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Ed Webb

'She just vanished': Ethiopian domestic workers abused in Lebanon | Conflict | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...an-domestic-workers-in-lebanon

Lebanon Ethiopia Ghana migrants abuse rights workers labor labour

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • Aster left Ethiopia in search of work. But after a Lebanese family hired her as a live-in housekeeper in 2014, she found herself cut off from the outside world and labouring without pay. Aster’s family, unable to contact her, feared she was dead.
  • Driven by Ethiopia’s rising living costs and unemployment, hundreds of thousands have gone to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Kuwait. But what many find, activists and domestic workers say, is a cycle of exploitation and modern-day slavery that is hard to escape.
  • Rights groups have long documented cases like Aster’s, finding “consistent patterns of abuse” under Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries’ “kafala” or sponsorship system. The system links a migrant domestic worker’s legal status to the contractual relationship with her employer.
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  • In Lebanon, where as many as 400,000 Ethiopians live, migrant workers are also excluded from the protections of the country’s labour laws – putting their lives and livelihood at risk of abuse and exploitation.
  • Local traffickers in Ethiopia work in tandem with recruitment agencies in Beirut. Ethiopian traffickers are known to have charged up to $500 to facilitate the travel of recruits to Lebanon, where domestic workers make on average $150 a month.
  • Some Lebanese employers force their domestic workers to put in extremely long hours, deny them days off, withhold pay, confiscate their passports to prevent them from leaving, and severely restrict their movement and communication
  • Following reports of abuse, Ethiopia, in 2008, banned its citizens from travelling to Lebanon for work. But the ban has never been properly enforced and the numbers of women migrating to Lebanon for work swelled in subsequent years.
  • “I kept asking ‘when are you going to pay my sister?’ She would say that after six months, Meskerem would receive the accumulated pay,” Tsedale told Al Jazeera by phone from Beirut. In March of 2015, with Meskerem yet to see a penny for more than two years of work, an exasperated Tsedale reached an agreement with her sister’s employer: Meskerem would be paid by the end of the month or she’d be permitted to leave. But when Tsedale went to visit her sister towards the end of March, she found an empty apartment.
  • Meseret started working for a Lebanese family as a domestic worker shortly after arriving in the city of Jounieh in February 2011. Things started off well, Emebet said. Her daughter received her salary and sent money home. But a little over a year after departing Ethiopia, she was suddenly unable to reach Meseret by phone and the monthly remittances stopped coming in. “I don’t know why she suddenly stopped calling,” Emebet said. “She just vanished.” Meseret’s parents made the trip to Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, a two-hour bus ride away in Addis Ababa on at least two occasions to plead for help in locating their daughter. “They took our names and opened a file for her. We hoped they might provide answers.” But none came
  • “This is Lebanon”, a Canada-based domestic worker rights organisation that works to locate and free women who have been abused under the kafala system
  • “Since 2017, we’ve looked into over 6,000 complaints of various types of abuse,” Uprety told Al Jazeera. “Many are resolved through negotiations, in particular when it’s cases related to unpaid salaries. We escalate things only when abusers refuse to cooperate.”
  • The group helped free Filipina domestic worker Halima Ubpah. According to This is Lebanon, Ubpah was confined without pay in the home of a family with close connections to Lebanon’s political elite for 10 years.
  • This is Lebanon caseworkers studied the files of both Meskerem and Meseret for most of 2019. A few weeks after Al Jazeera visited the Emebet’s home, the group called Meseret’s Lebanese employer, Dr May Saadeh, a single mother of three daughters. This is Lebanon activists told Saadeh they would post Meseret’s story to the group’s Facebook page if she did not release the Ethiopian woman. Saadeh gave Meseret some cash and booked her a flight back to Ethiopia. Within days, Meseret was free. By September 2019, Meseret arrived back home.
  • “Out of nowhere, she suddenly told me that I would be going home. I wasn’t allowed to use a phone for seven years. That day, she handed me the phone and said, ‘call your mother, tell her you will see her soon’.”
  • Meseret boarded a late-night flight back to her homeland, with nothing but the clothes on her back and the cash she was handed. She had no luggage and was still owed seven years worth of pay, more than $12,000.
  • When she was taken by her employer to renew her residency papers, Meseret pleaded with officers at the Ethiopian consulate in Beirut for help. But they turned her away, she said. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, as well as an official Meseret said she spoke to at the consulate did not respond to requests for comment. Saadeh also did not respond to Al Jazeera’s repeated requests for comment.
  • Meskerem boarded a plane and returned to Ethiopia as part of a group of formerly imprisoned domestic workers whose one-way tickets were covered by donations from members of the large Ethiopian community in Lebanon. Meskerem was a free woman again, but returned to Ethiopia last June, terribly scarred by her ordeal. Emaciated, drained, Meskerem had also lost most of her teeth.
  • After months of recuperating, Meskerem gradually opened up about her time in Lebanon, and spoke of the physical and mental abuse endured, the lack of food and how she was locked in at all times and forbidden contact with the outside world
  • “Aster is happy in our home, she is like one of my daughters,” Oula Keyrouz told Al Jazeera by phone. “I don’t understand what the family in Ethiopia wants because we don’t speak their language. But we treat her well.” But Aster told Al Jazeera that she has endured years of abuse, in particular at the hands of Oula’s husband Michel, allegations Oula denied. Aster explained that years ago Michel nearly strangled her with a belt, as punishment for an ill-fated escape attempt.
  • Oula Keyrouz admitted that Aster was owed six years worth of pay, totalling thousands of dollars. “We keep her money for her in a safe. She will take all of it when she returns to her country one day.” When asked when that might be, Oula Keyrouz said that “because of the dollar crisis in Lebanon,” the family couldn’t afford to send Aster home.
  • On June 17, 2020, a taxi pulled up to the Keyrouz family home. Aster, who had made coffee for Oula Keyrouz, walked outside, pretending to be taking out the trash. Instead, she stepped into the waiting vehicle, never to be seen again by the family that had stripped her of her dignity for six years. She was dropped outside the Ethiopian consulate, where members of a community group who had called the taxi, paid the fare and took her in. “It was like being freed from prison,” Aster later said.
  • Aster was part of a group of 90 Ethiopian domestic workers who were repatriated in September, with the help of Egna Legna Besidet, a Beirut-based nonprofit organisation.
  • Aster successfully escaped the Keyrouz home, but like Meseret and Meskerem, she returned from Lebanon empty-handed after years of toiling without pay.
  • Oula Keyrouz admits Aster is still owed six years of wages, but denies her family mistreated Aster, saying she has pictures she took of Aster enjoying herself in the family home. “I saw her like a daughter to me, like another one of my children.”
  • When asked about the three women’s cases, Lebanese Labour Ministry official Marlene Atallah said her office was aware of such cases and was working on preventive measures. “We have set up a committee at the ministry tasked with dealing with complaints from domestic workers,” Atallah explained. “There is now an emergency hotline number workers can call in case of violations. We have also begun giving orientation sessions for domestic workers to learn how to bring their cases to Lebanese courts.” But Lebanese courts have rarely sentenced abusive employers to jail time, and any kind of justice is often out of reach for migrant workers.
  • authorities estimate that at least two domestic workers die weekly on average. These are mainly deaths by suicide or from botched escape attempts.
  • the deaths of most migrant workers in Lebanon are rarely looked into.
Ed Webb

South Asian Migrant Workers Face Pandemic Deportations From Middle East - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...orkers-nepal-qatar-coronavirus

GCC UAE Qatar migrants labor workers SouthAsia Nepal India Bangladesh Pakistan Sri Lanka pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The Doha Industrial Area, already infamous for slum conditions and overcrowded camps, is now under strict police monitoring and effectively sealed off. The area mostly hosts workers building infrastructure for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, who even before the pandemic faced poor conditions and unsafe workspaces. The Qatari government has denied the allegations, but they’re part of a pattern of abuse of migrant workers not just in Qatar but across the Middle East—workers who are now dangerously exposed to the vagaries of authoritarian governments during the pandemic.
  • The oil-rich Middle East countries built their fortresses with the blood and sweat of foreign laborers, but during the pandemic the workers, who live in crowded dormitories, are seen as a source of infection.
  • 1.5 million Nepalis work in the Persian Gulf and Malaysia, and 400,000 in Qatar. Most of the Nepali workers are stuck abroad due to Nepal’s closure of its borders until April 30, leaving them highly vulnerable—although foreign governments have forced Nepal to accept some flights of deportees.
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  • Many South Asian countries are equally dependent on remittances from their workers abroad, according to the World Bank’s 2019 data, including India ($82 billion in remittances), Bangladesh ($17 billion), Pakistan ($21 billion), and Sri Lanka ($7 billion).
  • South Asian countries have either ignored the plight of these workers during the pandemic or made no significant plans to ease their hardships. In part, that’s because the workers tend to be from the poorest and least politically powerful groups at home.
  • As coronavirus cases rise in the Middle East, migrant workers from around the world, and particularly from South Asia, will be the worst-hit.
  • The UAE has threatened that Nepal and other South Asian countries must repatriate the workers or face the suspension of bilateral labor agreements.
Ed Webb

Qatar Migrant Workers Battle Coronavirus Outbreak During World Cup Construction - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...avirus-lockdown-world-cup-2022

Qatar pandemics migrants migration labor labour workers GCC

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Aug 20 - Cached
  • There are more than 2 million migrant workers in Qatar—a significant number given that the country’s overall population is just 2.6 million. In recent years the foreign laborer population in Qatar has swelled as the country has undergone a construction boom ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which is set to be held there.
  • as the coronavirus pandemic edges its way across Qatar, which now has more than 2,000 confirmed cases, the migrant workers’ cramped living quarters and lack of access to health care, proper sanitation, and nutritious food imperils an already highly vulnerable group of people.
  • abuse—which at times has amounted to forced labor and human trafficking—has been exacerbated by South Asian governments’ inability to successfully lobby for strong protections. (Critics contend there has been scant political will given the huge portion of GDP now made up by remittances from overseas workers.
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  • Some 35 million migrants are employed in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, in Jordan, and in Lebanon, and incidences of exploitation are well documented
  • “The situation here is serious,” Narendra said, describing the lockdown in part of the Industrial Area. “I have been frequently speaking with workers who are in lockdown areas. Employers aren’t allowing people out to buy food, and companies are not providing food. We don’t have any rights to ask for support.”
  • While Qatar has now shut down all public spaces, construction workers are still working on a variety of projects despite the fact that hundreds of cases of the coronavirus have spread among their communities
  • the true burden of disease among migrant workers is unknown. The government doesn’t give figures on what portion of the infected are migrant workers. And some migrants fear coming forward to report their symptoms.
  • Research published last year in the journal Cardiology explored the relationship between heat exposure and the deaths of more than 1,300 Nepali workers over a nine-year period until 2017. The climatologists and cardiologists found a strong correlation between heat stress and young workers dying of cardiovascular problems in the summer months
  • At the heart of the abuse faced by migrant workers has been Qatar’s kafala system, which legally binds foreign workers to their employers, restricting workers’ ability to change jobs and preventing them from leaving the country without their employers’ permission—a practice that has been described as modern slavery. In October 2019, the government announced reforms that would allow migrant workers to change jobs and leave Qatar without employer consent. Thus far, only the second reform has been implemented. And while campaigners laud the progress, enforcement of laws remains spotty, and there’s little clarity on when further reforms will be rolled out.
  • Most workers sleep in dormitories, sharing rooms with up to 10 people and sharing kitchens and bathrooms with dozens more. When they head to work on the construction sites, it is on overcrowded buses. In response, the government recently announced it would reduce bus capacity by half, that construction workers would work a maximum six hours a day, that workers’ accommodation would be limited to four people, and that all accommodation sites would be sanitized and information on hand-washing and hygiene would be provided. Whether this is just rhetoric remains to be seen.
Ed Webb

The complicated legacy of Qatar's World Cup - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...icated-legacy-qatars-world-cup

Qatar sport sports sportswashing football soccer FIFA labor workers rights HRW

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • perhaps the biggest test case for what happens when a Middle Eastern nation intent on using oil money to enhance its influence through sports emerges on the global stage.
  • Can sports help bring societal progress to a region that has long resisted change? Or are those countries rewarded with reputational prestige despite human rights abuses that they have little intention to address?
  • “FIFA has a human rights policy that guarantees press freedom, women’s rights and nondiscrimination,” said Minky Worden, the director of global initiatives for Human Rights Watch. “What the Qatar World Cup showed is that, if you have enough money, you can absolutely ignore those requirements.”
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  • Owing to its small population of roughly 300,000 citizens, Qatar relies heavily on migrant workers. When it won the World Cup bid, it employed a labor system called kafala. Under kafala, migrant workers, mostly seeking to leave impoverished conditions elsewhere, have to pay exorbitant recruitment fees and cannot change jobs without the consent of their employer. The system led to rampant abuses that included wage theft and unsafe working conditions, ultimately resulting in the deaths of thousands of workers. Qatar also bans homosexuality, which it defends on religious grounds.
  • In 2016, Qatar said it would abide by the United Nations’ human rights code. In 2019, Qatar announced it would abolish kafala. In 2021, Qatar instituted a minimum wage. The Supreme Committee, Qatar’s World Cup host organization, created a workers’ welfare program for those who built World Cup infrastructure. By the sound of the first whistle last November, the country’s labor market was “radically transformed,” a FIFA spokesman said.“Would any of that have happened if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup?” said Mary Harvey, chief executive at the Centre for Sport and Human Rights. “Would kafala still be in place in Qatar if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup? That may not be the question people want to ask, but it’s important. … You don’t just flip the switch with a law change and expect an implementation is going to take hold. It’s going to take a generation probably to get this put in. But it’s still big change, and it’s change that is needed.”
  • Max Tuñón, head of the International Labor Organization’s Qatar office, said he has seen major improvements in working conditions for foreign laborers over the past five years.
  • We work all over the world, and we rarely see change happening at this pace
  • Rothna Begum, a Human Rights Watch researcher, has worked extensively in Qatar and visited with workers. (Unlike Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s government allows human rights groups to work in the country.) Begum said it is “not the case” that Qatar dismantled kafala in practice.“They didn’t do it properly, anyway,” Begum said. “They didn’t take away all the elements. They reformed aspects of the kafala system, but they didn’t dismantle the kafala system. The bits that they did reform, they are implementing in such a way that kafala still exists in practice.”
  • While workers can apply to change jobs, Begum said, she has found they must first give notice to their employer. If the employer does not sign a resignation notice, the worker cannot get permission from the government — “employer permission through the back door,”
  • “Qatari authorities — not just Qatari authorities but FIFA — sought to weaponize a narrative of Qatar being an underdog, that they were under attack in this double-standard way that no one else has been under attack before, and it’s because they are a Middle Eastern country,” Begum said. “Rather than dealing with the fact that they just did not come through with reforms and did not protect migrant workers who really contribute to the success of the World Cup and made sure they got their wages and compensated them for it, they instead used this narrative and weaponized it. We’re seeing the Saudis and UAE are moving in that direction.”
  • Qatar’s reforms also did not address the biggest cost of the World Cup: the migrant workers who died — in the thousands according to human rights groups, a number disputed by the Qatari government — while building stadiums and other infrastructure FIFA required after working in extreme heat on strict schedules. Human Rights Watch challenged whether Qatar could move forward with meaningful reform without compensating the families of the workers who died.
  • FIFA instituted its human rights policy in 2017 in response to criticism about Qatar. That policy may receive a more stringent test in coming years. Saudi Arabia, whose government has jailed and executed dissidents, submitted a bid to host the 2034 World Cup and is the favorite to host the tournament. Unlike Qatar, Saudi Arabia has not met with human rights groups.
Amitabha Joshi

Kuwait: For Abused Domestic Workers, Nowhere to Turn | Human Rights Watch - 1 views

www.hrw.org/...-domestic-workers-nowhere-turn

GCC Gulf Migrants

shared by Amitabha Joshi on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Amitabha Joshi on 04 Nov 10
     
    The 97-page report, "Walls at Every Turn: Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers Through Kuwait's Sponsorship System," describes how workers become trapped in exploitative or abusive employment then face criminal penalties for leaving a job without the employer's permission. Government authorities arrest workers reported as "absconding" and in most cases deport them from Kuwait - even if they have been abused and seek redress.
Ed Webb

Qatar moves to announce abolishment of kafala system | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...la-system-191017070750729.html

Qatar GCC labor rights workers law

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Qatar has pledged to abolish its labour system that ties migrant workers to their employer and requires them to have their company's permission to leave the country as part of sweeping reforms to its labour market.
  • Under Qatar's "kafala" (Arabic word for sponsorship) system, migrant workers must obtain their employers' permission - a no-objection certificate (NOC) - before changing jobs, a law that rights activists say ties them with their employers and leads to abuse and exploitation.
  • Qatar and its labour laws have been under the spotlight ever since the country was named the host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Its government has pledged to resolve labour disputes in the run-up to the tournament.
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  • Protesting workers, mostly from Bangladesh, told Al Jazeera that in addition to poor living conditions, they had not been paid for four months, the companies had failed to renew their work permits - making their status in Qatar illegal - and were not given the required letters that would allow them to switch employers.
  • Last year, Qatar announced it was abolishing the need for exit permits for non-domestic migrant workers. It also did away with the need for an NOC if the migrant worker completed the contract duration or finished five years in the event of an undefined time period in a contract.
Ed Webb

Covid-19 kills scores of health workers in war-torn Yemen | Yemen | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...alth-workers-yemen-report-says

Yemen pandemics publichealth famine hunger war death disaster

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • At least 97 Yemeni healthcare workers have died from Covid-19 as the disease ravages the war-torn country, according to a report that gives an insight into the true scale of Yemen’s poorly documented outbreak.Yemen, already suffering from a five-year war that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has proved uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic, according to data published by the medical charity MedGlobal on Thursday.
  • Yemen’s official total number of cases is 1,610, with 446 deaths, so the high number of healthcare worker casualties outlined by the report suggests the true caseload and mortality figure is far higher. For comparison, in badly hit Italy, where 245,0362 people have caught the virus, 35,073 people have died, including about 100 doctors. Yemen currently has a 27% mortality rate from the disease – more than five times the global average.
  • In a country where half of all medical facilities are out of action, and aid funding shortfalls are exacerbating the existing malnutrition and cholera crises, the loss of just one medical professional has a devastating exponential effect. About 18% of the country’s 333 districts already have no doctors.
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  • “We have lost our best colleagues, people who can’t be replaced easily,” she said. “Coronavirus is also killing the morale of medical staff.”
  • The loss of five gynaecologists and midwives will also have a disastrous impact in a country where one in every 260 women die during pregnancy or childbirth.
  • the number of Yemenis facing high levels of acute food insecurity is forecast to increase from 2 million to 3.2 million over the next six months – about 40% of the population
Ed Webb

Slaves of Babylon | Souciant - 0 views

souciant.com/...slaves-of-babylon

GCC Qatar Kuwait Saudi KSA UAE labor labour workers migrants migration rights

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Guest workers often live in villas that “vary from unfinished to decrepit,” several men to a bedroom, kitchen, or toilet, with inadequate sanitation on the outskirts of the urban centers. There are also laws that limit when and where they can take their weekend breaks, even to the point of barring them from certain public parks, beaches, and during certain times of the day – a restriction that Human Rights Watch says is primarily enforced against South Asians, and not Western or Arab expats. As Andrew Gardner and Autumn Watts – anthropologists studying transnational migration in the Gulf – these workers are Invisible Men and Women. They are the largest single demographic in some of these states, but are effectively unseen unless they gather in such numbers to inspire unease among full citizens: “Labor migrants are, of course, visible everywhere in the city — in large work crews, in matching uniforms, on the buses that carry them between labor camps and construction sites — but those encounters from a distance are the limits of typical interaction between them and the middle and upper classes of both foreigners and citizens who make a home, however temporary, on the peninsula.”
  • Qatar is even more heavily dependent on migrant workers than Saudi Arabia. 87% of the population consists of migrants, and 94% of the entire labor force is from overseas – which means that only 6% of the workforce, as native Qataris, can legally form a union or leave a job without their employer’s permission
Erin Gold

Philippines seeks accord on workers - The National Newspaper - 0 views

www.thenational.ae/...article

shared by Erin Gold on 28 Nov 09 - Cached
  • A member of the Philippines’ Congress has called for a meeting between the Minister of Labour and his country’s labour secretary to find ways of better protecting Filipinos working in the Emirates.
  • He called for an agreement between Manila and the Government that would see the UAE more urgently combat the problem of employers withholding the passports of workers from his country.
  • “We will ask our public relations officers to assist our workers in filing a complaint against their sponsors who are holding their passports,” he said.
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  • He also suggested the rules governing accreditation of UAE-based recruitment agencies be more stringent, to prevent cases of contract substitution, sex trafficking and illegal recruitment of Filipino migrant workers.
  • They visited a Dubai shelter that currently houses 119 women, mostly housemaids, who have left their jobs complaining of a lack of food and sleep, maltreatment, overwork or non-payment.
  • Ms Ilagan, of the Gabriela Women’s Party, said Filipinas were generally vulnerable to abuse and were willing to gamble when recruited to work overseas.
  • The shelter occupants told the legislators that their passports were being kept by their employers, preventing them from returning to the Philippines.At least 15 of the women have been asked by their employers to refund recruiting costs.
Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Gulf labour laws fail to halt abuse - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...200910774729933917.html

migrant workers labor abuse gulf global south

shared by Jim Franklin on 07 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Every year thousands of women arrive in the Gulf to take up jobs as domestic workers.
  • The majority of them leave behind their families on a huge financial gamble to try to earn enough in remittances.
  • Two and a half years ago, Mary left her family in East Africa to work as a maid in a private house in the Middle East.
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  • "The beatings started on the second day," she said. "No day passed without beatings. If she didn't beat me in the day she would beat me at night."
  • One day she was ordered to have sex with another maid. When she refused, her employer threatened her with more beatings.
  • "She said the law was in her favour. Not in mine," Mary said.
  • Simel Esim, a specialist in domestic worker abuse at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), said the workers are simply not protected by labour laws.
  • "You are attaching a person's legal status, visa status and employment to one person as the employer and also the provider of housing, food and health care.
  • "It creates total dependency and total dependency means total vulnerability and opens the door wide for abuse and exploitation."
Ed Webb

Modern-Day Slavery: The Public Markets Selling Young Girls for $14 | Fast Forward | OZY - 0 views

www.ozy.com/...94386

Uganda GCC Oman KSA Saudi Jordan Kenya Africa migrants slavery

shared by Ed Webb on 30 May 19 - No Cached
  • 16 Ugandans who’ve died in the Middle East over just the past year, according to a parliamentary panel report from April this year. These women — all of whom died unnatural deaths after complaining of abuse — are just the most extreme examples of a growing epidemic of an increasingly open, modern slave trade that starts in Uganda’s eastern region and culminates in closed rooms in Gulf nations.
  • Migrant workers from across Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia have for several years complained of abuse in the Middle East
  • Uganda has emerged as the theater of a double-barreled racket. At fast-spreading weekly markets, some women are promised jobs in the Gulf only to be sold once they get there, while others — many of them girls between the ages of 10 and 18 — are directly and publicly “bought” as slaves in Uganda and then resold in the Middle East, according to Ugandan authorities, Interpol, independent experts, legislators, victims and their families.
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  • more than 9,000 girls and young women are estimated to have been bought at these markets since last year — for as little as 50,000 shillings ($14), according to Betty Atim, a member of Parliament.
  • After 22-year-old Shivan Kihembo died in Oman in October — months after she had been sold there — her father, Patrick Mugume, was asked by his daughter’s “owners” for money if he wanted her body back.
  • migrant laborers from other African countries have suffered human rights violations — and not just in the Gulf but in Southeast Asia too — in recent years that have drawn comparisons with slavery. But what’s different with Uganda, experts say, is the openness with which women are being auctioned in markets alongside domestic animals and household goods.
  • Officially, Uganda has banned its citizens from seeking work in most Middle Eastern countries — barring Saudi Arabia and Jordan — because it doesn’t have any diplomatic agreements on workers’ rights with those nations, says Uganda’s minister of gender Janat Mukwaya.That ban, though, rarely works as a deterrent when there’s a promise of significant economic gain being dangled before the downtrodden, experts say. Uganda has a per capita income of $604, so Nambereke was promised three times what the average citizen earns. It’s also no surprise that the markets where illegal traffickers find women they can dupe or buy are predominantly in eastern Uganda. It’s a part of the country that has seen far lower poverty reduction than other regions, according to the World Bank, with electricity available to only 6 percent of families, compared to 32 percent in the country’s central region. To get around the ban, traffickers take the women across the border into Kenya after fixing up their passports, and then fly them to the Middle East.
  • Because they’re traveling to countries they’re barred from legally working in, even those women who initially went thinking they were getting employed are scared to try and reach out to authorities, experts say. And their host countries — in a region not known for its defense of human rights of migrants — have little incentive to prioritize concerns for these slaves over those of nations that legally send workers there. And so the slavery mounts — as do the deaths
  • Authorities are also recording cases of abuse from countries where Ugandans are legally allowed to work such as Jordan, Juliet Nakiyemba died at the age of 31 in October. A postmortem showed her kidneys had been removed prior to her death.
  • the government is passing the buck around and hasn’t been able to stop the practice. Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Henry Oryem Okello says the ministry of labor needs to act to arrest traffickers. Mugisha says the ministry of labor has asked local governments to step in with legal remedies. And the country’s labor commissioner, Lawrence Egulu, concedes that Uganda’s law against human trafficking is routinely violated but has no clear answer as to why the government hasn’t been able to put a stop to it.
  • Herbert Ariko, the MP of the eastern Uganda region where most of these slave markets are located, says he’s drafting a law aimed at enhancing the punishment for human traffickers — currently 15 years in prison. Nonprofits such as the Uganda Association of External Recruitment Agencies are demanding that the government enter into worker-safety agreements with all Middle Eastern countries. The archbishop of the Anglican Church in Uganda, Stanley Ntagali, is also critical of the government’s inaction. “The government should ensure that the rights of children are respected and the act of selling them in markets is brought to an end,” he says.
Ed Webb

New Texts Out Now: Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisi... - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...el-beinin-workers-and-thieves_

Tunisia Egypt economy unemployment youth demonstrations analysis book

shared by Ed Webb on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • situate the movements in Egypt and Tunisia in the framework of the imposition of neoliberal economic reform and structural adjustment programs (ERSAPs) on Tunisia, from the mid-1980s, and Egypt, from 1991. The labor movements were the most salient expression of the deteriorating conditions of life under the regime of neoliberal globalization, or “flexible accumulation,” as the regulation school of political economy terms it
  • The recent murder and torture of the Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, who was researching the independent trade union movement in Egypt, suggests that it will be quite a while before anyone takes up this subject again.
  • class and political economy were far more salient elements of the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (and I might have added Bahrain and Morocco) than most Western (and even local) accounts were willing to acknowledge
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  • the successful installation of a (highly problematic, to be sure) procedural democracy in Tunisia, in contrast to the establishment of an authoritarian praetorian regime far more vicious than that of Mubarak in Egypt, made it necessary to argue that class and political economy alone do not determine outcomes
  • The character and political role of the Tunisian and Egyptian armies is also a factor
  • the economic and social discontent expressed by the desperate demise of Bouazizi and Yahyaoui has only intensified
  • In 2010 the national unemployment rate was under thirteen percent. By 2015 the figure rose to 15.3 percent. Unemployment rates in the center-west and southern regions of the country (including Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid) are typically nearly double the national average. In 2015 the OECD estimated national youth unemployment (ages fifteen to twenty-four) at nearly forty percent.
  • The government understands the problem, but has no solution. On 20 January the cabinet announced that 5,000 unemployed in Kasserine would be hired for new public sector jobs. Another 1,400 were to be hired through an existing employment program. However, on 22 January, Finance Minister Slim Chaker revoked the promise of 5,000 new jobs in Kasserine, claiming that the previous announcement was due to a “communication error.”
  • “There will be another revolution if the social and economic circumstances do not change,” said President Béji Caïd Essebsi on the fifth anniversary of Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Nidaa Tounes, a big-tent coalition of secularists ranging from former communists to former Ben Ali supporters has split. Over two dozen of its deputies have left, and it is no longer the largest party in the parliament. The terrorist attacks have reduced tourism to a catastrophically low level. The economy is not expected to grow at all in 2016. None of its traditional elite political forces—secular or Islamist—imagine an economic program substantially different than the one Tunisia has pursued since the mid-1980s.
  • On 19 January, faced with a UGTT threat to call a general strike, the employers’ association (UTICA) agreed to increase wages for about 1.5 million private sector workers. But for the unemployed, the streets are their only recourse.
Ed Webb

Saudi officials sweep the streets. Labour shortages and random arrests in crackdown on ... - 0 views

www.al-bab.com/...fficials-sweep-the-streets.htm

Saudi KSA migrants labor labour workers

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • it appears that some over-zealous inspectors may be rounding up foreigners on the mere suspicion of working illegally – contrary to the assurances given by officials when the crackdown began. In Makkah, a police spokesman appeared to admit that random arrests were taking place when he said the campaign in the city was focusing "on main squares and public places" and well as places that had previously been identified by investigators. Some members of the public have also joined in, raising fears of community-based violence directed at migrants. Yesterday Tawakkol Karman, Yemen's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, posted a photo on her Facebook page (below) which is said to show a Saudi man attempting to detain a Yemeni expatriate while waiting for police to arrive.
  • it appears that some over-zealous inspectors may be rounding up foreigners on the mere suspicion of working illegally – contrary to the assurances given by officials when the crackdown began. In Makkah, a police spokesman appeared to admit that random arrests were taking place when he said the campaign in the city was focusing "on main squares and public places" and well as places that had previously been identified by investigators. Some members of the public have also joined in, raising fears of community-based violence directed at migrants. Yesterday Tawakkol Karman, Yemen's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, posted a photo on her Facebook page (below) which is said to show a Saudi man attempting to detain a Yemeni expatriate while waiting for police to arrive.
  • it appears that some over-zealous inspectors may be rounding up foreigners on the mere suspicion of working illegally – contrary to the assurances given by officials when the crackdown began. In Makkah, a police spokesman appeared to admit that random arrests were taking place when he said the campaign in the city was focusing "on main squares and public places" and well as places that had previously been identified by investigators. Some members of the public have also joined in, raising fears of community-based violence directed at migrants. Yesterday Tawakkol Karman, Yemen's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, posted a photo on her Facebook page (below) which is said to show a Saudi man attempting to detain a Yemeni expatriate while waiting for police to arrive.
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  • it appears that some over-zealous inspectors may be rounding up foreigners on the mere suspicion of working illegally
  • fears of community-based violence directed at migrants
  • The crackdown has caused a shortage of workers in the construction industry which is said to be driving up labour costs by  as much as 30%. Recruiting new workers to fill the vacancies is a long and complicated business because of the kingdom's labour laws. Small construction firms have been especially hard-hit and 40% of them have now stopped operating, according to Khalaf al-Otaibi, president of the World Federation of Trade, Industry and Economics in the Middle East. Otaibi also pointed out that small and medium-sized firms account for about 75% of Saudi Arabia's construction industry.
  • About 300,000 Sudanese living in Saudi Arabia are facing deportation, according to reports from Khartoum.  The Sudanese government says it has no intention of helping them because it is too busy dealing with its own economic problems.
Ed Webb

Picking up the pieces - 0 views

www.synaps.network/picking-up-the-pieces

Syria society identities war civil_war

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Syrians have shown relentless ingenuity in adapting to every stage of a horrendous conflict, salvaging remnants of dignity, solidarity and vitality amid nightmarish circumstances
  • The decimation of Syria’s male population represents, arguably, the most fundamental shift in the country’s social fabric. As a generation of men has been pared down by death, disability, forced displacement and disappearance, those who remain have largely been sucked into a violent and corrupting system centered around armed factions
  • 80 of the village’s men have been killed and 130 wounded—amounting to a third of the male population aged 18-50. The remaining two-thirds have overwhelmingly been absorbed into the army or militias
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  • “If you want to protect yourself and your family, you join a militia,” remarked a middle-aged man in the Jazmati neighborhood. “The area is infested with crime associated with the National Defense militias. Each group has control over a certain quarter, and they sometimes fight each other over the distribution of spoils. Shop owners must pay these militias protection. One owner refused, and they torched his store.”
  • Another resident of the same area explained that he and his family could scrape by thanks to his two sons’ positioning in the Iran-backed Baqir Brigade—which provides not only monthly salaries, but also opportunities to procure household items through looting.
  • Most who can afford to leave the country do so; others benefit from an exemption afforded to university students, while another subset enjoys a reprieve due to their status as the sole male of their generation in their nuclear family. Others may pay exorbitant bribes to skirt the draft, or confine themselves within their homes to avoid being detected—making them invisible both to the army and to broader society. Some endure multiple such ordeals, only to remain in an indefinite state of limbo due to the contingent and precarious nature of these solutions
  • An industrialist in Aleppo put it simply: “I talk with factory owners and they say they want to reopen their factories, but they can’t find male workers. When they do find them, security services or militiamen come and arrest those workers and extort money from the owners for having hired them in the first place.” With no large scale returns on the horizon for local industries, this economic impasse will take years to resolve.
  • Although virtually every problem that sparked Syria’s 2011 uprising has been exacerbated, society has been beaten down to the point of almost ensuring that no broad-based reformist movement will be able to coalesce for a generation to come
  • the unraveling of Syria’s productive economy, and its replacement by an economy of systematic cannibalization in which impoverished segments of Syrian society increasingly survive by preying upon one another
  • a new term—taafeesh—to describe a practice that goes far beyond stealing furniture to include extremes such as stripping houses, streets and factories of plumbing and electrical wiring
  • active surveillance, intimidation and repression are not the only contributors to this leaden atmosphere. A pervasive exhaustion has settled over Syrians ground down and immiserated by war, disillusioned with all those who purport to lead or protect them, and largely reduced to striving for day-to-day subsistence
  • I returned to my apartment just to retrieve official documents and some hidden pieces of gold. I did so, and then destroyed my own furniture and appliances because I don’t want these people making money at my expense. I was ready to burn down my own apartment, but my wife stopped me—she didn’t want me to cause harm to other apartments in the building.
  • micro-economies in their own right—from the recycling of rubble to the proliferation of taafeesh markets, where people buy second-hand goods stolen from fellow Syrians. Many have no choice but to use these markets in order to replace their own stolen belongings
  • Syrians also dip into precious resources to pay officials for information, for instance on disappeared relatives or their own status on Syria’s sprawling lists of “wanted” individuals. For those wishing to confirm that they won’t be detained upon crossing the border to Lebanon, the going rate is about 10 dollars—most often paid to an employee in the Department of Migration and Passports.
  • This cannibalistic economy, which encompasses all those who have come to rely on extortion for their own livelihoods, extends to the cohort of lawyers, security officials and civil servants who have positioned themselves as “brokers” in the market for official documents such as birth, marriage and death certificates
  • Today, even the most senior lawyers in our practice are working as document brokers. A well-connected broker makes 30 to 40,000 pounds [60 to 80 dollars] per day; this roughly equals the monthly salary of a university-educated civil servant. As a result, many government employees resign and work as brokers to make more money.And this truly is a business, not a charity: Every broker takes money, even from his own brothers and sisters. Last week a colleague brought me his brother-in-law. I asked him why he needed me, when he could make all the papers himself. He explained that he can’t take money from his own brother-in-law, but I can do so and then give him half.
  • Multiplying forms of predation have accelerated the outflow of Syria’s financial and human capital, leaving behind a country largely populated by an underclass that can aspire to little more than subsistence
  • Syria’s predatory wartime economy is slowly but surely turning into a predatory economy of peace
  • As some Syrians put it, Damascus has been particularly effective in reconstructing one thing amidst the immeasurable destruction: the “wall of fear” which characterized the regime before 2011 and which momentarily broke down at the outset of the uprising
  • “I watched uniformed soldiers using a Syrian army tank to rip out electrical cables from six meters underground,” remarked a fighter with a loyalist Palestinian faction, who was scrambling to retrieve belongings from his apartment before it could be pillaged. “I saw soldiers from elite units looting private hospitals and government offices. This isn’t just looting—it’s sabotage of essential infrastructure.”
  • At one level, the war has wrenched open social and economic fractures that existed long before the conflict. The city of Homs stands as perhaps the starkest microcosm of this trend. A Sunni majority city with sizable Christian and Alawi minorities, Homs was the first major urban center to rise up and the first to devolve into bitter sectarian bloodletting
  • While vast swathes of Syria’s Sunni population feel silenced and brutalized, Alawi communities often carry their own narrative of victimhood, which blends legitimate grievances with vindictive impulses vis-à-vis Sunnis whom they regard as having betrayed the country
  • crude divisions based on sect or class fail to describe a complex and fluid landscape. Some fault lines are less dramatic, all but imperceptible except to those who experience them first-hand. Neighbors, colleagues, friends and kin may have come down on opposing sides, despite having every social marker in common. Each part of the country has its own web of tragic events to untangle.
  • Many Islamic State fighters swapped clothes and joined the [Kurdish-led] Syrian Democratic Forces to protect themselves and their families. But they haven’t changed; those people are bad, and will always be bad. There will be vengeance. Not now, while everyone is busy putting their lives together. But eventually, everyone who suffered under ISIS, whose brother was killed by ISIS, will take revenge.
  • A native of a Damascus suburb remarked: “Charities typically want to help those who fled from elsewhere. So, when I go to a charity, I say I’m displaced.”
  • The divide between conservative and more secular Sunnis has calcified, manifesting itself even in differential treatment at checkpoints. “I have an easier time driving around because I don’t wear the hijab,” remarked a woman from the Damascus suburbs. “If you veil, security assumes you’re with the opposition.”
  • While dialogue is sorely needed, some Syrians warn against emphasising dialogue for its own sake—even at the cost of burying the most substantive issues at stake. A businessman from Damascus described his own abortive experience with talks proposing to link disparate elements of Syria’s private sector: “There’s this whole industry around ‘mediation,’ including between sides that don’t actually disagree on anything. Meanwhile, all the problems that caused the uprising have gotten worse.”
  • Just as Syrians are forced to be more self-reliant, they have also come to depend evermore on vital social support structures. Indeed, extreme circumstances have created a paradox: Even as society has splintered in countless ways, the scale of deprivation arguably renders Syrians more closely interdependent than ever before.
  • remittances from relatives who live abroad
  • The country’s middle and upper classes have long extended vital forms of solidarity to their needier compatriots, with Syria’s merchant and religious networks playing a leading role. What is unique, today, is the scale of hardship across the country, which is so vast as to have changed the way that Syrians conceptualize the act of receiving charity. A businessman from central Syria noted the extent to which dependency, which once demanded some degree of discretion, has become a straightforward fact of life. “People used to hide it when they were reliant on charity. Not anymore. Today you might hear workers in a factory wondering, ‘Where is the manager?’ And someone will say that he’s out waiting for his food basket. The whole country is living on handouts.”
  • People still do charity the Islamic way, based on the premise that you must assist those closest to you. If there’s someone you should help—say, a neighbor—but you’re unable, then it’s your responsibility to find someone else who can. These circles remain very much intact, and the entire society lives on this. Seven years of war didn’t destroy that aspect of Syrian culture, and that’s something Syrians are proud of.
  • There will be no nationwide recovery, no serious reform, no meaningful reconciliation for the foreseeable future.
Ed Webb

Pentagon rethinks how to protect diplomats, aid workers in Mideast war zones - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...iplomats-mideast-warzones.html

USA US diplomacy military politics war Yemen aid USAID

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Nov 19 - Cached
  • The Pentagon is pushing Congress for more authority to provide security to diplomats and aid workers in conflict zones, a move that could allow US aid to penetrate deeper into war zones in the Middle East such as Yemen.
  • Undersecretary for Defense John Rood, the Pentagon’s number three official, submitted the proposal that would allow the agency to provide as much as $25 million in logistical support and services to support the State Department and USAID’s stabilization efforts
  • The Pentagon proposal could potentially set up the United States to have a larger role if negotiations succeed to end Yemen’s five-year war. Since the summer, the State Department scurried to help the country’s warring factions, including the exiled Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi government, the Iran-supported Houthi movement, the Saudi-led coalition and the United Arab Emirates-backed Southern Transitional Council, come to the bargaining table.
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  • The Pentagon's reexamination of the agency’s role in protecting diplomats in war zones has come as top members of Congress are also looking at options to give the hollowed-out State Department more firepower, such as the Provincial Reconstruction Teams used in the 2007 Iraq troop surge led by Gen. David Petraeus.
  • terror groups such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State — the main focus of American strategy in the war-torn country — as well as Iran could exploit power vacuums in the country.
  • The proposal would specifically allow State Department and USAID staffers to be detailed to Pentagon forces, allowing the Defense Department to maintain legal authority to protect American diplomats or aid workers. It would also allow the Defense Department to assume the authority to conduct stabilization operations if State personnel are unwilling to go. The defense spokesperson said though the Pentagon often has access to conflict zones, the agency “has extremely limited authority to conduct stabilization activities” or to support the State Department or USAID.
  • Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Ct., has called on the Donald Trump administration to create a hybrid class of so called “warrior-diplomats” who have the ability to protect themselves and provide conflict resolution support.
Ed Webb

Cameroonian migrants deported from UAE face conflict or exile - 0 views

news.trust.org/...20210917000028-v6ugx

Cameroon Nigeria UAE Dubai migrants rights HRW

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Just months ago, Cameroonian migrant Wilfred Christopher had a home and stable job as a pastry chef in Abu Dhabi. Now, the 26-year-old fears for his life after authorities in the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) deported him to Cameroon – where his home region is mired in conflict. "Sometimes there's fighting, there are stray bullets. Now they said if you go out (after curfew), they might shoot you," Christopher said by phone from the town of Tiko in Cameroon's South West region, referring to fighting between Anglophone separatists and government forces.
  • one of hundreds of African migrant workers - from Cameroon, Nigeria, and Uganda - who were arrested in late June in the UAE, and deported en masse in recent weeks
  • charges which human rights groups have decried as bogus
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  • forced returns of Cameroonians this summer to a country beset by violence could amount to a violation of international law, according to Human Rights Watch
  • six deported Cameroonians said they were repeatedly denied access to lawyers or information about the charges against them following their arrest, and that their concerns about the ongoing violence back home were dismissed
  • "I told them: 'you want me to die?' and they said: 'just go back to your country'," added Rene, who worked as a car polisher in Abu Dhabi since 2019. Rene said he had not been allowed to retrieve his savings or any documents, including his birth certificate, before being deported.
  • African and Asian workers have highlighted stigma and racism in the past, and the UAE regularly faces criticism from human rights groups for abuses including forced deportations. Yet the scale of the mass arrests in June and recent deportations were unprecedented, the non-profit Euro-Med Monitor - which co-authored a report on the issue - said this month.
  • all countries are obliged to abide by a human rights principle known as "non-refoulement," which prohibits nations from forcibly returning anyone to a country where they risk threats to their life or liberty
  • Cameroon's consul-general in Dubai, Donancier Mebouogue, said he had received "no official information" from the UAE's foreign ministry on the arrests and deportations, despite three written requests. In early August, Mebouogue tried to visit al-Wathba prison, where guards confirmed that Cameroonians were being detained but prevented him from seeing them, he said.
  • While Nigeria has proved a sanctuary for some of the Cameroonians, not all are so fortunate. "I traveled (to Abu Dhabi) because the war was getting too tough," former pastry chef Christopher said. "Now I'm back (in Cameroon), with nowhere to turn to – nowhere to run."
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