Category: World
Trafficking and Torturing Eritrean Refugees
Internationally ignored, life in Eritrea is brutal and shrouded in secrecy. The world is indifferent. The regime trusts nobody – even the UN’s special rapporteur on Eritrea, Sheila Keetharuth, has been denied a visa. Last year she stated: “basic tenets of the rule of law are not respected.” Following this, the Council “strongly condemned” Eritrea’s “continued widespread and systematic violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Violations include forced and child labor, “arbitrary detention, and severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and religion,” also violence against women, gender inequality, gender-based violence, female genital mutilation, and economic discrimination.
Eritrea is beset by fundamental problems, yet President Isaias Afwerki rejects all foreign intervention, including urgent food aid. Eritrea is ranked 77th (out of 78) in the 2013 Global Hunger Index and over 60% of the population is malnourished. In a report by risk analysis firm Maplecroft, it was identified as the country where child labor is most rampant. Children as young as 15 are routinely conscripted into the military, where, according to HRW, they are “subject to violence and ill-treatment. Beatings, torture, and prolonged incarcerations are common.” Military service is compulsory, and whilst 18 months is the official army time, many men, women and children spend their entire working lives in uniform, and are used as forced labor on essentially civilian jobs. Women recruits are victims of rape and sexual violence by officers. There is no constitution, functioning legislature, or independent judiciary – thousands are arrested and detained without trial, denied access to lawyers and their families, with no appeal against sweeping judgments. “Death in captivity is not unusual. Many prisoners disappear, their whereabouts and health unknown. Former prisoners describe being confined in vastly overcrowded underground cells or shipping containers, with no space to lie down, little or no light, oppressive heat or cold, and vermin.”
In 2001 all independent media outlets were closed and journalists arrested. There is no free press, radio or television. Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are banned, telecommunications and Internet are monitored and restricted, and parliamentary/presidential elections remain a dream. All power is concentrated in the hands of Afwerki, who along with his military muscle has held office since independence (from Ethiopia) in 1991. Predictably, all “promises of democracy, the foundation stone of the struggle, went out of the window… a gap was quickly created between ex-fighters and civilians, the diaspora were systematically prohibited from returning, and draconian measures were taken against the educated and those who voiced complaints.”
The economy is in tatters – GDP per capita is around $560 (World Bank), the State has destroyed the private sector, pouring funds into military mobilization. Eritrea has fought two ‘border’ wars with Ethiopia, with whom relations remain hostile following its neighbor’s failure to abide by the findings of an international boundary commission. Since independence, militarised politics has fashioned foreign policy; despite nationwide poverty the junta has found the means to engage in armed conflict with Yemen, Djibouti, Sudan, and has enmeshed itself in military mayhem in eastern Sudan, Darfur and Somalia.
Seeking sanctuary
Grinding poverty and the regime’s widespread violations of human rights are forcing tens of thousands of Eritreans – mostly young, many poorly educated women – to flee the country annually. According to the UNHCR over 305,000 (more than 5% of the six million population) left during the past decade. Last year 3,000 people every month headed for Egypt, Israel and The Gulf States, via Sudan and the Sinai Peninsula: many turn to criminal smugglers to facilitate passage, who charge extortionate “fees of between 1,000 and 5,000 USD.“ Large numbers fall victim to traffickers operating in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, who kidnap, rape and torture them.
Exploitation of the vulnerable is the name of the trafficking game. Eritrean military men exploit citizens’ desperation to escape military service and forced labour by charging high fees to smuggle them out of the country; corrupt officials in Egypt and Sudan – specifically security personnel stationed on the border checkpoints – facilitate refugees’ passage in exchange for bribes. A small number of asylum seekers end up in Ethiopia, but the vast majority find themselves in one of the overcrowded Shagarab refugee camps (covering three sites) in east Sudan. UNHCR estimates there are approximately 89,000 refugees in East Sudan most of whom are Eritrean. Approximately 30,000 live in Shagarab. The UNHCR states it is “seeing rising incidents of abductions and disappearances of mainly Eritrean refugees, allegedly involving border tribes, in eastern Sudan. This is occurring in and around refugee camps.”
Most of those kidnapped are “forcibly taken out of Sudan over the border into Egypt,” and on to Sinai. The traffickers inside Sudan are thought to be local Rashaida tribesmen (traditionally nomadic camel pastoralists of Eritrea and eastern Sudan), operating from Eritrea “to the refugee camps in Sudan and to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.”
“The majority of the victims report that they are sold between different criminal groups along the route,” including Bedouin gangs in Egypt, who, survivors state, are the main players in Sinai. In east Sudan kidnapped refugees “are subjected to brutal violence and inhuman treatment during attempts to extract ransom payments from their families.” “They raped women in front of us and left them naked. They hung us upside down. They beat and burnt us all over our bodies with cigarettes. My friend died in front of us and I wanted to lie down and die.”
Ransom is demanded from victims’ families – families living in penury under a brutal military dictatorship. “My daughter was crying and asking for help. She told me I had five days left to try and find USD 30,000 or else they will kill her. Not only do we not have the money to pay them, we don’t even have money to feed her children.”
The wife of a man kidnapped in January from Shagarab told Amnesty International the kidnappers telephoned her and demanded US $40,000. Captive in Sinai he was tortured; the kidnappers said he would be killed if she did not pay the ransom. “His parents are dead, his three sisters died in the [Eritrea-Ethiopia] war, he has no one but me. I don’t have any money; I can barely feed my four children. I don’t know what to do any more.”
The extortion technique is vicious: traffickers “hold a mobile phone line open to their hostages’ relatives as they physically abuse their victims.” As they scream in agony, the kidnappers demand payment. Many Eritreans tell of “their experiences of rape, burning, mutilation and deformation of limbs, electric shocks, and other forms of violence.”
Those who survive the Rashaida are sold to “criminal elements within the Bedouin community” and “are then forcibly transported [to Sinai] in harrowing journeys that last for several weeks,” where the nightmare continues.
Sina
i, Israel, and Xenophobia
After the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt. It is a lawless wilderness that has for years served as a transit route for people escaping persecution, political turmoil, hunger and poverty from the Horn of Africa. Refugees and asylum seekers are transported through the desert region in overcrowded “trucks and other vehicles, often with poor ventilation.” They receive little or no food and water, and severely malnourished and dehydrated some die en-route. Nobody knows how many. In Sinai “they are subjected to torture, forced marriage, rape or bonded labour,” held captive with the aim of extorting money from their relatives or communities. “Many former victims have recounted horrific tales of being held for months and repeatedly raped, of having plastic melted over their back and legs, and of being electrocuted and burned. Many have died at the hands of their tormentors.” Others report being urinated on and having fingernails pulled out. Rape of both men and women is apparently commonplace. “Some have allegedly been murdered because their families were unable to pay the ransom,” and even if ransoms are paid to secure their release, Amnesty has reports of people still being sold on to other traffickers.
The fortunate people who are released pass over the Egyptian border into Israel, where, traumatized and in need of support, they are unwelcome. Prime Minister Netanyahu described refugees and asylum-seekers as “infiltrators” who “threaten the Jewish character of Israel.” These victims of brutality and criminal torture are treated like criminals and herded into detention centers, albeit with a daytime open door policy. They are not regarded as refugees by the Israeli authorities but, as Netanyahu puts it, as “people who are breaking the law and whom we will deal with to the fullest extent of the law.” Comments by Eli Yishai, former Interior Minister, reveal a pervasive xenophobic attitude. He urged the government “to put every single one of the infiltrators in detention facilities, take their work permits, put them on aeroplanes and send them packing to their countries or a third country.”
As a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Israel is obliged to investigate asylum applications on an individual basis, yet it ignores such duties, and, far from examining individual claims, responds to all African refugees in the same dismissive manner. Asylum seekers cannot legally be deported if they face danger in their country of origin, so the Israelis have set up a ‘monetary incentive system’, whereby asylum seekers from Africa are offered US $3500 (up from $1500 last year) to leave. Most of those taking up the ‘incentive’ are Sudanese.
This January tens of thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers demonstrated in Tel-Aviv, calling for the Israeli government to grant them refugee status and to change its policy of detaining them in the Holot detention facility in the Negev. The UNHCR supports the people’s legitimate demands, and their representative in Israel, Walpurga Englbrecht, “has publicly stated that the process of indefinite detention in Holot does not comply with the norms of international human rights.”Eritreans make up an estimated 60% of the 60,000 illegal African migrants estimated to be in Israel, and yet to date only two Eritreans have been granted refugee status with its benefits of citizenship.
Abused and suppressed at home, the vulnerable are exploited from the beginning of their journey to the detained ignoble end in what UNHCR says, is one of the most unreported humanitarian crises in the world.
Israel needs to be pressurized to act with compassion and in accordance with its international obligations, and Egypt must act to root out traffickers operating in Sinai. HRW states that when Egyptian military were active there September-October last year, abductions dropped. Security personnel withdrew and the ransom phones resumed ringing. Despite overwhelming evidence of horrific abuses taking place within their jurisdiction, Egyptian forces have “taken no steps to end them.”
The siege state
Life in Eritrea though is the poisonous root of the refugees’ agonies, and all steps need to be taken to prevent it from becoming yet another failed state. In a positive sign last year the UN agreed a four-year $188 million ‘cooperation framework.’ “The UN will provide $50 million and attempt to raise the remaining $138 million from donor countries for capacity building, food security, environmental improvements, and social services.” However, without regime involvement, providing assistance presents “acute coordination challenges,” because of “access restrictions on international staff” and the “absence of up-to-date information” from the government.
Eritrea has become what the Crisis Group describes as “a siege state”, whose “government is suspicious of its own population, neighbors and the wider world.” Engagement by the international community; assessment of need, cooperation, dialogue and support is urgently needed; enforcement of the border ruling between Eritrea and Ethiopia would go a long way to building trust with foreign powers – an essential requirement in assessing and delivering aid and establishing relations.
May 2014
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/05/trafficking-and-torturing-eritrean-refugees/
Sharing: The Common-sense Solution: Inequality and the inevitable Collapse
Depending on who you listen to and how it is defined, worldwide income and wealth inequality is either more acute than it has ever been, or the gap between the rich and the rest is narrowing. The numbers may be distorted by conflicting statistics but what is indisputable is the shadow of extreme poverty that billions are living under, the economic induced anxiety millions more face every day, and the fact that the rich continue to get richer. Of the 7.2 billion people in the world, around half are living on less than $2.00 a day ̶ that’s the official barrier to the land of poverty set by the World Bank. Most of these people are to be found in the slums or villages of India, China, and the shantytowns and rural settlements of Sub-Saharan Africa, where 48% of the population live on less than $1.25 a day. [World Bank 2010]
Inequality, Noam Chomsky says, “has reached historic heights”, heights revealed by Oxfam in a recent report (using data from the Credit Suisse’s 2013 Global Wealth Report) by some startlingly unequal ‘facts’: “Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one per cent of the population. The wealth of the one per cent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population. The bottom half of the world’s population [3.6 billion] owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.” And the Washington Post report Credit Suisse’s findings that “the lower half of the global population possesses barely 1% of global wealth while the richest 10% of adults own 86% of all wealth, and the top 1% account for 46% of the total.” And in the Land of the Free, where anyone can supposedly become a zillionaire, income and wealth inequality is the most acute of any industrialised nation and the highest it’s been since 1928. The median wage for a working-man in the US today, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Steiglitz “is below its level in 1989”. But not to worry, the top 1% in America are doing just fine: Oxfam found that “the wealthiest one per cent captured 95 per cent of post-financial crisis [2009 onwards] growth, while the bottom 90 per cent became poorer.” To be born poor in the US is to remain poor: upward mobility remains virtually non-existent and ‘The American Dream’ little more than a frothy Hollywood fantasy.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes clear its view in a comprehensive report pointing to the stark differences existing in income within OECD countries; “it reaches 10 to 1 in Italy, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom,” leaps to “around 14 to 1 in Israel, Turkey, and the United States and “27 to 1 in Mexico and Chile.” It also lists America as having the highest poverty rate of all OECD countries (aside from Turkey), and slumbering near the bottom in terms of social justice.
Income imbalance is only part of the divisive socially unjust problem of inequality.
Wealth inequality is the other half of the puzzle, and it’s constantly growing, as French economist Thomas Piketty makes clear in his new book Capital and the 21st Century. “In societies where the rate of return on capital outstrips economic growth, wealth inequality ineluctably rises. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than economic output increases.” [New Statesman] Accelerating the social chasm that is wealth inequality, making it more difficult month on month, year on year to close the wealth gap and reduce the inequity. “In Europe the wealthiest 10% own 60 per cent of wealth, in the US its 70 per cent.” Piketty warns that if wealth inequality is allowed to grow, the consequences are “potentially terrifying”.
Discolouring democracy
Inequality has far-reaching social effects and erodes democracy. Grossly unequal societies have greater levels of alcohol and drug addiction, more crime, lower mortality rates, higher child pregnancies and lower literacy levels than less unequal countries.
Political influence/control is an added bonus for the rich; as for the rest, well they get to vote, but have little or no influence over government policy and overwhelmingly distrust politicians. With dire poverty, as experienced by the 3.5 billion living somehow, goes lack of education, vulnerability and exploitation, all of which discolours democracy.
Inequality is the plague of our times, a divisive epidemic caused by the unjust economic system – ‘Neo-Liberalism’, or market fundamentalism – which saturates the world. A system which, Noam Chomsky says, is “so dysfunctional that it cannot put eager hands to needed work,” as would happen “if the economy were designed to serve human need rather than create wealth beyond avarice for the privileged few.” It’s hard, he says, “to think of a more serious indictment of a socio-economic system.” The ‘dysfunctional’ socially unjust system has facilitated “very high concentrations of wealth, and with it political power, which yields [favourably skewed] legislation, which drives the cycle forward.”
Based as it is on competition, this ‘dysfunctional’ model breeds insecurity and stress, encourages separation and division leading to social tension and a lack of trust. A recent survey found that in America – where inequality is ‘off the scale’ – only 15% admitted trusting their neighbours, whereas in more equitable societies the number is closer to 60%. It encourages ‘short-termism’ and promotes the idea that everyone and everything is a commodity to be bought and sold at a profit; it has condemned billions to lives of stifling poverty, concentrated extreme wealth and power and poisoned the planet – perhaps irredeemably. The driving doctrine of neo-liberalism is selfishness, well-expressed Chomsky relates, “by Adam Smith (1723-1790) in what he called ‘the vile maxim of the masters of the mankind – all for ourselves and nothing for other people’.” [Ibid] It is a maxim religiously adhered to by the corporate proponents of the system and their political allies.
According to a small army of leading economists (many of whom forecast the 2008 crash) it is however a system on the brink of collapse
– again. And this time they say, it will be worse than 2008.
Peter Schiff, the best-selling author and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, says “the crisis is imminent… we’re broke [the US]… we owe trillions [US public debt is around 17.5 trillion to date]. Look at our budget deficit; look at the debt to GDP ratio, the unfunded liabilities. If we were in the Eurozone, they would kick us out.” [Money Morning] Schiff predicted the 2007 meltdown and believes that the 2008 stock market collapse “wasn’t the real crash. The real crash is coming. … And it will be worse than the Great Recession.” It is a view shared by others, including Robert Wiedemer, best-selling author of The Aftershock Investor, who points out the so-called recovery is “100 per-cent fake.” He explains that the GDP of America in 2013 “grew 2% or $350 billion, but we borrowed over $700 billion. That tells you right there that we are borrowing more than we are even growing.” He goes on to predict “the big one [collapse] is coming . . . we’re just pumping up the bubbles, and all that’s going to do is make them a lot worse when they pop.” [USAWatchdog] Marc Faber, financial adviser and fund manager, expresses the same view, saying, “we are in a gigantic financial asset bubble,” which “could burst any day,” as does renowned pundit, Warren Buffet, who is “pointing to an imminent and devastating crash.” [Iacknowledge] Given unprecedented levels of debt and youth unemployment, together with growing inequality and a flock of financial bubbles from bonds to housing – from Britain, where it is burgeoning ready to burst, to Australia and the US, via China and various points in between. This includes some developing countries that have been persuaded to adopt the same model, because according to the High Priests of Corporate Capitalism, ‘there is no alternative’. Well for the millions and billions living without, we had better find one and soon.
The collapse of this violent unjust monster seems inevitable, whether it arrives at the ATM in 2014, 2015 or a few years later.
There is of course a body of less pessimistic views. These come mainly from those in charge of western economies – treasury men and national bankers wedded to the comforting model of the familiar. Their political careers uppermost in their ambitious dishonest minds, they cling to a dying paradigm and cannot see a more socially just, unifying alternative. Notwithstanding their remonstrations, the urgent need for a new economic system, based on equality and fairness, is clear. The neo-liberal model is an unjust system that belongs in the past; it serves not the majority of people, the 99.9% who have had enough of social injustice, government duplicity and inequity and have taken to the streets in huge numbers in cities across the world to make known their collective view.
Sharing: the common-sense alternative
We are living in times of great change. Transitional times many of us believe, as we move from one model of civilization, built in a time when conflicting -isms dominated man’s thinking, and religious, political and social ideologies fought for dominance. New ideas, based on perennial principles of freedom, social justice and unity are increasingly influencing our thinking. Qualities like cooperation, tolerance and synthesis are at the heart of the new way. Such ideas run contrary to the existing socio-economic ideologies (with their focus on ‘the individual’, competition and nationalism), and are anathema to the reactionary, mainly conservative (large and small ‘c’) neo-liberal disciples, who resist change as they seek to maintain the ‘status quo’ that rewards them so very well.
The forecast economic crash is not an isolated collapse; it is a symptom of a broader movement of change and dissolution of inadequate structures. The old must give way in order to accommodate new truly democratic ways of organizing society, as the New Testament puts it: “Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.” [Matthew Chapter 9 Verse 11]
“If democracy is some day to regain control of capitalism, it must start by recognising that the concrete institutions in which democracy and capitalism are embodied need to be reinvented again and again.” [Thomas Piketty]
So dominated by market fundamental madness is our civilization, that in a world of plenty we allow 20,000 children to die every day of starvation and poverty related illnesses, and millions more to live unfulfilled stunted lives without access to education, health care and basic sanitation and shelter. This and a plethora of other poverty related issues must all come to an end: forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking of persons (primarily women and girls for prostitution and associated poisons); the displacement of indigenous people; the destruction of the environment; and the denial of people’s basic human rights..
Piketty asserts that “we need to rebuild the democratic institutions that can redistribute income and wealth.” Redistribution, or sharing, of resources, skills and knowledge is the commonsense option to the destructive neo-liberal model. Putting the principle of sharing at the heart of the economic system is a sane alternative that is increasingly gaining ground. A plethora of sharing initiatives have been set up, many of them local, from sharing unwanted items through various recycling websites, to car and bicycle sharing schemes. Systems of information sharing are growing, whether smallholder farmers in India spreading their wisdom and sharing their experiences through a mobile phone app, or the mighty United Nations. Above all sharing unites people, building relationships and creating the possibility for trust to flower, something inequality has destroyed.
Not only would sharing be a huge step towards alleviating worldwide poverty and reducing inequality, it would help in the creation of social justice: an essential pre-requisite in establishing peace
April 2014
http://www.nationofchange.org/sharing-common-sense-solution-1397832894
Inequality Disorder Indifference
You can see it glistening in colours red, white and blue, smell its choking fumes through the fog of ambition and greed and mac-taste its convenient food; fast and furious, no time to waste, to pause, to question and wonder. Market fundamentalism pervades all areas of contemporary civilization, has saturated every corner of the world, and created what Pope Francis recently described as the “Globalisation of Indifference”, a world in which “we have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business” [The Guardian[i]]. This extreme model of capitalism places profit, not people at the centre of everything. The wellbeing of human beings has become secondary to the aim of maximizing returns no matter the costs, human or environmental, remorselessly pursued by corporate governments and their multi-national bedmates.
One of the major “trends of globalization” is what P. Sainath[ii] calls “corporate globalism”. Today’s world is “marked by the collapse of restraint on corporate power, in every continent.” This is borne out by the fact that over half of “the world’s 100 wealthiest bodies are corporations” [Global Issues[iii]]. Organizations with enormous political influence who own media groups, essential utilities – water, electricity and gas, telephone and Internet companies – and control transportation systems. They are the major donors to political campaigns, they finance development projects and fund think tanks, they are the mining giants clearing indigenous people from ancestral land in search of minerals; and are the driving force behind the commodification of everything and everyone everywhere. They jangle the corporate politicians in their silk-lined pockets, influence policy and determine elections.
Inequality and social disorder
A river of destructive consequences flows from market fundamentalism: Inequality and the “Globalization of Indifference” are two of the more prominent, inter-related poisonous effects of the economic model that has served the bank accounts of a tiny minority well, failed the rest and polluted the planet. It sets people in constant competition, encourages greed and selfishness, fuelling division and conflict.
Income and wealth inequality are thought to be greater today than at any time in history, and in spite of the growth rhetoric from certain commercial corners of the world, the poor are poorer than ever. Noam Chomsky relates a study by Action for Children[iv], which concludes that “the gap between rich and poor [in Britain] is as wide today as it was in Victorian times,” and in some ways worse. “A million and a half families cannot provide their children with the diet fed to a similar child living in a Bethnal Green [London] Workhouse in 1876.” The chasm is wider than ever and the pace of disparity is quickening: under market fundamentalism “inequality has grown faster in the last 15 years than in the past 50” [P. Sainath], condemning hundreds of millions of people to a life of crippling poverty, exploitation and suffering and causing deep-seated social division and separation. It is a system that works against the underlying unity of humanity and generates tremendous tensions and resentment. Noam Chomsky[v] reports that a recent study by the Pew Foundation on “the greatest source of tension and conflict in American life”, found that for the first time ever, “concern over income inequality was way at the top [of the list].” This shift in collective awareness, he notes, is “a tribute to the Occupy movement, which put this strikingly critical fact of modern life on the agenda.”
America leads the industrialised rich world on every measure of inequality, followed by their 53rd state, Israel, and main international ally, Britain. At the other, more equal and just end of the income/wealth spectrum of developed nations, we find Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In these countries where the level of inequality is considerably lower, Richard Wilkinson[vi] (Emeritus Professor of Public Health, University of Nottingham) found there is less crime and far fewer murders. Children have a better life, people live longer; there are fewer mentally ill, drug and alcohol dependents. Literacy levels are higher; obesity numbers are lower; there are fewer teenage pregnancies; prison numbers are much lower (America is “off the scale” here too), and community life is stronger and more vibrant. In their detailed investigation Professor Wilkinson’s team discovered that, perhaps unsurprisingly, trust is related to equality. In America a mere 15% confessed to trusting others, whilst in more equal countries (on average) 60% of the population, trust their fellow citizens. Lack of trust fuels divisions, strengthening suspicions of the ‘other’ on the opposite side of the economic tracks, which aggravates social tensions and fuels criminality. Gated communities, with private security patrols, armed guards and alarm systems, (which randomly go off and are universally ignored), result from such division and distrust.
Inequality is a major cause of poverty and creates the marginalised majority, who have little or no influence on social policy or political decisions designed to maintain and strengthen existing divisions and reinforce concentrated power. Disempowered and ignored, this ocean of men, women and children suffer the indignity of what the Brazilian educationalist and philosopher, Paolo Freire[vii] calls “dehumanization”. They are the tens of millions of children living in rural India without sanitation; the families of five or six in Ethiopia who share a bed, have no access to decent health care, clean running water or electricity, whose children are forced to walk 20 km a day to attend poorly equipped schools without so much as a chair or desk. Or the 50 million plus in America living below the poverty line, who have no health care insurance, whilst the three leading pharmaceutical companies earn collective profits of $27,000 million (2010 figures); or the tea pickers in Assam, India earning US $1 a day forced to sell their daughters for $50 to an ‘agent’ offering a city job, only to traffic the child into the commercial sex industry and years of misery and abuse.
With poverty goes vulnerability and exploitation: the “dehumanization” of the oppressed at the hands of the oppressors.
Health and poverty
One of the starkest effects of this worldwide social injustice is the lack of adequate healthcare (although it is enshrined as a fundamental human right in the much ignored Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Poverty is “the world’s biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering” [World Health Organisation (WHO)[viii]]. It is the main reason “why babies are not vaccinated, why clean water and sanitation are not provided, why curative drugs and other treatments are
unavailable and why mothers die in childbirth,” and is the “underlying cause of reduced life expectancy, handicap, disability and starvation.” Poverty is the major contributor to mental illness, the cause of “stress, suicide, family disintegration and substance abuse.”
The overwhelming majority in the world live and die under the repressive shadow of poverty and inequity. They are oppressed, abused and exploited in varying degrees depending on the nation of birth, by the 1% or less who have accrued obscene levels of wealth and with it power and political influence. This tiny coterie of men (they are almost all men), suffer from what is perhaps the greatest vice of privilege: complacency. The ‘I’m all right Jack’ syndrome of cynicism and crippling selfishness, which allows 12.2 million children under the age of 5 to die every year in the developing world, “most of them from causes, which could be prevented for just a few US cents per child” [WHO]. These innocent children “die largely because of world indifference.” As a great teacher has said, “throughout the world there are men, women and little children who have not even the essentials to stay alive; they crowd the cities of many of the poorest countries in the world. This crime fills Me with shame. My brothers, how can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men?”
The “globalisation of indifference” is killing these children; they die for no other reason than being born into poverty and therefore denied the essentials to survive – food and clean water, proper sanitation and health care. And this in a world of plenty, a world overflowing with resources, where there is no need for anybody, not a single child to go hungry, or to be impoverished. All that is required is that the resources of the Earth be shared equitably throughout the world. It is a common-sense idea so simple as to be dismissed by those who abhor simplicity.
Growth feeding inequality
The highest levels of inequality worldwide (developed and developing nations) are to be found throughout Latin America: “there are 7 million more hungry people, 30 million more illiterate people, 10 million more families without homes, 40 million more unemployed persons than there were 20 years ago. There are 240 million human beings in Latin America without the necessities of life, and this when the region is richer and more stable than ever, according to the way the world sees it” [Juan de Dias Parra, head of the Latin American Association for Human Rights in Third World Traveler[ix]]. The economic model adopted throughout Latin America and the developing world is one aggressively promoted by the financiers and benefactors of development, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is a model that concentrates economic growth in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population – the already wealthy – and sets conditions of market access for western corporations on the look out for upwardly mobile consumers. A fact true in Sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia, where state owned corporations together with those in political power and (government subsidized) multi-nationals are the primary beneficiaries of economic development and so-called market liberalization (which usually entails handing out sweeteners to corporate man and withdrawing state support for the poor) within the national economy.
The development model sits within the broader economic ideology of market fundamentalism, which is building a world divided as never before. As Noam Chomsky says: “If you compare the percentage of world income held by the richest 20% and the poorest 20%, the gap has dramatically increased over the past thirty years. Comparing rich countries to poor countries, it’s about doubled. Comparing rich people to poor people within countries, it’s increased far more and is much sharper. That’s the consequence of a particular kind of growth,” which directs the lion’s share to the already comfortable and proclaims that ‘trickle down’ economics (a system which the 3.5 billion living on less than $2.50 a day will testify, has failed totally), a mythical place where the rich fill to overflowing and allow their leftovers to fall to the ‘poor’, will raise all ships.
Take India, a nation often cited as the golden child of development. Twenty years of economic growth, open markets, de-regulation and an access all areas business visa to foreign corporations, and yet the United Nations places India 136th out of 187 countries in the Human Development Index. Factor in inequality, including gender inequality, and the country plummets further down the table. With almost 500 million people living in poverty (on less than 50 US cents a day), India has more poor than all of Sub Saharan Africa combined; child malnutrition at 48% is the highest in the world, and despite two decades of growth, is only 1% less than it was in 1991. Due to crippling debt and government neglect, smallholder farmers are committing suicide at the unimaginable rate of two per hour, and an armed conflict rages throughout the north east and central forests of the country, not to mention the violent occupation of the disputed region of Kashmir. After twenty years of development, the nation is divided in a multitude of ways: social, gender, racial, religious and of course economic. The 100 richest Indians are said to own wealth equivalent to 25 per cent of the national gross domestic product (GDP = 1.84 trillion US dollars in 2012) and, where the richest man in the country, Mukesh Ambani (Chairman of Reliance Industries), takes home 18 million USD a year, while two-thirds of the population (around 900 million people) live on less than 2 dollars a day [World Bank]. Is this just, sane even? With such colossal levels of inequality and social injustice there will never be harmony, trust and peace – in India or for the world.
Sane step
Capitalism blended liberally with the seeds of social justice and fundamental human rights (shelter, food, health care and education) – let’s suggest a 40/60 split – would be a sane step towards much needed economic reform and a more humane model that places the needs and well-being of the people at its heart. But the extreme type of unrestrained market capitalism that allows children in their millions to die of starvation whilst food rots in storehouses, condemns women – in their millions – to lives of servitude and slavery, and men – in their millions – to live undignified, hopeless lives totally devoid of creativity, has been allowed to poison all areas of life, including education and health care. It is sold to the world as the only logical practical economic model and the ugly sisters of competition and separation are relentlessly promoted in all areas of life.
There is however a change of heart sweeping the world, a new consciousness of synthesis, tolerance and cooperation is sighted: the people, the oppressed 99.9% have had enough. Change from a divisive system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few whilst oppressing billions to an alternative, just model based on equity, social justice and freedom is the need of the time and the rightful cry of millions protesting around the world.
February 2014
Division and injustice: Worldwide Inequality
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Where and to whom one is born is, it seems, arbitrary, chance, fate or karma being the divine decision maker. Wake from innocence to middle class parents in one of the developed wealthy nations of the world, and be blessed with opportunity, good health care and education and a life of profitable possibilities. Find yourself in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya or the daughter of tea pickers in Assam, India, and see before you: poverty, uncertainty and the threat of extreme exploitation.
Inequality: The Plague of the times
We live in a world rife with inequality (wealth and income, power and influence); it is the underlying cause of deep-seated social tensions, community divisions and a range of poisons causing terrible suffering to millions of people.
The disparity between the wealthy minority and the billions living in suffocating poverty is greater than it has ever been. Worldwide it is estimated that the wealthiest 10% owns 85% of global household wealth. The UC Atlas of Global Inequality[i] states that the “three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 47 countries with the least GDP,” and reports that “The richest 2% of the world population own more than 51% of the global assets”. At the other more densely populated, less perfumed end of the scale, Global Issues[ii] report that: almost half the world’s people (over 3.5 billion) live on less than $2.50 a day; and 80% live on less than $10 a day. The largest proportion of those living in poverty are in India, rural China and Sub-Saharan Africa, where despite the fact that some countries within the last decade or two have seen economic growth, poverty rates have remained unchanged with some countries actually “seeing an increase in the percentage of their population living in extreme poverty” [World Bank study Africa Pulse[iii]]. Prompting the omnipresent question: who is this economic growth for; who, under the current development model, is benefiting?
Discussing the possibilities of change to a more equitable world, UNICEF[iv] paints a rather bleak picture; assuming the perpetuation of the current economic model, they estimate “that it would take more than 800 years for the bottom billion to achieve ten percent of global income under the current rate of change.”
The world of income and wealth inequality is awash with unbelievable statistics. Figures disclosed by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic and reported by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz[v], are shocking and revealing: “Eight percent of humanity takes home 50% of global income, the top 1 percent alone takes home 15 percent.” America, he states, “provides a particularly grim example for the world.” It is where income and wealth inequality reach their zenith, and where one in four children live in poverty. The country’s wealthiest 1% (incomes above $394,000) take “home 22 percent of the nation’s income”; the top 0.1 percent, make do with a colossal 11 percent. Stieglitz goes on to make the staggering point that an average American worker earns less today than he did 45 years ago (inflation adjusted), and that men without a University degree, earn “almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.”
Why are millions of Americans not marching in the streets demanding justice and equitable living one wonders? Physically exhausted, emotionally drained and mentally put to sleep, most do not have the time or the energy to revolt.
The figures depicting poverty and hardship are many and varied, shocking to all: over 20% of the world’s population (that’s 1.4 billion people) live on less than $1.25 a day, 75 cents below the official World Bank poverty threshold; UNICEF states that 22,000 children (under the age of five; if it was 6, or 7, the numbers would be even higher) die every day due to poverty related issues. They “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”
Of the two billion children in the world, half are currently living their lives in extreme poverty, with limited or no access to clean water or sanitation, health care and education worth the name. The greatest concentrations of people living below the banks $2 a day poverty line are to be found in rural areas where three in every four are to be found. Life is little better in the cities where over half the world’s 7.2 billion population now live, one in three of whom are living in a slum.
The unequal are always with us
It may well be true that income and wealth inequality has always existed; the industrial revolution in Britain and America created sharp inequities. However, the worldwide gap between the “rich and the rest” as Stieglitz puts it, “widened even more, right up through about World War II.” But it took the combined political idealism of Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of Britain 1979–1990) and President Ronald Reagan (President of USA 1981–1989) to hyper-accelerate levels of inequality, and set the divisive competitive tone for the years that followed. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) states that income inequality “first started to rise in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel).” The ratio between the average incomes of the top 5% to the bottom 5% in the world increased from 78 to 1 in 1988, to 114 to 1 in 1993. During the Thatcher/Reagan reign, Income tax was lowered for higher earners, trade unions were broken and the financial sector was deregulated with, we now know, devastating consequences. The inequality “trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s,” and continues to poison the social fabric of countries throughout the world, including more egalitarian nations, like Sweden, Finland, Germany and Denmark.
Stieglitz relays that, “from 1988 to 2008, Mr. Milanovic found, people in the world’s top 1 percent saw their incomes increase by 60 percent, while those in the bottom 5 percent had no change in their income. In America, home to the 2008 recession, from 2009 to 2012, incomes of the top 1% – many of whom no doubt had a greedy hand in the causes of the melt down, “increased more than 31%, while the incomes of the 99% grew 0.4% – less than half a percentage point” [Los Angeles Times[vi]].
Flowing from wealth and income inequality (combining to create the powerful elite), is the inequitable use and distribution of natural resources; water and food, minerals, and we could add knowledge, information, technology and skills. The United States, for example, with a mere 5% of the world’s population, uses 30% of its natural resources; the 25% of people living in developed countries use 80% of the world’s non-fuel minerals. Many of these are found in poor developing countries, which have little or no control over their resources and on the whole benefit little from their extraction and sale. Not only do the wealth
y countries usurp and waste 80% of the world’s resources, but their “voracious consumption of resources cannot be sustained” [United Nations (UN)[vii]]
Inequality, vulnerability exploitation
The extreme dualities of poverty and wealth inevitably create the vulnerable and the powerful, the abuser and the abused. There are wide ranging consequences of such social division: the erosion, or denial of democracy – for with money comes power and with power political influence, making it inevitable that “inequality reinforces itself by corroding our political system and our democratic governance,” [Joseph Stieglitz]. Man-made climate change (though affecting everyone), it is the poorest people living in the poorest regions who are suffering and will increasingly suffer most acutely, as a recent report by The World Bank Group makes clear; stating “that global warming will lead to a major food-crisis in the future. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are expected to be the worst-hit” [Nature World News[viii]]. That is, the regions with the largest concentrations of people living in utter poverty.
One of the gravest consequences of this social-economic imbalance is the worldwide movement of people, from impoverished communities with few employment opportunities where education is poor, to a rich or richer region or nation. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM)[ix] estimates there to be, over “105 million persons [excluding children] working in a country other than their country of birth.” Women make up the lions share of this army of workers, many of whom are vulnerable to trafficking. The US State Department estimates that up to 800,000 persons are trafficked every year (although the figure is probably considerably higher): 80% of victims are women, the vast majority of which are sold into the commercial sex industry. Trafficking (which is the second most widespread and profitable worldwide criminal activity) often arises from debt bondage, resulting in forced labour and is nothing less than modern day slavery. There are thought to be more people living as slaves (that’s people held against their will, forced to work and paid nothing) now than at ant time in history, and for those with the means they are cheap; on average, $90 will buy you a human being [Free the slaves[x]].
Working within an economic system, that disempowers the disadvantaged, migrant workers form an economic lifeline for millions of families. In 2012 they sent, “$406 billion in savings to their families in developing countries” [The World Bank[xi]]. Money earned through domestic servitude, with its inherent dangers of mistreatment, or construction work in appalling, often dangerous conditions: remittances, which may enable their children to eat three meals a day, to go to school and learn to read, or perhaps allow for an elderly parent to receive health care. Essentials: indeed fundamental human rights that should be met by the nation state and if not, more broadly by the international community.
It is poverty in its many manifestations – poor education and health care, poor sanitation and water supplies, poor living conditions: poor or low self-esteem and an absence of hope – which drives migration, and creates the environment in which trafficking and extreme exploitation can flourish. The vulnerable are vulnerable in a variety of ways: to exploitation, to slavery, to sexual abuse, to the effects of natural disasters and to political and economic manipulation.
In a world of plenty why are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people vulnerable at all? The vulnerable and exploited exist because of an inherently unjust social-economic system, which has caused extreme global inequality and built a divided fractured world society.
Inequality, sharing justice
The complacent party line of the wealthy and ruling elite is that “there is no alternative (TINA)” to the present unhealthy, divisive economic model. The advocates of market fundamentalism have sought to totally close down the intellectual space for creative enquiry and discourse. If indeed ‘there is no alternative’, inequality and poverty will continue to increase, building intensely “divided societies, [where] the rich will hunker in gated communities, almost completely separated from the poor, whose lives will be almost unfathomable to them, and vice versa. I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns” [Joseph Stieglitz]. The resulting social injustice of such a horrific future would strengthen existing divisions, creating resentment, anger and potentially violent conflict.
The cherished economic model of choice – market fundamentalism, used as a paradigm for worldwide development has, as UNICEF makes clear, failed and continues to fail, both the people and the planet. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy, and leads us to question as UNICEF does “the current development model (development for whom?), which has accrued [growth] mostly to the wealthiest billion” people. “Not only does inequality slow economic growth, but it results in health and social problems and generates political instability. Inequality is dysfunctional, and there is a grave need to place equity at the center of the development agenda,” they correctly assert. A more just and humane model of development, based on the equitable distribution of the world’s resources, is a viable alternative whose time I suggest has come.
The common-sense idea of sharing the food and water, the resources knowledge, skills, ideas and technology of the world, as the guiding principle for development and economic life, is supported by Frances Stewart, Professor Emeritus at Oxford Department of International Development. She believes that “poverty can be eliminated. Essentially, what is needed is a significant reduction in the quite obscene levels of inequality that prevail today” [The Guardian[xii]]. The distribution of resources “from the privileged to the deprived, would be enough to eliminate poverty in high and middle income countries,” she asserts. Not simply the redistribution of wealth but resources more broadly, to, as she puts it, “improve the health, the education, the assets and the productivity of the poor so that the improving of their lives can become self sustaining.” Expanded and imaginatively applied to address the needs of the poorest people in the poorest nations, such a simple model, based on social justice and equality, would meet peoples basic rights and needs, reduce vulnerability and exploitation, ease social tensions and slowly establish trust and unity.
November 2013
Abject poverty or Domestic Servitude
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They work as maids, housekeepers, cleaners; they take care of children, the elderly and infirmed for wealthy and middle class families in rich and upwardly mobile nations. They are found throughout the world: in the G20 countries and the Gulf States, Latin America (where they account for 60% of internal and international migrants), and developing countries in Africa and Asia where vast numbers of poor and vulnerable live alongside the privileged few. They walk the dogs, iron the designer shirts, collect the privately educated children from school in London and New York: they clean the homes and are on 24 hour call to comfort the elderly in Paris and Dubai, Kuwait City and Tokyo: they cook and serve in Singapore City, New Delhi and Moscow.
They are the domestic workers of the world: essential employees, numbering anything between 53 and 100 million people (excluding children), 83% of whom are women. And, due to a range of social and economic factors, including demographic, social and employment trends, an aging population in many regions, more women working outside the home, together with the decline in state provision of care, and grinding poverty in many source countries, their numbers are growing: between “the mid 1990s and 2010, there was an increase of more than 19 million domestic workers worldwide”, The International Labour Organisation[i] (ILO) states. Demand is particularly strong in “North America, wealthier Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea, and in many Arab States”. [Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising (WIEGO) report[ii]]
They live outside the economic growth bubble, in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, as well as India, Bangladesh and Nepal, and to a lesser degree the Horn of Africa countries of Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. They constitute around 8% of the total worldwide female workforce, (that’s one in 13); it’s 27% in Latin America and the Caribbean (where 20 million work). But the region with the highest number of migrant domestic workers as a percentage of the total workforce is the Gulf States where it is almost one in three: mistreatment and abuse is widespread and labour laws for domestics are amongst the weakest in the world.
Legally neglected, socially maligned
Universally undervalued, domestic work is unregulated and poorly paid: in Latin America for example, the average income is 60% lower than for women employed in other areas, and often the tiny salary is not paid. Human Rights Watch[iii] (HRW) records that “unpaid wages – for months and sometimes years— are one of the most common labor abuses faced by domestic workers.” Employers withhold wages, HRW states, to prevent “workers leaving to find alternative employment”. Workers often work excessively long hours without breaks, days off or holidays: live-in staff are considered on call 24 hours, seven days a week. They may be confined to the house of their employer for months or even years on end, making them extremely vulnerable to mistreatment. Such exploitation is particularly widespread within the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, where the widely condemned Kafala sponsorship system is employed. This creates a power imbalance between worker and employer by effectively granting ownership of the migrant to the sponsor, endorsing modern day slavery.
Many governments do not regard domestic service as ‘work’, and conveniently exclude the millions providing indispensable care from national labour laws, thus offering them no protection. In Egypt for example, where there are 245,000 domestic workers, they are completely excluded form the any legislation; Israel offers no legal framework for workers; in Lebanon, where 200,000 migrant domestics live and work, they are routinely denied their rights. In fact only 10% of domestic workers worldwide “are covered by general labour legislation to the same extent as other workers, [and] more than one quarter are completely excluded from national labour legislation” all together [ILO report]. And in the few countries that do provide legislative protection enforcement is poor or non-existent. Officials often dismiss domestic’s complaints and reports of mistreatment.
In an attempt to rectify this legal injustice, in 2011 the ILO adopted the Domestic Workers Convention 189[iv]. The treaty – long overdue – offers protection to those in domestic service equivalent to workers in other sectors. The groundbreaking accord, which entered into legal force on 5th September 2013, covers the basic areas of employment, such as pay and hours of work, social security entitlement, health and safety, as well as specific issues relating to migrant work: withholding passports by employers, and outlawing the deduction of agency fees from salaries, which causes many women to fall into debt bondage. The lack of legal support for domestic workers, particularly for migrants, creates opportunities for trafficking, (the second most widespread and profitable organized criminal activity in the world), leading to sexual enslavement and forced labour.
Without ratification and implementation by national governments, the ILO pact means nothing. If implemented – and all pressure should be brought to bear on nation states to do so – domestic workers would for the first time have protection in, and recourse to, International law. To date, ten countries have ratified the treaty, with more – the European Union amongst them – in the process of completion. Inevitably, governments in Asia and the Middle East (where some of the worse abuse occurs), have not signed up. There is however a new and powerful force active throughout the world: ‘people power’ is the generic term often applied to this worldwide movement of collective action. In a positive sign of the times, The International Trade Union Confederation[v] reports that “Labour leaders from more than 40 countries met in Montevideo from October 26 to 28 to establish the International Domestic Workers Federation to organize domestic workers worldwide, share strategies across regions, and advocate for their rights…. In the past two years, 25 countries improved legal protections for domestic workers, with many of the strongest reforms in Latin America.”
Sri Lanka (Al Jazeera[vi] relay) has “banned its nationals under the age of 25 from working as maids in Saudi Arabia after a Sri Lankan maid was beheaded last year, [despite a chorus of pleas for Saudi Arabian authorities to step in and reconsider Rizana Nafeek’s death sentence] for allegedly killing a Saudi baby she was tasked with caring for”, something she denied. “Similar disputes have occurred between Indonesia and Qatar, Indonesia and Kuwait, and Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates”. Last year Nepal banned women under 30 from working in Gulf countries due to abuse by employers and the Ethiopian government, responding to wide-ranging abuse suffered by many domestic workers, has recently “banned its citizens from travelling abroad to look for work, because [according to the regime]…Ethiopians had lost their lives or undergone untold physical and psychological trauma because of illegal trafficking” [BBC[vii] report]. Whilst such steps reflect the concern now being shown by certain governments, the movement of migrants living in extreme poverty from countries where there are no employment opportunities is unlikely to be affected by such bans.
Vulnerable, exploited and abused
Some of the millions in domestic service throughout the world are lucky and are treated well, very many are not. Physical, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of employers is widespread. Domestic workers interviewed by HRW have reported a “barrage of verbal and psychological abuse as well as physical violence from their employers ranging from slaps to severe burnings and beatings using hot irons, shoes, belts, sticks, electrical cords, and other household items.” Sexual harassment and violence by recruiters and employers’ family members is also a risk. Phally migrated from Cambodia to Malaysia in 2010. Upon arrival “her passport was handed over to her Malaysian agency. Her employer [a 60 year old man] made her work at his house and his shoe shop in Ipoh, Perak, she only slept between four and six hours daily [and] was not paid her monthly salary. After two months, her employer started to rape her. He would also ask her to sit next to him and watch television and then demand to have sex with her. When she refused, he would beat her,” reports the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN)[viii].
Such distressing accounts are commonplace. Tenaganita[ix], a Malaysian women’s group that campaigns for the rights of migrant workers, says that up to “three million women migrant workers have been lured into the country [Malaysia]. But many now find themselves suffering the most appalling abuses and are detained in camps as undesirables”. Within the Gulf States (including Yemen) physical abuse and barbaric mistreatment of migrant domestic workers is, it seems, endemic: Emirates 24/7[x] reports the barbaric story of the Saudi employer of a Sri Lankan maid, who hammered 19 heated nails into her body. “The nails were in her arms, legs and forehead.” She said, “the husband and wife couple who employed her regularly beat her up and their seven children threatened to kill her.” The chairperson of Gabriela UAE, a chapter of a Philippines women’s group working in the Gulf State relays that, “housemaids are classified like slaves”. She related the case of a young domestic: “The sponsor didn’t [pay] her salary for almost eight months and he was trying to rape the girl,” who in fear of her life “was sleeping with a knife under her pillow”[Middle East Voices[xi]].
Agents working in source countries promise legitimate well-paid employment, but all too often betray the innocent and trusting (and their impoverished families), and with their partners in the destination state, sell them into slavery. Sreekala from India, “worked in Kuwait in 2010” [Equal Times[xii] relay]. Upon arrival the “recruitment” agent sold her for 30 Dinars ($105) to “an Arab man” who denied her food, beat her and forced her to work “long working hours until 02.00 am, and locked her in the house when the employer went on holiday.” She was completely isolated and repeatedly threatened by her employer, who said: “If they killed me, they could disguise my death as a car accident or by saying that I fell over”.
In addition to women, there are hundreds of thousands of young girls employed in domestic work. The average age of children employed is between 12–17 years old; however, some are as young as 5 and a “third (3.5 million) are between ages 5 and 11 years”. There are thought to be 175,000 under 18 year-olds working in Central America and a staggering 688,000 in Indonesia alone (ILO report). Alarmingly, whilst child labour is falling in other sectors, the numbers of children in domestic work has increased, growing by 9% between 2008 and 2012 [HRW[xiii] report]. Many employers prefer children; they pay them less and find them easier to control and, let us add, exploit. HRW report that in Indonesia for example, “child domestic workers interviewed earned (US$0.02-0.05) an hour, which was one-tenth of the normal minimum wage. National laws setting a minimum age for employment are often not enforced for domestic work, allowing employers to exploit children with no consequences.” Children in domestic employment are commonly hidden from public view and at heightened risk of abuse: far from home they are easily exploited and manipulated by agents and employers.
The widespread abuse suffered by domestic workers calls for the urgent enforcement of proper labour laws, the ratification of ILO convention 189 and fundamental changes in attitudes towards women and children workers, including racism, class/caste and gender prejudice.
Driving exploitation
The poisonous feeding ground forcing millions of children and women into lives of enslavement and exploitation is inequality. It is the fundamental cause impelling parents to sell their children and the underlying social injustice driving hundreds of thousands of women away from their families and homes to take up domestic work. It is the plague of our times: it divides and separates communities and nations, instilling despondency, resentment and anger amongst the dispossessed (the 99.9%), feeding complacency and arrogance amongst the coterie of economically privileged.
Vulnerable and easily exploited, the millions of women and children meeting the domestic needs of the economically better off, are victims of a global socio-economic system that has trapped hundreds of millions into poverty and continues to fuel stellar levels of inequality.
November 2013
https://www.opendemocracy.net/graham-peebles/‘global-woman’-abject-poverty-or-domestic-servitude
Killed Beaten Raped: Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia
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With few opportunities at home, millions of poor, desperate men and women from South East Asia and the horn of Africa migrate annually to Saudi Arabia. Vulnerable at home and vulnerable abroad where many are enslaved and badly abused, some killed. Slavery is woven into the fabric of the psyche of the kingdom; according to Saudi scholar Ali al-Ahmed, a “culture of slavery pervades the country”[The Guardian[i]], and although banned in 1964 (when it is thought there were 30,000 slaves in the country) the barbaric practice of owning a fellow human being still exists in the form of the internationally condemned kafala sponsorship system. By tying the residency status of migrant workers to their employers, the system grants the latter total control, amounting to ownership.
Under the scheme employers confiscate passports, money and mobile phones of new arrivals; workers who want to change jobs or leave the country must seek their employer’s, consent who universally refuse to give it. A “sub-contracting” scheme is also in operation, with employers selling workers on. The Dickensian system, which facilitates the abuse suffered by migrant workers, particularly domestic staff, needs to be banned as a matter of urgency; labour laws protecting migrant workers introduced and enforced, and full access to consulate support made available.
Oil rich and Abusive
Migrant workers make up a third (8 million) of the population and over half the workforce in Saudi Arabia; they are mainly unskilled labourers and domestic workers (jobs the Saudis don’t want to do), “are inadequately protected by labour laws and are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by their employers” [Amnesty International[ii]], including: excessive working hours, up to 15 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week; wages withheld for months or years on end; forced confinement; food deprivation; and severe psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. Women domestic workers “are also at particular risk of sexual violence and other abuses.” A study by the Philippines based Committee on Workers Overseas Welfare[iii] says, “70% of [Filipino] workers employed as caregivers or without a specific work qualification suffers continuous physical and psychological harassment,” in the oil rich gulf state [report by Asia News[iv]]. Lorraine, a 27-year old Filipino arrived in Saudi Arabia in 2010. ‘When my boss came to pick me up’ – she says – ‘he tried to touch me at once to see if I was available. In the first weeks I constantly suffered his advances, which became more insistent every time I refused.’ In nine months of employment Lorraine was raped five times.” She was beaten and insulted by the man’s wife and fed on bread and leftovers.
Large numbers of migrant workers relate similar stories, horrific experiences causing many to fall into ill health and large numbers to commit suicide; “scores of Asian and African domestic workers have been reported to have committed suicide in Saudi Arabia over the past years because of mistreatment and other factors” [Emirates 24/7[v]]. One such was an Ethiopian woman[vi] (who remains anonymous), working as a maid in the northern province of Tabarja: she hanged herself in her employer’s home.
Racism is rife throughout the kingdom, from the royal top to the rural bottom; it forms part of “a nefarious cocktail of rigid sectarianism, classism, clannism, and state-sponsored xenophobia” [Al Jazeera[vii]] that underpins extreme exploitation. All migrant workers are tarnished as “black” – (a national insult relating to marginalised groups), with Ethiopians sitting at the bottom of a hierarchy of prejudice that places migrants from the Philippines, Malaysia and Sri Lanka ahead of their African cousins. Ethiopians suffer the double injustice of being mistreated by their employers and agents, and neglected by their own notoriously duplicitous government – The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) – that offers their nationals little or no consulate support.
There is no solace allowed even in their religion. Many African workers are Christians, but “absolutely no churches are officially allowed. As recently as this April, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti [the most senior and most influential Sunni Muslim religious and legal authority in the country] declared that all churches in the Arabian Peninsula must be destroyed” [All Africa[viii]]. Ethiopian migrants are commonly Orthodox Christians (many devoutly religious); they suffer extreme discrimination and repression by the intolerant authoritarian Saudi regime. In February this year the Islamic religious police or Mutaween, (an extreme body responsible for the enforcement of Shia law in Arab States) raided an Ethiopian Christian prayer meeting and made mass arrests; six months earlier 35 Ethiopians were arrested and deported for engaging in Christian worship.
Judicial indifference Capital punishment
In addition to suffering extreme discrimination and violent mistreatment, migrant workers (mainly domestic) who manage to escape abusive employers, are often victims of spurious criminal accusations. “Employers may accuse domestic workers, especially those from Indonesia, of witchcraft. Victims of rape and sexual assault are at risk of being accused of adultery and fornication” [The Guardian[ix]]. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the “Saudi justice system is characterised by arbitrary arrests, unfair trials and harsh punishments………[the] criminal justice system violates the most basic international human rights standards and detainees routinely face systematic violations of due process and fair trial rights.”
Migrants, who often don’t speak the language, are denied access to translators and lawyers and frequently are not allowed to contact their embassies. In 2011 an Indonesian 54-year old worker Ruyati Binti Satubi Saruna, was tried, sentenced and decapitated without being able to consult her g
overnment More than “45 [Indonesian] foreign maids are facing execution on death row” as well as women from “Sri Lankan, Filipina, Indian and Ethiopian maids.” Saudi families are known to ask for up to US $2 million in blood money in exchange for the release of incarcerated (falsely accused) women awaiting execution.
In 2012 The Guardian reported, “Saudi Arabia executed at least 69 people [says HRW]. The previous year it executed at least 79, including five women, [Amnesty International]. The death toll included one woman beheaded for witchcraft and sorcery.” The Saudi authorities are not forthcoming with the total numbers imprisoned and living under the shadow of the death penalty; however, “Amnesty International said it knew of more than 120 people – mostly foreign nationals – on death row.”
Violent expulsions
Over a million Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos, Nepalis, Pakistanis and Yemenis have been repatriated since the “correction campaign,” (arrest and expulsion) was enforced on 4th November against migrants without the required legal documentation. The expulsions are largely supported by Saudi society; many feel the number of migrants has grown out of control since the oil boom of the late 1970s and that the huge numbers of migrants in the kingdom has impacted negatively on community life. With 12% total unemployment, 25% – 30% for under 30 year olds, it is hoped the process of “clearing” will allow Saudi’s to find more work.
During the crackdown migrants of different nationalities report being mistreated by security personnel and civilian vigilante groups; workers from the Philippines (numbering around 660,000) report being abused and “treated like animals”. Ethiopians (of whom 100,000 have been repatriated), with and without visas have been specifically targeted; men and women have been dragged through the streets; beaten, raped and according to Esat TV, dozens have been killed, including women. Witnesses report seeing two Ethiopian women killed in Mekreyement, Shababiya by Saudi military vehicles, and another beaten to death with an iron by soldiers [Esat TV[x]].
Confined to repatriation centres that are little more than prison camps, migrants relayed accounts of extreme mistreatment, poor sanitation, lack of food and health care. “Keeping thousands of people in makeshift centers without adequate food, shelter, or medical attention could lead to humanitarian disaster”[HRW[xi]]. According to reports reaching Esat, thousands are hastily being taken from the camps to the Yemen border and left without any provisions. Many returnees to Ethiopia tell of violent treatment, and (AllAfrica reports), carry with them scars and fresh wounds from beatings by [Saudi] employers, police and/or civilian mobs – who armed with sticks, swords, machetes, and firearms [HRW], have been allowed, indeed encouraged by the authorities to attack, murder and rape innocent Ethiopians. Men and women whom the Saudi media accuses of crimes, alcohol use and prostitution, a prejudicial attitude churned out by the TV and press that is shared by many Saudis: “they’d rather sit here and do nothing than go home because maybe they will get some kind of work…in Ethiopia there is nothing for them”, a local said [The Guardian[xii]].
Leading up to the routing of migrants the media and “Saudi authorities have spent months branding foreign workers as criminals……….and stirring up anti-migrant sentiment to justify the labor crackdown.” Antagonism between Ethiopians and Saudis has been fanned by “local press reports blaming Ethiopian female domestic workers for brutal attacks against Saudi employers. In July, Saudi officials claimed that over 200 Ethiopian women had been detained in two months for ‘psychological problems,’ leading the labor ministry to temporarily ban the recruitment of Ethiopian workers to the country.” “Psychological problems” caused undoubtedly by abusive employers. The Saudi government “needs to rein in Saudi citizens who are attacking foreign workers” [HRW[xiii]], and Investigations should be instigated to prosecute those responsible for the violence.
The hundreds of thousands being repatriated made the journey from Asia, Yemen and the horn of Africa because they had no options at home. As “reverse migration”, not only from Saudi Arabia, but also from Bhutan and Oman, takes effect, what awaits these men and women upon their return?
Over 190,000 Yemeni migrant workers, mostly employed in construction, have been sent home, causing “severe deterioration in living conditions in Yemen”[Press TV[xiv]]. From the glass and steel mountains of Jeddah and Riyadh they were sending up to USD 200 a month to their families, money desperately needed for daily living. The International Organization for Migration (IOM)[xv] says “we are looking at approximately USD 5 million lost in remittances [to Yemen] for the months of October and November alone.” Most Yemenis “are returning to areas with high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition. The massive loss of income will inevitably exacerbate this situation.” In June Filipino migrants sent over USD 2 billion home, which was “an all-time record. It was better than all foreign investments (direct and indirect) combined” [Arab News[xvi]]. In 2011 migrant workers residing in Saudi Arabia sent USD 35.7 billion[xvii] (double what it was just two decades ago) to their families. The huge amount flowing out of the country makes Saudi Arabia the second highest source of overseas payments in the world – the first being America. The single biggest recipient, with 30% of the total is India, (made up of millions of individual amounts averaging USD 30), followed by Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines with almost USD 9 billion each.
The IOM has been providing assistance to Yemeni returnees, “including health care, water, food, and immediate necessities such as clothing and footwear,” and offers much needed support to Ethiopian returnees: “overnight accommodation, food, water, shoes and money for transport to their places of origin.” Essential short term aid, which will be gratefully received; however, the immediate and ongoing hardships they and their families face, the struggle of living without work, opportunities or hope have gone nowhere. It is these underlying issues that make the disadvantaged vulnerable, and causes people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and South East Asia to leave their homes and seek work elsewhere.
Unless the root causes, poverty, poor education and lack of opportunities, together with extreme social and economic inequality, are dealt with, the danger is that many of those being repatriated will endeavor to migrate elsewhere, perhaps illegally with the aid of criminal gangs, placing themselves at risk of further exploitation, abuse and even death.
The ‘migrant crackdown’ in Saudi Arabia has unearthed a plet
hora of poisonous practices, racism, hate and abusive methods in the country; the violence meted out by security personnel and civilian gangs on the city streets has revealed publicly the level of extreme mistreatment suffered by thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of domestic workers hidden from view, trapped and enslaved. It is a society operating in defiance of all manner of human rights that has been clearly seen and exposed; as the thousands of Ethiopians protesting outside Saudi Arabian embassies across the world have chanted; “shame on you, shame on you, shame on you.”
November 2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/migrant-workers-in-saudi-arabia/
Trading Women for Profit: The Commodification of Everything and Everyone
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The act of buying and selling sits at the very heart of the global economy. A commercially motivated system, that P. Sainath rightly describes as “Market Fundamentalism”, in which competition and conservative uniformity are central elements. Creative independent thinking and originality are anathema to this relentless homogenous machine, which breeds conformity, crushes individuality and “Borg-like”, assimilates all into ‘The Collective’. The aim of all traders is to buy cheap and sell for the highest price possible; keep costs low, (including workers’ wages) and maximise profits for stockholders, directors and senior management. This methodology is applied no matter the commodity: cars, mobile phones, tomatoes, lipstick, fridges, land or human beings.
Trading in people – historically known as slavery – is now called trafficking. It is a term which the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)[i] says “can be misleading: it places emphasis on the transaction aspects of a crime that is more accurately described as enslavement”. The worldwide spread of market fundamentalism (or globalization), Victor Malerek in The Natashas: Inside the Global Sex Trade states, “has created people who are vulnerable and easily enslaved”, giving rise, to there being “more human slaves in the world today than ever before in history”. And apparently they are cheaper than they have ever been.
Modern day slavery or trafficking of persons is the second most profitable, organized and destructive global criminal activity after drugs, and within the next five years is expected to ascend to the number one spot. It is a huge, highly profitable worldwide business that is destroying the lives of millions of vulnerable people. Men and women who have the misfortune to be born into poverty, are poorly educated, desperate and, therefore easily manipulated by ‘recruitment agents’, who paint a false picture of decent, well paid, legitimate work in one or other of the major cities of the world.
Trafficking is the exploitation of people, day after day, for years on end. Men (often supported by women ex-victims) drive human trafficking, specifically trafficking for sex, which is a major cause of the spread of HIV/Aids – fuelled by arrogant men who refuse to wear condoms.
Millions of victims, innocent and vulnerable, are trafficked into a life of extreme exploitation, violent abuse and slavery. At the heart of this 21st century epidemic are women, mainly young: most are under 24, some are as young as six, always poor, desperate, and frightened. They make up 80% of an unknown total number of people trafficked every year. Although the US State Department say it’s around one million, the figure could just as easily be double that. What is known, is that the majority of women is forced into prostitution of some kind or another and sex slavery; constituent parts of the burgeoning global Commercial Sex Industry (CSI). The language of market fundamentalism facilitating a subtle acceptance of the criminal and inhumane; for what is commercial is good and industry must be encouraged at any cost; it feeds the economy, which must be constantly stoked in order to fuel economic growth, which as we know is the source of lasting happiness. So goes the dishonest, corporate political propaganda, rooted as it is in self-interest and thoroughly intoxicated by profit.
The CSI has been given a major boost by the Internet, providing as it (currently) does, an unregulated platform for pornography. The pornographic material freely floating around cyberspace is beyond shocking, the statistics startling: over 12% of all internet sites deal in pornography of one kind or another – totaling 420 million pages. Every month there are 72 million worldwide (primarily male) visitors to these websites packed with explicit pornographic images, many showing abusive practices, which feed into and strengthen a conditioned view that defines women in a purely sexual manner and promotes the idea of women as sexual objects, commodities to be used for pleasure, exploited fully and totally. The proliferation of on-line pornography is a major factor in the ever-growing commodification and sexualisation of women and young girls. Whilst this is not necessarily new, the level of accessibility is. Extreme sexual behavior like pedophilia, bestiality and rape, that saturates the internet, encourages obsessive behavior and is a crippling poisonous ingredient in the lives not only girls and women, but of men, young and not so young.
Debt, Abuse and Exploitation
“Forced” or “Bonded” labour is a major factor in the trafficking of persons. The International Labour Organisation (ILO)[ii] say as many as “21 million people are victims of forced labour – 11.4 million women and girls and 9.5 million men and boys” – the totals may and probably are much higher.
“The most widely used method of enslaving people around the world”, according to Anti-slavery[iii], is through bonded labour. A person becomes entrapped, they report, “when their labour is demanded as a means of repayment for a loan”. It has been a method of control, and exploitation of the poor for centuries and is today highly prevalent in South Asia, particularly India – (the hub for trafficking of women in the region). Rooted in the unjust caste system, it primarily affects the Dalits (or untouchables) and Adivasi (indigenous) people, who make up 9% or more of India’s 1.3 billion population. ILO estimate almost 12 million people in the Asia-Pacific area are trapped in bonded labour, due overwhelmingly to debt. Bonded labour occurs because “of poverty and the existence of people who are prepared to exploit the desperation of others”. India boasts of a decade of 9% growth, and yet because all wealth is concentrated in the hands of the elite and the aspiring, India has the highest percentage of malnourished children: the poor are growing in number, levels of inequality are greater than ever, desperate parents are selling their daughters and young women are being forced to take loans from unscrupulous ‘recruitment agents’, men with neither conscience nor morality living off the misfortune of others, who sell the girls on up the criminal chain into sex slavery and years upon years of sexual violence and exploitation. The lives lost are countless.
Loans are taken either to meet the requirements of daily living, or in order to pay traffickers/agents fees for services, which include providing (forged) documentation and travel expenses. Women in their quest to find employment become victims of trafficking at this stage; some are aware that they are entering the CSI – most are not. Others are recruited when pregnant, the commodity the newborn baby – sold on the black market: “the profit is divided between the traffickers, doctors, lawyers, border officials, and others”. The mother, if she is lucky, may “receive a few hundred US $”, records Louise Shelley in Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective. Brokers are the initial criminal contact; they charge extortionate fees for their ‘services’ and load interest charges of up to 40%, onto loans, trapping women and their families into a never-ending cycle of debt and perpetual enslavement.
The only way of paying the loan back is through working for nothing; Banjit from Thailand was trafficked into Brita
in in 2005 and incurred a debt of £27,000, The Guardian[iv] reported. On arrival in London her passport was confiscated by a Thai brothel keeper who told her, “she would be able to pay off the debt within two to three months by providing ‘services’ to buyers such as anal sex and sex without a condom”. She was forced to work seven days a week in brothels all over the city and give all her earnings to the Thai ‘madam’. Realising “she would never be able to repay the debt, Banjit eventually ran away without her passport and turned to the police for help”.
A report published in 2012 by Foundation Scelle[v], estimated there to be around 42 million prostitutes worldwide: how many one wonders are imprisoned through debt bondage?
Returnees or “broken-in-girls” as well as taking on the role of “guardians” or “jailers”, in destination countries, are used to persuade young girls to become CSWs. “Sex traffickers often train girls themselves, raping them and teaching them how to behave with ‘clients”, reports Victor Malerek. The only way some women can escape their own enslavement is to return home and recruit young girls. An Albanian woman told The Guardian how she returned to her home town and told ex-school friends “that there were great opportunities in the UK for them, you know, as waitresses and even as dancers …… I felt like I had stuck a knife in my own stomach, knowing what I was taking them to, but I could not stand one more day [in the brothel]”.
Traffickers scour the planet looking for potential victims. They find them in at least 127 countries UNODC[vi] report and put them to work in over 137. New opportunities for the ever-watchful criminal predators are created by natural disasters (many caused by global warming) that have left millions homeless, impoverished and vulnerable, as well as major global events such as the end of the Cold War, the integration of China into the global economy, and the break up of the former Soviet Union. Repressive regimes, from which people are seeking escape, also provide fertile ground for traffickers. The majority of citizens (90%) fleeing the repression and poverty in North Korea for example, are women. Almost all who find their way into China are herded into the CSI. Protesting victims are deported by their criminal handlers back to North Korea, where “they are thrown into gulags or are executed. 30,000 victims of sex trafficking die each year”, relates Dana Liebelson in ‘Nine out of Ten Women Escaping North Korea are Trafficked’. In all cases women’s vulnerability is the common thread, leading to violent exploitation, humiliation and extreme suffering.
Imagine a Just and Fair System
Measures are urgently needed to prevent the trafficking of women: awareness programmes to deter girls from migrating and improved access to schooling and higher education; stringent enforcement of national trafficking laws and the observation and implementation of international covenants, plus the eradication of official/police corruption. All such common sense measures would be helpful. Added to this, a change in destructive gender attitudes is essential, together with a reassessment of the current economic model that encourages the commodification and commercialization of everything, including people, specifically women.
Trafficking is the extreme inevitability of a distorted economic system, which fuels inequality and encourages profiteering, greed, and the exploitation of the most vulnerable members of society. A fundamental shift away from such a divisive system, which has failed the vast majority of people and caused environmental mayhem throughout the world, to a model based on the creation of social justice and equality is needed. The current model, Arundhati Roy in The Guardian[vii] states, has “reduced the idea of justice to mean just human rights”, (and let us add, retribution), and “the idea of dreaming of equality {has} became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced”. We need, she rightly asserts to “redefine the meaning of modernity”, to alter the way life is organized and to create the possibility of looking “at something without thinking of it as a resource to feed the kind of capitalism that is leading the planet to a crisis”, and causing immense suffering to millions of the most vulnerable people in the world.
Whilst economic prosperity for nation states is important, we should ask what the nature of prosperity is and question, as P. Sainath does, “who is this growth for”: the corporations and multi nationals is the immediate collective reply. The proceeds of growth must and should be shared amongst the people and not collected into the already overflowing coffers of the wealthy and aspiring. Such a move would be a giant step towards establishing greater levels of equality and social justice and would make many disadvantaged people – particularly women, a great deal less vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation.
October 2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/08/trading-women-for-profit/
Poor Vulnerable and in Search of Work: Abuse of migrant workers in MENA countries
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Given the choice few people would leave their families and friends and migrate from their homeland. The tens of thousands that pay unscrupulous ‘agents’ and criminal gangs to transport them hundreds or thousands of miles (often across borders), are compelled to do so to find work and to earn money to support themselves and their loved ones at home. The Middle East and North African (MENA) countries are some of the destinations of choice for both men and women seeking work, women look for domestic work and child-care, whist employment in the construction industry, is the goal of the tens thousands of men from South East Asia living in stifling poverty.
Migrant workers have become the majority workforce throughout the Arab States; Wealthy countries with weak or non-existent domestic workers rights, destructive gender attitudes that suppress and control women and endemic racism. This poisonous cocktail, rooted in prejudice and ignorance, fuels and justifies exploitation, including forced labour, physical and sexual abuse and extreme mistreatment by employers.
The shining modernist cities across the region are being built by migrant workers, so too the 2022 World Cup Stadiums in Qatar and they are the main providers of domestic care for middle and upper class households. The International Labour Organisation (ILO)[i] estimate there to be 53 million domestic workers worldwide, of which 84% are women, accounting for “7.5% of women’s wage employment”. The numbers of domestic workers in the MENA States in comparison to population totals are staggering, as the ILO[ii] state, “labour migration in this part of the world is unique in terms of its sheer scale and its exponential growth in recent years”. The highest numbers (according to the International Institute for Humanitarian Law) are in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where migrant workers comprise around 95 per cent of workforce. In Lebanon, a country with a population of around four million, there are roughly 200,000 migrant domestic workers, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). In Saudi Arabia the ILO estimate that 50% of workers are migrants, whilst Kuwait has 660,000, and a population of around three million. Similar or larger ratios are found throughout the region.
Migrants to MENA countries mainly come from Asia – Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines and India, and to a lesser degree from east Africa – Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Somalia. Countries where huge numbers of people, (often marginalized groups), are living in extreme poverty, where illiteracy numbers are high, education poor and opportunities rare. Excluded, ignored people who are the casualties of a divisive, corrupt worldwide social/economic system, where economic benefits and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of an ever-decreasing number of people, causing social injustice and extreme hardship for millions throughout the world. With little or no options such people are at the mercy of criminal gangs who see them as an object, a commodity to be profited from, and nothing more. There are thought to be more people in slavery now than any time in history. Such are the consequences of a system that breed’s greed and separation and places all value in profit, even over life.
Deceived and trapped into debt and bonded labour from the start, prospective migrant workers are duped into leaving their homes for Beirut, Dubai, Kuwait city, Riyadh, Sana’a or some such perfumed land of comfort. Naïve and desperate young men and women are promised they will be handsomely paid. That the streets are paved with dollars, that every apartment has hot and cold running designer clothes, smart phones and flat screen TV’s and that you too will live the good life, easily repay your loan to the agent and crucially help drag your family out of grinding poverty. With hollow promises like these, migrants (the ILO make clear), are “lured into jobs that either didn’t exist or that were offered under conditions that were very different from what they were promised in the first place,” by unscrupulous recruitment agents, who are the first rung in a criminal journey, which for large numbers of migrant workers, leads directly to purgatory. The reality for many is one of modern day slavery, imprisonment and violence; mistreatment that in many cases amounts to human trafficking that leads some, in total despair, to take their own lives. In Lebanon alone, migrant domestic workers are “dying at a rate of more than one a week – often by throwing themselves of balconies” The Guardian 27/04/2013[iii] report. On the scaffolding around the glitzy building projects for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the ‘Pravasi Nepali Co-ordination Committee (PNCC)’ estimate 1,300 Nepalese construction workers died last year.
The death sites of Qatar
Abuse of migrant workers, who account for nearly 90 percent of Qatar’s population of 1.9 million, is widespread. And little has changed to improve matters since being awarded the much-prized 2022 World Cup. Human Rights Watch (7/02/2013)[iv] state, that Qatar “has not delivered on its pledges to improve migrant workers’ rights”. In 2010 the country’s rulers asserted that their successful World Cup bid, “could inspire positive change and leave a huge legacy for the region, but the past two years have seen an absence of reform”.
Every year over 100,000 men from Nepal head to Qatar to work on building projects across the realm, they “are not experienced at this type of work, which is much more risky than other jobs.” Appalling conditions and mistreatment by employees and low pay, lead “some to commit suicide.” The Guardian (26/09/2013)[v] reported. In fact many recount how their salaries are withheld, or not paid at all, their passports confiscated to prevent them from leaving and they are “deprived of the ID cards they need to move around freely without fear of arrest”.
Bodies of dead Nepalese men are returning home at a rate of three or four a day, it is a mystery why these fit young men are dying in such large numbers, especially so, when “the most common cause of death given on forms is some form of heart failure”. A probable contributory factor is the appalling working and living conditions that the men are forced to endure, working 12 hour shifts in 50 degree C temperatures, and often without water. After work “they return to filthy and overcrowded accommodation in the Sanaya industrial centre, where the stench of raw sewage is overpowering and workers allege 600 men share two kitchens. “The kitchens are infested with mosquitoes, cockroaches and bugs,” said KBB, one of the camp’s residents”. No wonder employees, like Ganesh Bishwakarma aged 16 years old are falling like flies. He died after just two months in Qatar. Too young to legally migrate, the recruitment agent forged a passport stating Ganesh was aged 20-year and a job as a cleaner was his. The cost of this life shifting opportunity including false documents and travel – an extortionate 150,000 rupees ($1,500), to be re-paid, dead or alive, with 36% interest. The debt now falls on Ganesh’s family to somehow service, trapping them into bonded labour as their son was similarly enslaved.
En
trapment
All MENA states, with the exception of Yemen are signatories to the Palermo Protocol[vi], (which clearly defines the conditions of trafficking) making its articles legally binding and employees who contravene them guilty of human trafficking offenses. In what could prove to be a significant action, a recent high profile case involving Meshael Alayban a Saudi-Arabian Princess, has highlighted the fact that treatment of many migrant domestic workers by their Arab employers, qualifies as human trafficking. The BBC 20/07/2013[vii] reported that the “Princess is accused of forcing a Kenyan woman to work 16 hours a day while paying her far less than what she was originally promised”, and, taking away “the woman’s passport, precluding her escape”. The two-year contract guaranteed the women “$1600 a month, for eight hour work five days a week”, but as is often the case she was paid much less – “$220 a month and made to work twice as long”. The unnamed Kenyan escaped on a visit to America with the royal household, and has brought a case in California (where they were staying) against the regal Alayban for trafficking. She faces a maximum prison sentence of 12 years.
The vulnerability of migrant domestic workers to human trafficking in MENA countries, beyond the underlying prejudicial causes, are due to two primary factors: the Dickensian “Kafala” employment system, allied to the lack of labor protection and legal redress, and the initial recruitment process, with agents extending loans to prospective migrants for employment fees, forging passports and other documentation and travel costs. This creates debt bondage, trapping the unsuspecting into years of bonded labour. The Kafala (literally, ‘guaranteeing and taking care of’ in Arabic) or sponsorship system forms the legal basis, for both residency and employment for migrant domestic workers in the Gulf Cooperation Countries, as well as Lebanon and Jordon. Under the scheme the employer, to all extent and purposes, ‘owns’ the migrant worker, who cannot change employers, unless the sponsor decides to sell them on to someone – a lucrative add-on for employers and a form of trafficking that fuels resistance to the schemes abolition, vehemently called for by human rights groups and all right minded thinkers.
Upon arrival the migrant workers passport is confiscated, so too their mobile phone (if they own one), together with any money. They are then driven to their workplace – the construction site or (for domestic workers) the home of their employer, where they often disappear, as HRW[viii] make clear. “Domestic workers are typically isolated and shielded from public scrutiny…[and consequently] are at heightened risk of mistreatment, including physical, sexual and psychological abuse; food deprivation and forced confinement”. The Kafala system encourages abuse and corruption and “creates a profound power imbalance between employers and workers and imposes tight restrictions on migrant workers rights”, (HRW[ix] found). In fact migrant workers are rarely aware they have any rights and their employers behave as if they do not, their freedom of movement is completely restricted by the employer. The Kafala system gives the employer total control, they can, and often do confine the dependent victim to the house or site for weeks or months on end, and in many cases force the worker to continue working long past the completion of their contract, commonly two years. Bir Bahadur Lama from Nepal has been trying to leave Qatar for a year The Guardian (25/09/2013) report. “When my two-year contract finished, I asked my employer to let me go home. He kept promising to issue me with an exit permit and send me home, but he never did…last year my employer sold me to another man, but when he realised I was an undocumented worker, he fired me. My only option now is to turn myself in to the police, and hope that they’ll deport me”.
Legally vague
Labour laws for migrant domestic workers in MENA countries, where they exist at all, vary in structure but not in inadequacy or lack of enforcement. All domestic work occurs beyond the protection of national labour laws, and anti-trafficking laws designed to protect migrant workers from abuse are not enforced. Under Lebanese law for example, migrant domestic workers are not allowed to leave the house without the permission of their employers, making it possible, and in many cases likely, for employers to imprison workers, exploit them and force them to work beyond their contract, with the Kafala preventing the innocent victim from reporting the abuse without risking losing residency status. It is a legal trap not confined to Lebanon, which contributes to human trafficking by creating conditions of compelled service and forced labor. Confinement, dependency, weak labour laws, plus migrant domestic workers inability to speak the local language or understand their rights under international law (what few exist), make them acutely vulnerable. A Filipina domestic worker who tried to escape abusive employers in Lebanon told the ILO, CNN 9/04/2013[x] report, “my employer broke my elbow and then tied my hands behind my back. They left me one day long in my room and put a camera there. He threatened me: ‘I’ll accuse you of stealing money and ask for my money back, and they will throw you in jail”, she said. Another Filipina domestic worker interviewed in a detention centre in Kuwait told the ILO that her employer had raped her. “I went to the doctors and filed a complaint at the police, and then returned to work the next day. He reported to the authorities that I had run away, and the police arrested me,” she said. “My employer tells me that if I drop the rape charges, he will make sure that I am not deported”. Appalling accounts of physical and sexual abuse, which are representative of many, far too many migrant domestic workers experiences.
In the MENA states, labour laws need to be introduced, and where they exist need to be enforced. The ILO speak of signs of positive change, “governments and other groups have stepped up efforts to combat forced labour and human trafficking in recent years, including through the passage of anti-trafficking legislation”, but “shortcomings persist in applying laws and prosecuting and convicting perpetrators of human trafficking”, shortcomings growing out of a prejudicial attitude of mind, that lies at the poisoned heart of the violent mistreatment metered out to migrant workers, male and female, who want simply to work hard, improve their lives and support their families at home.
September 2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/04/poor-vulnerable-and-in-search-of-work/
Spying Control and Freedom
As millions take to the streets demanding political participation, social justice and freedom, opponents to change – governments and reactionary forces worldwide – centralise power, tighten control of civil society and the media and trample on democratic ideals. The dangerous accumulation of powers, “legislative, executive, and judiciary” – the “father of the [American] constitution” James Madison wrote[i],“in the same hands whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Respect and trust for political leaders and governments throughout the world is at an all- time low. In Britain MORI[ii] tells us that only “18% trust politicians to tell the truth,” and only “one in twelve believe MPs put the interests of their constituents first”. A survey by Transparency International,[iii] found that “on a worldwide basis, political parties are considered to be the most corrupt institutions”, followed closely by the police. Political leaders, politicians and members of the civil service, “those responsible, for running countries and upholding the rule of law… are seen as the most corrupt”, they are “judged to be abusing their positions of power and acting in their own interests rather than for the citizens they are there to represent and serve”.
Edward Snowden and the NSA
Perceptions of government dishonesty and deceit have been compounded by the recent revelations from Edward Snowden, which exposed extensive government spying, by America’s National Security Agency (NSA).
Snowden, a former technical assistant for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for the last four years was contracted to work for the NSA – “the biggest and most secretive surveillance organization in America”, The Guardian (8/07/2013)[iv] report. During this time, he discovered the extensive nature of secret surveillance operations being carried out by the NSA who, he say’s “are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them”. It is Snowden’s affirmed belief that the people have the right to know of such paranoid, criminal intentions; “my sole motive” he has said, “is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”
The revelations of unconstitutional spying, on hundreds of millions of American citizens by the NSA, which appears to operate as a ‘state within a state’, shows, as Glenn Greenwald[v] makes clear, how “the rule of law [which maintains all in society – including political and financial institutions, are bound on equal terms by a set of common laws] in America has been radically degraded”. The NSA’s operations reveal how dangerously close the country is to the authoritarian and controlling regime foretold by Senator Frank Church, who in 1975 said “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision”. Far from there being “proper supervision” in place, Snowden told The Guardian that “the [US] government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to”.
Edwards Snowden’s act of conscience provides the opportunity to step back from a democratic precipice, and, as Daniel Ellsberg[vi] in his article, “Have we been saved from the United Stasi of America” writes, take back “what has amounted to an executive coup” against the US constitution”. Since the tragic events of 9/11, governments worldwide have appropriated greater and greater levels of control and, in the name of national security, centralised power. In the US “a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago”, has taken place, “In particular the fourth and fifth amendments of the American constitution, which safeguard people’s privacy from government intrusion, have been virtually suspended”.
Snowden’s courageous actions expose the shocking extent of US government spying and theft of personal data, on its own citizens and those of America’s allies – unconstitutional (and therefore criminal) practices, using previously unknown hi-tech programmes, which he felt duty bound to make public. Ellsberg expresses the widespread view that “there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.” Whist Snowden may well have technically committed a criminal act, justice and the law are often unrelated terms, as Martin Luther King made clear in his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, “one who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustices. Is in reality expressing the highest aspect of the law”.
Us v’s Them
The government has charged Snowden with “theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person”, The Guardian (22/06/2013)[vii] reports. He is the most recent, and perhaps the most significant, of a troop of whistleblowers to be criminalised by the Obama administration, which has indicted more people under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined. Indeed it is thought, that President “Obama may be breaking the record for US presidents for violation of civil rights and [the] law.” (Noam Chomsky, quoting Professor Jonathan Turley)[viii] This is quite a record for a president who, in his 2007 pre-election propaganda, attacked the Bush administration, saying it “acts like violating our civil liberties is the way to enhance our security, it is not.” Obama went on to say there would be no spying on American citizens who are not suspected of a crime. And politicians wonder why nobody trusts them.
Stating Snowden has “actively aided America’s enemies”; a charge for which there is no evidence at all, the Obama administration, US legislators and the US media are content to paint him as a traitor. The mainstream press seems unconcerned by the NSA’s gross infringement of the human rights of millions of innocent civilians, or the wider threat to media freedom that this matter has shown. Acting on behalf of the government, the media are attempting to restrict the issues of privacy, national security and violations of civil liberties raised by Snowden’s revelations, to a nationalistic discourse, of ‘Us versus ‘Them’. With the sparkling clean men in red, white and blue, sacrificing freedom in the name of security, constituting ‘Us’, (in opposition to the unholy) ‘Them’: undemocratic disbelievers, who, disagreeing with the American model are seen as ‘Anti-American’ and therefore branded as terrorists. Snowden, unsurprisingly, is being cast as one of ‘Them’. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me,” Snowden told The Guardian, but “ I am not afraid”.
Global Intrusions
The NSA does not confine its illegal operations to the shores of America, nor is it alone in assuming illegitimate, unconstitutional levels of power that violate people’s human rights and invade their privacy. Glenn Greenwald author of ‘Liberty and Justice for Some’, states – that the US “imposes standards [of legal conduct] on everybody else but exempts itself”, in the same way, he maintains[ix] as the elite, who “have committed some of the most egregious crimes of the last decade”, without any legal accountability, “has implemented for everybody else the western worlds harshest and most oppressive [legal] system by far”. Double standards followed not just by the US administration that people throughout the world are waking up to, as the recent worldwide protest movement’s show.
In addition to national surveillance by the NSA, The Guardian revealed that the British had their own paranoid men in grey suits in residence at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), who in 2009, whilst the G20 Summit in London was in full swing, monitored the computers and phone calls of “foreign politicians and officials”. This and a great deal more “evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret. Seen by the Guardian”[x].
Soon after these revelations La Monde disclosed that France’s Directorate General for External Security (DGSE) had mass surveillance systems in place, that are “illegal and outside any serious control”. O Globo (12/07/2013)[xi] in Brazil announced that, “in the last decade, people residing or in transit in Brazil, as well as companies operating in the country, have become targets of the NSA” to the extent that “last January (2012) Brazil was just behind the United States, which had 2.3 billion phone calls and messages spied.”
Der Spiegel in Germany reported that documents provided by Snowden show that the NSA had not only been listening to millions of Americans, but they also spy on diplomats from the European Union, in Brussels, Washington DC and at the United Nations in New York. Apparently Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain are excluded from NSA intrusions, but in a typical month they may tap up to half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany, who are, the documents make clear, their number one target in Europe.
Unjust imprisonment
Since 20th May, when he left his office in Hawaii for the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, Snowden has been in hiding. We are told he is now in the international transit lounge at Moscow airport and has applied for temporary asylum in Russia. He is entitled to request political asylum from any country in the world (despite having his passport revoked by the US State Department) and Wikileaks report he has in fact requested asylum in 21 countries, one of which was indeed Brazil, who (surprisingly – given NSA intrusion) refused his application. Asked if he would “trade access to his documents for asylum. He said he would not”.
Like those other ‘consequential whistleblowers’ – Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg, Snowden is a man of conscience who sees clearly that national loyalty means allegiance to the people of the country and not necessarily the government. Their stand for justice and freedom shows both loyalty and integrity, and deserves public recognition. Instead of this, they are persecuted and slandered. Having “watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, Snowden ”is aware that the government will “use all its weight to punish him”, as indeed it has done with Bradley Manning and other courageous public servants.
Arrested in Baghdad in May 2010 and imprisoned without trial ever since – a total of three years, much of which was spent in “extreme” solitary confinement, when he was “ forced to sleep naked without pillows and sheets on his bed, and restricted from physical recreation or access to television or newspapers even during his one daily hour of freedom from his cell, all under the pretense that the private was a suicide risk”, The Daily Beast (5/06/2013)[xii] reports. He is currently on trial facing a court martial. The most serious of a range of charges against him, that of ‘aiding the enemy’, has, Amnesty International (AI)[xiii] state, “no basis [and], the government should withdraw that charge.” However, the government-appointed military judge, (who doubles as jury), Colonel Denise Lind, has refused to throw it out. The charge made against Manning, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (with to date 65,000 nominations), is one of the most severe available to the military, and is a sign of the Obama administrations continuing war on whistleblowers that, The Guardian (18/07/2013)[xiv] make clear, ”could have far-reaching consequences for investigative journalism.”
The suppression of information is a major attack, not only on those whose conscience compels them to speak out, but to the freedom of the press. Chris Hedges, speaking on Democracy Now[xv], states that without men like Snowden and Manning, “there will be no free press”. They have provided information about the unconstitutional activity of their governments to the public and should be applauded for their moral courage. The American government is attempting to demonise anyone who reveals publicly what the government is doing in secret; “we are at a situation now by which any investigation into the inner workings of government [by the media] has become impossible. That’s the real debate”.
Newspapers have been attacked as guilty accomplices for publishing Snowden’s material by American politicians, Republican member of Congress for New York, Peter King, told CNN “action should be taken … against reporters”. He is clearly unfamiliar with the first amendment of the US constitution, which protects the freedom of the press, and as Professor Geoffrey Stones makes clear is “simply wrong”. Nevertheless such comments, albeit uneducated ones, show the dangers and indeed the desire in some quarters, to impose controls on the press.
Snowden, like Manning before him is “being charged by the US government primarily for revealing its – and other governments’ – unlawful actions that violate human rights. He has disclosed issues of enormous public interest in the US and around the world”. (Amnesty International) The villains of the piece are the politicians, distrusted and disrespected, together with the men inside the NSA’s of the world, who spend their shadowy days sifting through the communications of millions of innocent men and women without their consent and, until Snowden’s revelations, without their knowledge. Political leaders are sanctioning what is dangerous and unconstitutional activity by the intelligence agencies, which, in place to protect the people, have themselves become a cause of national (and indeed international) insecurity by creating an atmosphere of mistrust and fear. The wholesale “invasion of privacy” by the NSA and others “does not contribute to our security”, states Daniel Ellsberg, but rather, “it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect”.
July 2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/26/freedom-and-spy-control/