Small Money At A Very High Price

Mary was still trembling with fear as she sat in a corner of the reception area at the Indian Embassy here in Doha.

The 32-year-old housemaid from Karnataka state in south India could not understand why she had been “verbally abused, mentally tortured and physically beaten” by her Qatari employer.

“They hit me a lot,” she said. “And I did not do anything wrong. I don’t know why they beat me.”

Mary arrived in Qatar six weeks ago expecting to be treated as part of the family, just as she had been during the four years she worked in Dubai.

She was wrong.

“They nagged me everyday. The woman (wife of the Qatari employer) used to slap me, pull me by my hair for no reason… if a little bit of dust was left on the table, or if they thought I didn’t do the dishes properly,” she said.

“They used to accuse me of stealing soap cakes. I never stole anything. I didn’t even take a pencil from their house,” she cried.

Surviving on a “single piece of bread” since two days, Mary said she was hardly given food to eat.

The final straw came when the man (the Qatari employer) beat her with his shoe. That night she fled and sought shelter at the Indian Embassy.

“The man hit me with his shoes,” she wept. “They never gave me any food to eat. If I opened my mouth to ask for it, he would hit me. They used to tell me to not say a word in front of them.”

The torture had begun just a few days after Mary came to Qatar. But she tolerated it hoping things would improve with time. “I stayed hungry for days. But it was ok because I thought when I get my salary at least my two children back home would be able to eat. They didn’t even pay me my salary,” she said.

Mary came to the Indian Embassy only for help to send her back to her country. “I don’t want to stay here anymore. I’ll never come here again,” she said.

Mary’s Qatari employer, after receiving a call from the Indian consulate, came rushing to the embassy. He abused Mary, forcibly opened her bags accusing her of “stealing QR 6,000” from his house.

Not finding any money, the Qatari found to new bars of soap in her bag and then accused her of stealing those, while Mary wept in front of him that she had brought them from India.

This is what happens, says Ramesh Chandra, second secretary at the Indian Embassy. “If we don’t send her back immediately, they will frame charges against her and throw her in jail. She would never be able to go back.”

Fortunately, a few threats to report the matter in the press worked. The Qatari came along with Mary’s passport, a return air ticket and her salary of a meager QR 600.

Mary flew back home last week to safety and peace, leaving behind a sorry tale of several thousand housemaids who work in not just Qatar but the entire Gulf region, where domestic workers are seen as the lowest rung of society.

Many of them even know of the abuse and mistreatment they are likely to face, but they still enter the Gulf region with hopes of earning a little more money than what they would earn back home in their countries.

Most of them are from Asian countries like India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Philippines, Indonesia and some also from Ethopia.

Anita (name changed), 29, of Nepal, who has been a housemaid in Doha for three years, said she was “exploited, beaten and sexually abused till date by her Arab employer,” but she had no option but to bear the torture.

“The situation in our village is very bad. There is no money there. How will I feed my three kids if I go back,” she said.

Some 700 Indonesian maids reported mistreatment by their employers in 2004. Complaints included sexual harassment, physical torture, imprisonment, and maltreatment.

“There were several cases where abused Domestic servants did not press charges for fear of losing their jobs,” said Gulfan Afero of the Indonesian Embassy in Qatar.

There are about 20,000 Indonesians working in Qatar, of whom more than 15,000 are housemaids.

In June, Indonesia lifted a ban on the recruitment of housemaids to the Gulf state but introduced new laws which regularize contracts and set minimum wages of QR900 instead of QR600.

The measures were aimed at offering greater protection to housemaids, said Afero.
Arbaiah BT Suluri, 41, an Indonesian, has been battling for life at the Hamad hospital for over 10 months.

In October last year, she was admitted with severe head injuries resulting from a blow with a “blunt tool”, allegedly, by Suluri’s sponsor and his wife.

The sponsors, now on bail, deny the allegation, saying Suluri was “mentally unstable”.

But the truth, whatever it is, may die with Suluri, who has been in coma ever since.

In neighbouring Saudi Arabia, a case of an Indonesian housemaid, who had to have her fingers amputated after suffering gangrene, is still surrounded with confusion.

She initially accused her employers of beating her and locking her up in a room for days. They were charged, but she later withdrew the allegations, and has since been removed from hospital and thrown in prison for making false accusations.

Human rights workers, who were not permitted to see her in hospital, believe she was pressured into dropping the charges.

Every year, more than 100 Sri Lankan women return home dead from the Gulf region. Most deaths are labeled “natural” by the host governments. Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.

According to a report published in the New York Times, 15-20 percent, of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the Gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.

Crishantha Harath of the Sri Lankan Embassy in Qatar said they received “several complaints every day” from their country’s housemaids accusing their sponsors and employers of physical abuse, but all they could do was to report the cases to the Criminal Evidence and Information Department (CEID), or send the victims back to Sri Lanka.

“It depends on what the victim wants. Most of them choose to go back home instead of pressing charges because they are well aware the result might take long to come, and moreover, they might end up on the receiving end” Harath said.

At the same time Harath mentioned of a case just two weeks back when a housemaid came crying to the embassy accusing her employer of raping her. “She was hell bent on pressing charges.”

The matter was forwarded to the CEID for investigation.

Foreign embassies provide temporary shelter for 48 hours to their nationals who leave their employers as a result of abuse or disputes before transferring the case to local government officials.

If the matter is not resolved within 48 hours the cases are transferred to the CEID of the Ministry of Interior for a maximum of seven days. Cases not resolved within those seven days are then transferred to the court.

Abdul Rahman, owner of Doha-based Jassim Services, a manpower agency, which specializes in supplying housemaids, said more often than not he sent back runaway housemaids complaining of physical or mental torture or even sexual abuse due to lack of evidence.

“There are many who return to me with complaints, but there is not much you can do. Some say they were kicked, and punched in the stomach, but there are no marks. How can you prove it,” Rahman said.

“And if it is a sexual abuse case, I definitely tell them there is nothing you will get out of it. Either return back to your country, or I would try and change your employer,” added Rahman, who supplies “70 to 80” housemaids every month in the country and charges a fee of about “QR5000” for each.

It is no wonder then that runaway housemaids think of their embassies as their first and last resort for help or justice, despite the existence of the independently-run National Human Rights Committee (NHRC), and the recently-inaugurated Human Rights Department of the Interior Ministry.

We tried contacting the NHRC only to know how easily accessible the organization was.

For two full days we called NHRC number 4444012 extension 235 and 244, which is the complaints section, but there was no response.

An official of NHRC referred to the absence of response as “strange” and said, “99% of the time someone would respond on ext. 235 or 244.”

Whereas the Human Rights Department, which was launched on August 8, said it had “not received even a single complaint from a domestic worker” as yet.

Why would they? They’ve only advertised an e-mail address - hrd@moi.gov.qa – for the public to “e-mail” their grievances, when most of the domestic workers, who are uneducated, don’t know how to even spell the Internet, leave alone using it.

Anthony Manyanchery Paily, 38, who worked as a driver for a Qatari family till he “couldn’t tolerate being beaten up every day,” said he couldn’t think of anywhere but his country’s (India) embassy to seek help.

Paily, in Doha for seven months, said he had “no idea” he could have contacted a human rights organization to solve his issues.

Nevertheless, knocking on the Indian consulate’s door helped him.

Paily’s employer, who used to hit him with slippers on the face for “bringing tea two minutes late, or driving too slow,” came around with Paily’s passport, return ticket and QR2000 to bury the matter right there and then.

Paily too flew back to India last week.

Doha-based psychologists blamed the domestic violence on the “cultural differences”.

“In different cultures people express their anger differently. Here they express it by raising their hands. For the Qatari or Arab employers it wouldn’t be an issue, while for those being hit it would be something major,” said Dr. Ouisama Hajal of the American Hospital.

Dr. Hanadi Jaber a psychologist at the Doha Clinic said she in fact got several cases where the men came complaining of their wives mistreating the housemaids.

She believes it’s the frustration of the wives in this region of the world that the housemaids have to pay for.

“The wives are frustrated and jealous. They know they can’t take their anger out on their husbands, so they take it out on the housemaids. Sometimes it is because of other women in their husband’s lives, or sometimes she is even jealous of the housemaid,” Dr. Jaber said, adding, she had received a few cases where the wives claimed to have “caught their husbands with the maids.”

Several people in Qatar need psychiatric help, pointed out Dr. Jaber, which is a major cause of brutal domestic violence.

However, she said, it was “considered a matter of shame in Qatar” to visit a psychiatrist.

“It’s sad,” she said.

BOX ITEM:
Domestic workers, report mistreatment.
Call up National Human Rights Committee (NHRC). Phone Number: 4444012 ext. 235, 244.
Human Rights Department. Phone Number: 4866322.

And employers, if you are raising hands on your workers, whatever be the reason, call these numbers for Psychiatric help: 4384333 (Doha Clinic), 4421999 (American Hospital), 4392222 (Hamad Hospital).