The culture in the Arab States is difficult to understand, especially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, e.g. the recent collapse of a crane at the Grand Mosque in Mecca was not a disaster but “a blessing in disguise”, the 107 people killed, say Muslim leaders “that dying while on the hajj is a ‘great honour from God” what about the other 238 who were injured?, they are not in heaven, but are innocent victims of the tragedy.
The head of Saudi Arabia’s civil defense directorate says high winds caused the massive crane to topple over and smash into Mecca’s Grand Mosque, when looking at the actual or potential causes of lifting accidents, the power of wind is often underestimated or neglected as anyone with construction experience knows the wind and weather wreaks havoc with construction schedules. However, Mother Nature and the laws of physics rule that when it comes to crane operations, never exceed the crane or component manufacturer’s recommendations pertaining to wind speeds, which should always be determined via a boom tip anemometer, there should also be a plan in place for lightning safety.
Lift plans should be provided for each major component lift to the crane operator prior to performing the work. The operator should keep the lift plans on hand to ensure that each lift falls within the plans made. Lift plans should have basic information such as crane configuration, component weights, rigging requirements and weights, crane capacities, crane pad requirements and so forth. The more information that can be provided to the operator the safer the work site will be.
From this brief overview one can see that the effect of wind on cranes and their loads is not to be taken lightly and it must not be overlooked when carrying out the risk assessment and planning that is an essential part of all effective lifting operation, obviously no risk or hazard assessment was conducted by the crane owner and operator, and as a result King Salman also ordered that the Bin Ladin group’s board members and senior executives be barred from travel abroad until after an investigation is complete.
It is difficult for non-Muslims to understand the thinking, I have tried studying the Koran, but found no real answers, let me provide you some further examples, say I am driving in Riyadh, I break at a red light, a Saudi National runs into me from the rear, anywhere else in the world the driver behind would be at fault, but not in Saudi Arabia, I would be at fault, their rational, if I had stayed in Canada, this accident would not have happened.
Another example, In 2002, a fire at a girls’ school in Mecca made 15 school girls burn to death because they were not wearing Hijabs, the 15 girls died because of the Authority for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue stopped the schoolgirls from leaving the burning building and hindered rescue workers because the girls were not wearing correct Islamic dress and not because of the fire as the media stated.
Being a professional health & safety consultant for almost 50 years I often reflect on the code of ethics of which I am bound, and wonder if I am always being honest to the code, now I am nearing retirement, there seems much more that I could have done, but I am not sure where I would get the biggest bang for the buck especially in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, so I am putting some of my thoughts and ideas in writing in the hopes that some of my concerns will be addressed, by the powers that be, having spent 1000’s of days in the kingdom, training oil Industry staff in root cause analysis and conducting audits, what is the use if the true causes are ignored, and these disasters are considered an act of god or a blessing in disguise.
One question I continue to ask is why is the international community remains silent about widespread barbaric phenomenon of migrant workers in the GCC countries?
During my many visits to the Gulf, I had the opportunity to visit Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Fujairah, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait etc. collectively these are known as the Gulf Cooperation Council states, where I found the living and working conditions of migrant workers to be so intolerable that people in the outside world need to know about it and push their governments to exert pressure for reasonable change in that inhumane situation.
The Gulf Cooperation Council, The South Asian Immigrants are not there because they like Arabs, they are there because they simply want to feed and educate their families, I believe that Canada and the United States and the Western World need to be concerned?
All these six states are extremely wealthy, and they are the allies of Canada the United States, Great Britain, and the G8 Western World. Crude oil and natural gas are their main exports and the source of their great wealth, the elite in these countries are so wealthy that they send their luxury cars to London for oil change (6,500 miles round trip).
There are nearly fifteen million immigrants or migrants in these countries. Approximately 60% of these people are Muslims from Islamic countries. Even the majority of immigrants from India are Muslims, since India actually is home to more Muslims than any other nation
All these immigrants to the GCC Member States are treated in an inhumane manner that no one should have to endure, many Asian migrants to the Middle East go there in the hope of finding jobs unavailable at home or that pay better, so that they can support their families.
Many are either single women seeking employment as maids in wealthy Gulf State households, or men seeking jobs either in the oil industry or in construction, the latter especially in Dubai, an Emirate within the United Arab Emirates (UAE), particularly in the fast-growing city of Dubai that is now such a major tourist attraction, and Bahrain and Qatar are other small but prosperous countries, So, while migrants to the Middle East may have heard something about the conditions they’ll be facing, their own personal economic reality drives them to hope for the best and go anyway.
Asian immigrants to the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, cannot escape their inferior status and oppression in working conditions, health care, residency, and legal recourse for harm done to them. They effectively become slaves to employers who consider them unworthy of any degree of decent treatment as human beings – and, thus, totally disposable, it’s actually a racial discrimination of the worst kind.
Native-born citizens of Kuwait, for example, receive so much money and other benefits from their oil-rich government that they have little or no need to work at all – particularly the women. But, since these wealthy Arab women consider staying home to tend to the house and take care of their children is beneath their dignity, they require maids for such tasks. According to Arab news reports, 83 percent of Kuwaiti households have foreign maids working for them. There are more than three million foreign maids working in the GCC nations, mostly from Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Nepal.
They can well afford to pay these housemaids a living wage and provide decent working conditions, but in reality few do. Instead they force maids to work inhumanely taking away their passports, forcing them to work exhausting hours; frequently abusing them both verbally and physically to the point of torture; willfully delaying, or totally withholding their wages; many are beaten, raped, or even killed.
The GCC Member States are now home to some of the most beautiful and architecturally advanced buildings in the world, including Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, now the tallest man-made structure on Earth. This magnificent multi-use showpiece was designed by an American architectural firm, but – like nearly everything else newly built in the region – was constructed mostly by South Asian migrant construction workers.
Though some of these men are young and single, many of them are married with wives and children back home that they are trying to support but will not see for months or even years. Their working conditions are so hazardous that injuries and deaths are common, but the local news media barely notice. These migrants most often have to live in filthy, overcrowded labor camps and too often do not even receive the inexcusably low pay they are allotted.
In order to work in a GCC Member State, a prospect must be recruited in her or his home country and pay an exorbitant fee to the recruiter, who then becomes an “agent” that finds employment for this worker (and may receive a fee from the employer as well). The worker’s fee is often so high relative to anticipated wages that paying it back could take years.
There is something called sponsorship, essentially, you can only work for the employer that brought you into the country – no one else. If you want to seek a job elsewhere in the host country, you need to leave that country and return on a different visa, it is common practice for either the recruiter/agent or the employer to confiscate the worker’s passport. Because leaving the country – including escape back home – is absolutely forbidden without a proper passport, and because holding ANY job requires that passport, immigrant workers are effectively trapped by their current employers – no matter how negligent or even intentionally cruel they may be.
They are thus enslaved to uncaring masters whose control over them is total, and they can be discarded (or worse) at any time without recourse. There are no unions or other organizations to protect workers in GCC Member States.
As a result, there have been many suicides among both housemaids and male workers besides the deaths from job hazards, disease, and brutal treatment. These tragedies receive only the briefest mention in the local news media unless they occur publicly enough to warrant a few extra paragraphs of coverage. Even then, the public response is essentially nil.
Being a successful safety & health consultant, sworn to a code of ethics and regularly witnessing the suffering of Asian immigrant workers in GCC Member States disturbed me so much that I have wrote a considerable number of articles, I put hundreds of pictures and case histories onto Power Point presentations and present them at events in Canada, the USA, from the whole region on a regular basis, at International conferences, and also present articles analyzing the issues and proposing solutions.
A few case histories: These efforts are dedicated to improving both working conditions for immigrants and the rights of pilgrims of citizens in general in Gulf Cooperation Council nations, one case history is regarding an Indonesian housemaid, who was pushed out of a third-floor window by her employer, she was in a coma for a week and later sent back to Jakarta without her pay.
The most frequent cause of death among immigrant housemaids in GCC Member States is “falling down from high floors” according to an attorney investigating worker grievances. Some of these women may have been driven to suicide by their horrid circumstances, but many were probably murdered.
There is simply no respect for migrant lives, An Emirati woman and her male neighbor were convicted in Abu Dhabi of stripping the woman’s Asian housemaid naked and beating her to death with a frying pan, then threatening the maid’s colleague against reporting the murder to authorities.
Three Kuwaiti men stalking a Sri Lankan housemaid waited for her to finish shopping and start walking home before jumping on her and throwing her into their car.
They then drove to an empty lot behind a building and took turns in raping her, despite her constant screams. The attackers have not yet been found.
In 2008, in the United Arab Emirates, a woman who was gang-raped by a group of men, then she was imprisoned for eight months for adultery after reporting the crime to the police.
Employers or Sponsors often rape housemaids too, and If a pregnancy results, they will abuse her until she miscarries, get her deported, or cause her death. If her child somehow survives, it will have no rights, no protection, no food, and no shelter.
A Saudi employer and his wife were arrested in Riyadh for torturing a Sri Lankan housemaid by hammering 18 heated nails into her arms, legs, and forehead. The nails ranged in length from one to three inches. The case is still pending.
Another Indonesian maid was tortured and so badly maimed and burned by her female Saudi employer that she became unrecognizable as the pretty 23-year-old she had been Before and after pictures in this article would make any decent person both sick and very angry. Also, the employer, though initially sentenced to three years for her crime, was later allowed to go free.
The appeals court in Kuwait upheld the death sentence of a Kuwaiti housewife for murdering her Filipina domestic helper but commuted the punishment on her disabled husband. They had regularly beaten the maid until her health failed, then taken her to the desert where they threw her out of the car and ran over her repeatedly until she died.
Cases like these have prompted Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, and Kenya to ban travel by women to serve as housemaids in GCC Member States, which is why Saudi Arabia in particular is looking for fresh recruitment sources in Vietnam and Cambodia.
They have an excessive death rate too, mostly from high falls that are rarely reported unless obvious suicides – which are a significant percentage – but also from poorly treated injuries suffered because of unnecessarily hazardous work conditions or disease from the filthy, overcrowded labor camps they are forced to live in.
In Bahrain, ten immigrant men crowded into a flat in an old house died of smoke inhalation before fire crews arrived to fight the blaze, which was caused by faulty wiring. The building had never been legally registered for labor camp use. It was supposed to be bachelor apartments.
Many of the places legally designated as labor camps have no indoor cooking equipment, no garbage collection, and no proper bathroom facilities.
You can imagine how depressing it must be to live there, not even be paid the wages you were promised, and knowing you are trapped in that situation because your employer is holding your passport.
These immigrants are not living in “slums” of their own making. They are basically slaves without choice about where they must eat, sleep, and perform their bodily functions.
I want to inform people both outside and inside the Gulf cooperation Council Member States about the extent of the immigrant oppression issue and motivate people to push for the rights that these workers deserve, specifically, here are some of the changes needed.
As you can see, these are quite reasonable expectations that are fulfilled in modern nations all over the world.
The Muslim Arab rulers and native citizens in GCC Member States treat these immigrants as slaves. There is no religious freedom. There are no women’s rights. There are no gay rights. Workers have no recourse to address grievances. Employers confiscate the passports of immigrant workers. They do not pay their meager wages – for seventeen years in one housemaid’s case, and she was confined to her employer’s house the whole time.
This is a glaring example of the hypocrisy of Arab Islamic leaders. No nation, no civilization abuses fellow human beings more than the governments and the elite of Gulf Cooperation Council States. These abusers preach, practice, and export Wahabi Islam. But even the Quran they profess to follow forbids the kind of atrocities and murders daily in the news there.
Meanwhile, Muslim immigrants to G8 countries, mostly Arabs, make enormous demands on governments and seize every opportunity to claim discrimination if they don’t get what they want, It’s a very clear double standard that must be corrected.
What then is the answer, particularly in the Arab GCC Member States that may be our allies on paper but who really resent us behind their masks, we must apply the leverage we do have through careful diplomacy. Along with that, we must gently and tactfully educate the people without incurring wrath and resistance from the existing governments.
This is a short list of what you can do.
1. There are almost ten million immigrants in North America from Indonesia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka in the United States & Canada. We must educate these immigrants. It is their fellow citizens from their native countries that are abused in the Gulf Cooperation Council Member States.
2. The rulers and elite of GCC countries are the most racist, xenophobic, hedonistic people on Earth. Many export Islamic fundamentalism all over the world. Remember that 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 came from Saudi Arabia, a GCC Member State which is supposed to be our ally.
3. G8 countries put pressure on GCC countries to improve the sponsorship process for immigrants, and stop the confiscation of workers’ passports.
4. Stop the sale of work permits to prevent “bait and switch” tactics where workers are sent to jobs that differ from the ones they were promised, and eliminate the exorbitant fee system that enslaves immigrants to their recruiters for years.
5. G8 Countries should demand fair wages – “equal pay for equal work” – regardless of nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion should become a right as practiced in other nations. Pay salaries uniformly according to contract – the full agreed amount in timely manner by the day, week, or month without contrived reductions, gaps, or arbitrary holdback.
6. Reverse anti-immigrant laws that absolve natives from most crimes against immigrants but severely punish immigrants for even minor infractions.
7. Freedom of Religion for all immigrants. Provide permanent residency status and a reasonable path to citizenship for lawful immigrants who have been living in GCC countries for decades, however I agree that my recommendations are only a “band aid” solution where major surgery is required.
Bio:
Dr. Bill Pomfret; MSc; FIOSH; RSP; FBIM. Managing Consultant, Safety Projects International Inc., www.spi5star.com pomfretb@spi5star.com Tel: 613-2549233
Dr. Bill has taken over a hundred pictures that may be requested by publishers which have been taken over the past couple of years, and he has put together a dynamic and interesting Power Point presentation for conferences or interested groups who wish to learn more about the problems and proposed solutions to the Middle Eastern Migrant Worker crisis.