L.P. Ariyawathie said she got a taste of what was in store for her just weeks after leaving her native Sri Lanka to work as a housemaid in Saudi Arabia.
At first, she said, her employers mocked the basic Arabic she had learnt during a 15-day training course before she left for the Gulf. Then, events took a more sinister turn.
“The torture started when a plate was broken by accident. [My employer] asked me whether I was blind and tried to prick something in my right eye,” the 49-year-old said. “When I covered it with my hand, they pricked a needle on my forehead above the eye.”
PHOTO: AFP
Ariyawathie returned home from Riyadh last month, traumatized after what she said was months of beatings and abuse. Doctors had to operate to remove dozens of nails and needles driven into her forehead, legs and arms.
Saudi authorities have questioned the mother of three’s account.
However, the case has brought into focus how some foreign employers treat the thousands of poor women from South Asia and beyond who work overseas, lured by the promise of better wages to help support their families back home.
Human Rights Watch has raised concerns about Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, although cruelty and ill-treatment — from withholding wages and travel documents to overwork and sexual abuse — have been documented worldwide.
A recent Channel 4 television documentary said many of the more than 15,000 domestic workers who come to Britain each year are enduring a modern form of slavery, with a charity claiming one in five people they see reports abuse.
Joynal Abedin Joy, a charity worker in Bangladesh, said rapes, beatings and brandings were “routine” in Lebanon, although the government in Dhaka said it was unaware of any pattern of abuse.
“In 2009 alone, dead bodies of 11 Bangladeshi girls came from Lebanon. Most had torture marks on their bodies,” Abedin told reporters. “I know of a girl who called her home for help. Two days later, her Lebanese employers informed her family that the girl had died due to a heart attack.”
Nargis Begum, a 26-year-old Bangladeshi, said her employers in Beirut gave her electric shocks, beat her with chains and leather belts and burnt her with hot irons over five months, during which she was also raped.
“Ninety-five percent of the Bangladeshi girls I met there told me they were raped at their work place. They don’t tell their families out of fear. They endure it and accept their fate,” the mother of two said.
Maya Gurung, 35, left Nepal in 2004 for a job as a cleaner in Kuwait. She said she was forced to work up to 20 hours a day and was often made to survive on scraps of leftover food from her employers.
Her attempts to leave were dashed because the recruitment agency had taken away her passport. She became pregnant and had to quit her job after a man she met a local church offered to get the documents back in exchange for sex.
When she appealed to the police for help, she was jailed on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.
Gurung managed to return to Nepal last year, but her family shunned her and she now lives in a shelter in Kathmandu.
The wages earned by domestic workers form a significant part of the billions of dollars in remittances sent home to developing countries every year.
Unions, activists and human rights campaigners say migrant workers need greater protection, as individual governments are failing to include them in labor laws — or where they are, their rights are still limited.
The International Labor Organization is working toward new guidelines for such employees, including written contracts and complaint mechanisms, as well as guarantees on minimum wages and working hours.
In the meantime, lawmakers like Sri Lanka’s Ranjan Ramanayake have called for government action, describing the plight of the country’s female migrant workers as a “social issue” and suggesting Saudi Arabia should be blacklisted.
“I’m ashamed to say this, but the truth is we have become international pimps ... by sending or rather selling our mothers, sisters and daughters to be enslaved or abused,” he said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not