Forgotten Victims in the Middle East?

KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."

This is the introduction to Sunday's article in the New York Times which dealt with the often heartbreaking plight of foreign maids in wealthy Gulf oil countries such as Saudi Arabia. Before the discovery of oil, men in Gulf countries lacking an economic infrastructure such as Saudi Arabia used to venture abroad to places like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq in order to send some capital back to their families.

This situation ended up being reversed with the discovery of oil. With a very small indigenous population and a very large and profitable oil industry, the vast majority of the labor force was now imported. These imported workers included not only American employees of oil companies to keep the oil industry running but also poor South-Asian men and women to serve as drivers and maids for the now opulently wealthy Gulf families.

The problem with this sudden and shocking rise to wealth among a previously tribal and nomadic population was that interests and values that would normally arise in an industrial society, such as civil institutions and laws dealing with worker's rights, were absent. The main ideological driving force for Saudi Arabia was Wahabiism, named after its proponent Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. The movement, called Wahabiism, is structured around recreating in exact detail the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Wahabiists rejected innovations that grew after the seventh century as Islam was absorbing the cultures of its conquests.

The foreseeable consequence of the combination of such factors was that women from such countries as Sri Lanka were beaten and abused by their employers, with nowhere to turn for re-dress because after all, due legal process did not exist and the only courts that existed were Sharia courts of Islamic law with strictly male judges. As the article points out:

Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka's Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled "natural" by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.

Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20 and emaciated, had arrived at the shelter from Lebanon one morning. She had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks on her body and dried blood still around her ears.

The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily, she said, speaking in the high, anguished voice of a little girl who cannot understand what she has done wrong. They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food.

With this situation continuing to be a problem, it may come as a surprise to some that Saudi Arabia's religious police spend their time worrying about things such as banning red roses during valentine's day.

The fact that the United States sends billions of dollars in the form of oil payment to a country with institutions that allow for such a grotesque violation of human-rights may seem unconscionable to some. Until as much money and effort has been spent to curb our oil consumption (and hence cease to fund and turn a blind eye to situations such as the abuse in Saudi Arabia) as the money spent (and lives lost) in the Iraq war, we cannot seriously talk of "spreading freedom" and keep a straight face.