
expressway). Activists told me that the security services have violently
cracked down on any protest at the centre. Colonel Badr al-Saud, director of
public relations at the Mecca Police Department, confirmed that such
protests had taken place but denied that the police used excessive force. At
the gate of the Ethiopian consulate in Jeddah, a few hundred Ethiopians
remain, at the time of writing, on a sit-in protest.
Reaction from Addis Ababa
Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn imposed a six-month ban on
emigration to Saudi Arabia. His government condemned the killing of
"innocent civilians"; strong words coming from a country hesitant to be
critical of Saudi Arabia. Ethiopia's weak economy is reliant upon remittance
payments; the legal and hawala remittance money put together is more than
three times the foreign direct investment in Ethiopia. The reaction from
Addis Ababa to previous incidents of violence in other Arab countries has
also been shockingly muted. In 2012, 33-year-old Alem Dechasa fled her
kafala employer to the Ethiopian embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Her employer
found her and beat her in public outside the doors of the embassy, which
could not protect her. In hospital, Alem Dechasa is alleged to have
committed suicide. The response from Ethiopia was tepid.
Part of the problem is the remittance payments, but there are other
entanglements that make a break very difficult. Saudi Arabia is also one of
the main investors in Ethiopia, largely through the offices of the kingdom's
second wealthiest man, Mohammed al-Amoudi. Al-Amoudi's mother is Ethiopian
and he considers himself a native son despite his Saudi subject-hood. His
firm, Debra Group, is in agribusiness and also manufactures cement,
petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Al-Amoudi's relations with the Ethiopian
government are said to have suffered when Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, his
ally, died last year. Saudi-Ethiopian relations rested on the
al-Amoudi-Zenawi alliance. This has not stopped al-Amoudi's investments,
including in new cement plants and an expansion of his agribusiness venture,
Saudi Star. From 2009, Saudi investment in Ethiopian agriculture expanded
with the King Abdullah Initiative for Agricultural Investment Abroad.
Ethiopia was to be Saudi Arabia's bread basket, to grow maize, teff, white
sorghum and white wheat for the Saudi market.
As the conflict over Ethiopian workers grew in Saudi Arabia, Saudi investors
grew skittish. Some pulled out their money, either to pressure Ethiopia not
to act to defend its nationals or fearful of the political outcome of this
deportation. "We should admit that mistakes have been committed by both
sides," said Mohammed Bin Abdul Rahman al-Shahri, head of the Saudi
Agricultural Investors Association in Ethiopia, to the Arab daily Al-Hayat.
"The illegal entrance of Ethiopians is unacceptable. The Ministry of Labour
has dealt with them without knowing their exact number and the way to deport
them. What is happening with Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia will affect our
investments in their country on the popular level."
Ethiopia's government has been quick to crack down on any protest in front
of the Saudi embassy in Addis Ababa. The police arrested Getaneh Balcha,
head of the organisational affairs of the opposition Semayawi (Blue) Party.
After his release from prison, Balcha disappeared on December 7. His
whereabouts are unknown.
Overhaul
In April, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) published an important
report, Tricked and Trapped: Human Trafficking in the Middle East. The
report shows that the kafala system is "inherently problematic" since it
extracts "forced labour" and "reinforces underlying vulnerabilities of
migrant workers". These are strong words from a United Nations agency. The
ILO makes several recommendations that are likely to be ignored-reform the
kafala system, bring all workers under the protection of domestic labour
laws, increase the power of labour inspectorates for worksite monitoring,
and build up worker organisations. The ILO notes that "trade unions are
ideally placed to raise awareness, as they are mass membership organisations
with direct access to the workplace". This is precisely what migrant workers
around the world clamour for-not an abolishment of their right to work but
the creation of more just systems that leave them less vulnerable as they
work. This is clearly brought out in a new report, Claiming Rights: Domestic
Workers' Movements and Global Advances for Labour Reform (Human Rights
Watch, October 28, 2013).
On September 5, the ILO's Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic
Workers went into legal force. It is a broad-minded and powerful convention
that lays out the legal basis for domestic worker organisations-the kind of
force that would countervail the terrible conditions faced by Ethiopian
workers in Saudi Arabia. What is most ironic about the convention is that
the states of the Arabian peninsula, including Saudi Arabia, voted
enthusiastically for it.
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Received on Sun Jan 19 2014 - 07:15:57 EST