Fewer than 300 Sri Lankan domestic workers have made it out of Lebanon so far, and the effort seems stalled at this point:
Sri LankaÂ’s Lebanon ambassador M.A. Farrok admitted in a BBCÂ’s Sinhala language service interview that the steady dispatch of war refugees to Sri Lanka has broken down after the first batch has been flown home.
He said after sending nearly 300 people home monetary difficulties faced by an international organization in sending them home, prior engagements of Sri Lankan Airline planes for different jobs and difficulty of reaching Southern areas of Lebanon have all contributed to the break down of dispatching refugees to Sri Lanka.
Several hundred women have taken refuge at the Sri Lankan embassy. Some of the women don’t have valid papers, either because they overstayed their contracts or because they couldn’t get their documents back from their employers. Some employers refuse to release their workers, while others have fled leaving them high and dry:
Terrified Sri Lankan maids who spoke to Gulf News from their embassy in Beirut said they had no alternative but to run away from their sponsors’ houses.
A few among them said they had been left behind by their sponsors, who were either on vacation or had fled the country.
“The Lebanese family for whom I used to work fled leaving me behind. I asked them to help me get out of the country as well but they just gave me $75 (Dh275) and asked me to get in touch with my embassy. I am scared. I want to go back to Sri Lanka where I have a four-year-old daughter and a husband. I am unable to keep in touch with them. The last time I spoke to them was eight days ago,” said Jayanti Gunasekara.
The Ambassador is keeping busy:
With roughly 400 stranded Sri Lankan women sleeping in his offices as they try to escape Lebanon, Amanul Farouque, the country’s ambassador was out yesterday morning, going from bakery to bakery to buy them bread. “This is an unusual assignment, but we are in an unusual situation,” he said wryly.
The embassy promises that it will give travel documents to all Sri Lankans regardless of legal status. But how many will be able to get to the embassy, let alone leave the country?
Is India still helping the stranded blue collar workers?
In MSM clips via Google News from today, they only say that Nepal and Sri Lanka has requested India for help. On personal basis, even Bangladeshis too? Is it really happening?
Damn, this is exactly why it is so evil to take away someone’s passport.
How kind of the Lebanese. Why is that the majority of arabs with maids treat south asians like shit? And before the PC brigade freaks out, I said the majority of arabs with maids. This has been a well documented problem for a log time. My aunt is a doctor to some of the wealthier arabs in Saudi Arabia. She’s a professional. Her stories would make you cringe.
Why is that the majority of arabs with maids treat south asians like shit
Maybe they are taking lessons from South Asians on how South Asians treat their own maids 😉
the situation with the maids in lebanon is exactly what occured in kuwait during the gulf war in 1990… and i am sure this is the same with maids from all backgrounds…
the act of taking away passports is just one of the ways to exercise control over the the ‘workers/maids’. maids that live with their sponsor families cannot do anything without the permission of the families and they cannot leave them at their own will. it is illegal is some middle eastern countries to be without proper ID or passport out in public, like in kuwait. if there is a random police checking going on, which happens from time to time, and one does not have proper ID, they can be put in jail. in the case of maids, they sometimes do not reach the jails and are assaulted. so to be safe, they stay at home all the time. their ‘freedom or independance’ totally depends on the sense of humanity of the sponsor families.
i don’t want to paint an evil picture… it is important to realize that we are discussing the extreme cases. there are also maids that work part-time in several homes and live on their own, they have a different stories. and there are live-in maids that are also treated humanely.
there is a considerable difference in treatment of maids in educated vs non-educated/tribal families. the educated ‘class’ of arabs that have travelled/studied abroad, seen more civilized societies and have a more humane sensibility. whereas the wealthy families that are given money by the government, do not work and only know to lavish or indulge, think that the world is there to serve them. these are some ignorant sentiments u hear of in kuwait: ‘we have brought the maid to this country so we own them and they are here to work for us only’, ‘the expats are there to serve them because they let them live and make money in their country’… etc
but this is NOT representative of everyone there… otherwise many structures would break down… it is changing… very slowly
you are quite right…
Right…becuase in India, maids can be routinely beaten without recourse and sexually assualted without recourse. And if they press charges they may themselves be sent to prison in India right? Get a clue. India may not be Brentwood, but the abuses there pale to how they are treated in the Middle East. Maybe some racism is the cause, but let’s not broach the subject when we can equivocate.
Vikram, have you honestly never known dozens of people back home who keep little kids as servants and lock them in and not allow them to go home? Beatings of servants, that so strange to you? What about desi families who bring their maids with them to the States and don’t let them leave the house? I know a few. The families who only let their servants sleep and sit on the floor because they are of a lower sort? Have you ever been to India?
Sure the Lebanese can be racist towards their dark skinned South Asian maids, and the Gulfies treat just about everyone like shit (just come to Cairo during summer Gulfie season – everyone hates them). Ain’t no moral high ground for desis, though.
What is the significance of Brentwood? There is a city named Brentwood in California. Is that what you are referring to?
Maybe I am clueless and naive – maybe my family is abnormal – but this is not the India I know.
“This is not the India I know” – the cases I know of still form a minority of the relationships between employers and their domestic help within my circle of acquaintances. But I don’t think any Indian would say they’ve never heard of such a thing. Just do a news search, for gods sake.
In case it isn’t clear, I abhor this sort of treatment no matter who does it, and I’m well aware that it’s a problem in Lebanon, I’ve read all sorts of horror stories about the lack of legal protections and systematic mistreatment of South Asian maids in the Gulf and Lebanon and am outraged by their situation. I just don’t think we can pretend it’s not our problem too.
Vikram, have you honestly never known dozens of people back home who keep little kids as servants and lock them in and not allow them to go home? Beatings of servants, that so strange to you? What about desi families who bring their maids with them to the States and don’t let them leave the house? I know a few. The families who only let their servants sleep and sit on the floor because they are of a lower sort? Have you ever been to India?
Back it up with some statistics or well-ordered narrations of your own experiences, but there’s no need to patronizingly dismiss others’ experiences. I’ve been to India and that is definitely not how I’ve seen servants treated. More like employers sent their children to college and hosted their weddings. I have nothing to say about wider Indian statistics, and wouldn’t try to say anything one way or the other about the situation as a whole based on how my family behaves, but for you to assume that any of our families/hosts–including Vikram’s—necessarily behave as badly as the households you’ve apparently been staying in is rather arrogant. It’s one thing to dispute his generalizing from his experience to the wider situation, especially if you have good statistics/evidence to the contrary, but to so arbitrarily and sarcastically question his experience and honesty seems a little rude. I certainly have never seen anything like what you describe and have in fact seen completely different relationships. I’m fully willing to accept the households I stay in might be peculiarly progressive, but I really dislike being told (even indirectly) that I’ve seen something I haven’t.
Here here Saheli!
SP, I see that in between my writing the comment and actually posting it you retreated slightly. It still seems like the problem is much more systematic and widespread in the Middle East than in South Asia.
It still seems like the problem is much more systematic and widespread in the Middle East than in South Asia.
The maids are mostly foreign so there are shades of involuntary servitude (passport confiscation, difficulty in travel, language barriers etc) and the embassies get involved. In rural South Asia, things might not get reported as much.
I think considering the fact that UAE, Kuwait etc. have first world living standards, they should be compared to treatment of maid in other economically prosperous nations and not to third world nations like India. In my opinion class consciousness is more entrenched and deep rooted in South Asia than in the Middle East. So the maids are not made to sit on the floor etc. (pretty common in South Asia) in the Arab world, they still might be subjected to more serious abuse because the maids are foreign etc.
I have lived in India and I have heard of cases where the emplyers have abused their domestic help. A very recent case completely shook me up. I do believe that these are extreme cases, but sad nevertheless. Having said that, I also know people who treat their domestic help as well as any employer in the ‘first world’ might – giving them vacation time to go home, paying tuition for their children, organising (or assisting) weddings, even helping them get health insurance and paying medical bills.
On a tangent, while in college I worked at the Shoe Fair(a trade conference held annually in Delhi) for a couple of days to earn some extra money. The job entitled answering some very basic queries from prospective clients and walking around wearing a tee that advertised XYZ Shoes. It was/is a family owned business that is primarily into exports. Members of the family arrived at the stall to talk to some of the more important clients. You should have seen the way they treated their employees. It was as though we were the very vermin of the earth mistakenly placed before them. These were people who were well educated but used to being served on. They treated the company employees as shabbily as they treated personal ‘help’ because they deemed us servants by extension. Not an experience I like to remember.
I don’t know about the actual statistics in the middle east, but lets look at our own country and see that 15 million of our children are subjected to child labour. Regardless of where the issue is, it should be condemned, but let’s not claim any moral high ground here.
ok i’m going to play devil’s advocate here…
there are definitely cases of physical abuse and sexual assault of maids in india… it may not the story of every house, but it does happen. i don’t think it’s hard to believe that reported cases will be fewer than the actual incidence… reports of physical abuse are also well known by word of mouth (i have personally heard of such stories from my family in india before).
on the other hand… check this out, “Housemaids who seek a short cut towards repatriation often blame their sponsors by using flimsy excuses, said a senior Indian consulate – Dubai.”… so maybe the situation appears to be more aggravated than it is?
there are also issues with many maids that work in the middle-east… honesty is hard to come by. maids also steal and take advantage of sponsors/ employers as well. my mom has a few stories of maids silently removing small pricey items from our house, or disappearing after borrowing large sums of money for a child’s school fees or for a parent’s operation… you are strongly cautioned not to trust the maids. many indian employers verbally abuse indian maids in middle-eastern countries as well, it’s not just the arabs…
there are also reported cases of maids abusing the employers children at home during the day (perhaps this was in retaliation to personal abuse, but still!). i have personally heard of one such story.
i am NOT condoning any form of verbal, physical or sexual abuse of maids, but i just wanted to add a little more to the picture.
it is also difficult to change fundamental beliefs of people. people are raised with different values for human life and equality and it is hard to get through to shatter those mental constructs… sometimes you can take the kuwaiti out of kuwait but you can’t take awat his habits. there are also cases of canadians and americans of south asian origin who have abused maids while living abroad… there is something greater underlying all these cases… there just needs to be personal change one step at a time to shift the balance towards something more humane… anyway, this is a broad statement that can be applied to much more…
now i’m feeling a little depressed… there’s a lot of craziness in the world! 🙁
yes its very depressing how it seems to be expected in ‘war conditions’ that people still are able to show official documents/papers for later on when they’ve managed to get away.
Ridiculous these national bureucracies..
I think far too many people are guilty of generalizing the whole thing. yes, people who abuse maids will exist everywhere .. as will pedophiles, bad bosses, rapists, and murderers. They will exist in Boston, Beirut and Bombay. Stop playing this game of ‘holier than thou’.
Al Mujahid said: Maybe they are taking lessons from South Asians on how South Asians treat their own maids 😉
Not quite, mate. I would love to see Indians treat their maids like they treat their colleagues, but in the middle east, employer mistreatment is far worse and institutionalized.
Hi Sumiti, You have made some very valid and exhaustive observations. My two fils worth: I feel that there is a substantial difference between the situation in India and the Middle East, simply because, when a case is reported, the person subjected to abuse has an incredibly better shot at justice in India, than in the Middle East. The legal system in India is definitely skewed to favour the rich than the poor; but, this anomaly fades in comparison to the situation in the Middle East where the chance of bringing a “local” to justice for crimes committed against a mere housemaid is negligible. Peace!
I know no one has been saying it is “all the Arabs,” but just to reinforce how untrue this is I thought some might like to know that there are orgs in several of the Gulf states (not sure about lebanon) that work on this issue and many citizens of the gulf states are very much involved.
Although enforcement is lacking they have been able to get better legal protections on the books for the workers (a small, but important step in the right direction) and there is talk of allowing unions in places like the UAE. Some also help run away workers and pay for legal representation.
A sad example of ineffective laws is that you can’t work outside when it is above 50 degrees, so the official temp for most of the summer is 49…funny that.
I don’t look that Arab I guess (I am), and I speak a little hindi/urdu and it breaks my heart everytime I get in a cab with a S. Asian driver who confides in me that he “hates Arabs”.
On the flip side there are more than a few S. Asians I have met who have had very positive experiences working the Gulf. Some have even gotten citizenship. I know some refugees from partition who felt deeply let down by both Pakistan and India and found the Gulf to be the only place that gave them an opportunity to restart after the disaster.
Another link in the chain to draw our ire is that predatory placement agencies (like Manpower) that take huge upfront and monthly charges from migrant workers and do almost nothing to help them (e.g. aggresively blacklist bad employers).
Ironically in some Gulf countries the situation is getting worse. For older Gulf Arabs in some countries they had professional trading relationships with S. Asians (a lot of old timers in the Gulf speak Hindi/Urdu) and the British brought in S. Asians to be police men so these older Gulf Arabs have more respect for the S. Asian workers. Saddly, it is some of the silver spoon crowd that mistreats the migrant workers (Note: not all Gulf arabs are rich!). Of course, this is balanced to some degree by more cosmopolitan liberal Gulf Arabs who treat migrant workers with a great deal of respect.
Anyways, thought you guys might like an Arab-American perspective who has spent time in the Gulf. Check out my blog for a recent post on the relationship between the Gulf and S. Asia.
Saheli – why don’t you read what I had to say instead of jumping to conclusions. Did I say “necessarily”? No, I said “dozens” of people I knew kept little kids as servants locked up, “a few” who beat their servants – and pretty much everyone will not allow the servant to sit on the same chairs or sleep on the same beds as the family or eat from the same dishes. In my own family people treat their domestic help extremely well – my parents pay a monthly pension to the woman who worked many years for us after making her retire at age 55. But in my experience, this is the exception rather than the norm.
Vikram was insisting that servants are not in the position of being beaten and sexually assaulted without recourse in India, and I don’t see anyone asking him to offer evidence to back up his assertion that “abuses in India pale in comparison to how [servants] are treated in the Middle East.” But let me tell you that I have heard so many stories and cases of sexual and physical abuse(I particularly remember hearing about one boy – from an elite, “progressive” family – who raped a young woman working for his family, when I was growing up) that to claim this is not a problem in India is absurd. You say you’ve “been” to India, Saheli – but have you lived there? What is your evidence for the assertion that the problem is “much more systematic and widespread in the Middle East than in South Asia”?
Also, when we hear of cases of employers abusing their servants in the Gulf/Lebanon and read things like “the woman was expected to work from 6 am to 10 pm and not allowed to leave the house” – how many employers do you know in India who respect limited working hours for their domestic workers and give them a day off on the weekend? But we tend not to think of that as “abuse” though in many of the cases we hear about in the US or Gulf, that is what counts as abuse (as it should!)
There are growing associations and NGOs to protect domestic workers, especially in Delhi, that get employers to register, check references, allow certain protections and grievance procedures for domestic workers. This is a good thing, and I’d like to see it spread. Most people I know do not use such agencies yet, however. UMM – you said in India we have a much better shot at justice in cases of abuse – do you know of successful cases of domestic workers taking their abusive employers to court in India? That would be very heartening. I haven’t heard of any, though of course in principle it’s possible.
AMFD makes a good point about what is reported and what is not, first world and third world standards. The particular position of workers in a foreign country is what makes the Sri Lankan maids’ ordeal so much the worse, the fact that more traditional noblesse oblige procedures of the kind that exist in many Indian families (e.g. this person’s family has always worked for yours, you “take care” of them and pay for the kids schooling, weddings, medical,etc) do not exist there, but nor do the legal procedures that should take their place. I feel strongly that embassies and foreign ministries need to do a better job of negotiating for their nationals in the Gulf and other countries, and not just serve as a conveyor belt taking maids and workers to employers who are likely to exploit them.
And Laith is right about the silver-spoon Gulf Arabs who treat everybody like shit. The Saudis are probably worst. The Lebanese are odd, more cosmopolitan in some ways but also more likely to be racist. One would hope, though, that greater tolerance and openness would emerge from the desi-arab cohabitation that’s going on in the Emirates right now. (Laith – nice blog!!)
This Lebanon/Gulf conflation by some is not helpful.
Most Lebanese Christians would take great umbrage at being defined as Arab. They prefer to define themselves as “Lebanese” or “Phoenician”. Given migratory patterns and linguistics, this is somewhat delusional. But understanding that mentality goes some way to explaining the sectarian dynamics among the Lebanese themselves. It is the Lebanese Christians who employ an overwhelming majority of Ski Lanka and Filapino maids. It is true that you do not have to be super rich to employ a maid, and this is even more true in Lebanon, where many downwardly mobile Lebanese, cling on to their past. From my limited observations, migrant maids in Lebanon seemed very well adjusted. Unlike Gulf countries where gender roles are problematic, Lebanon, particularly or mostly, Beirut, can be a vibrant place, and a trip to any Spinneys (the major supermarket chain part owned by Tescos) would reveal a Brady Bunch maid family dynamic. Ouch!
The relationship between most Lebanese and Gulf Arabs is a tense one. Many Gulf Arabs spent their summers in Lebanon. It is called ‘the sex trade’ by many Lebanese. Enough said.
And of course, the Lebanese nation survives because of remittances from overseas. There are a lot of Lebanese who teach, in the Gulf and elsewhere. But crucially for the Lebanese economy, there are plenty of Lebanese who do well in the Mr. 5% role. You will find a fair share of Lebanese in the Andean region of South American, in West Africa, and in the Arabian-Persian Gulf. Cocaine, Diamonds and Oil.
My mother was a surgeon in Bahrain for 15 years during which I visited Bahrain and stayed there for extended periods of time over a dozen times. I never ever saw anyone ill treat a maid! Does that mean none were? Hell no.
The stories I heard and I had ever reason to believe them from people existed and were true and would put humanity to shame. My mom’s maid who was from Sri Lanka would have so many things to tell and she wasn’t a live in and worked in several households.
And you don’t need to be beaten for it to be considered abuse. Some of these women weren’t allowed to call their families or leave their home for any reason unless they were going out with the family to tend to their spoilt brats or carry their shopping. Many were simply treated like shit because they were maids, many were raped. There was a woman that had gotten pregnant and it was illegal for her to have an abortion in Bahrain and her host family wouldn’t have any of it so they shipped her off to India and her husband left her with her kids. I’ve heard too many of these stories.
Likewise I have never seen anyone ever treat a maid or help poorly in India. Does it happen? Absolutely. People treat the average working class like shit in India and you don’t need to be the Tatas to do it. Gooddamn middle class that once lived in chawls treat their servants like crap. The fucking peon at a government office talks down and says shit to the guy sweeping the floor. Jesus can we all get off our high horses and stop trying to figure out who treats which maids shitter? For petes sake is it really that important to win this battle and figure out who is the lowest denominator?
We’ve had this exact same conversation on Sepiamutiny before.
The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg, whose reports from Jenin I remember well, is in Southern Lebanon. Below is the final paragraph of her most recent dispatch.
It can’t come too soon for Yusuf Baydoun, 78, who spent 2Å“ hours walking here over the hills in socks and plastic bath sandals. “They were bombing all the time,” he said. “It was very bad. I thought my heart was going to stop.” Mr Baydoun managed to bring out his wife and two daughters. But he too left people behind. In the ruins of his home, hit by the Israeli forces on Monday night, lay the bodies of his two maids: one Ethiopian, one Sri Lankan. The women were asleep when Mr Baydoun’s home was attacked. “It is very sad,” he said. “It was not their war.”
So I found out recently that oversees workers have become Sri Lankan second highest export, right after textiles. So much the good old(recent) agrarian days of coconuts, tea and rubber. The fact that maids to the middle east constitute a high percentage of the #2 export is not something the country advertises. Neither is the fact that the SL govt. still does fuckall to help them know their rights or protect them.
The SL international airport is full of painfully skinny, clearly village-bred women waiting for their flights abroad. Most are on the payphones, sobbing to the children they’re leaving behind about how they’ll be back soon. It’s heartbreaking.
sowing dragon’s teeth a report by the ultimate blogger.
I don’t think anyone in their right mind would push the “Israel as innocent victim” mantra.
However, it’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention that no one–not the UN, not Lebanon, not the European Union–was going to do anything to disarm and disband Hezbollah in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1559.
If there was a way of resolving the problem of Hezbollah that didn’t involve Israel invading Lebanon, I haven’t heard it.
(Note that this is a separate argument from whether the MANNER in which Israel has gone about this is defensible.)
the first tooth (see #31) germinates.
angry muslim-american person shoots six at seattle jewish center. One dead. shooter in custody. same center had organized a ‘united with israel’ march earlier this week.
yea i know – “they started it”.
and this is why you cant let the teeth take root.
We didnt start the fire.
As Doug saunders explores in today’s G&M for all you Canadians – Israel terrorizes a new democracy because –> Hezbollah uses Lebanese ground to wage war on Israel because –> Israel destroyed civic society in Lebanon in the war in 1982 because –> The PLO was using Lebanon as its base because –> Israel had displaced 300,000 Palestinians who were exiled to Lebanon because –> there was the Israeli-Arab war in 1967 because –> Arab states were poised to attack because –> Israel was created by carving out separate states for the jews and the arabs because –> in the debate of cleaving the middle east versus having a federal but secular state, the separationists won. Leaders on opposite sides of the debate – drumroll – Ivan Rand a Canadian supreme court justice for the separationists, and Sir Abdul Rahman from India for the federal solution.
Mr Rahman seems to have seen this coming in this expression of skepticism.
A little bit about Mr Rahman
I know what you’se thinking. I’d write about it on my blog, but that’s already taken with matters more technical. So … leave it to y’all to read or distil as you see fit.
Most Sri Lankan workers I know in Lebanon are choosing to stay. Some are heavily in debt for having paid their passage to Lebanon, and cannot afford to leave, then come back after the situation calms down. Others are saying that they would not be able to support their families if they did not continue working. (This is all first hand info). I have been ecavuated, and managed to evacuate my Sri Lankan nanny to Europe also, but only because I had applied for a visa for her before the bombings began.
When in Lebanon in June I spent a good deal of time with advocates for Sri Lankan maids and even took part in a Buddhist prayer meeting they organized.
I am not surprised that many have decided to stay. Abusive employers are a huge problem, but the Sri Lankan embassy was seen by the women I met as self-important, corrupt and useless in caring for their needs. These women and men would never have expected to be evacuated by the embassy.