Migrant women workers die unheeded in the Middle East
"Fresh blows the wind/For home;/My Irish child,/Where do you tarry?," TS Eliot alludes to 'Tristan and Isolde' in 'The Waste Land'. Similar verses may have reflected the state of Bangladesh's Nazma Begum if we could read her mind. Nazma, a mother of two, was tortured to death in Saudi Arabia. Her children had already lost their father. Nazma had cried over phone just two days before she died. She said her Saudi employer had tortured her and was taking her to some unknown destination. "You can't save me anymore. I will not survive," she said.
Poet Omar Ali writes 'Ae desher shyamol rong romonir sunam shunechhi' (Much have I heard about the dark-skinned women of this land). This reputation reached the Middle East too. Housemaids are in 'great demand' there. Indonesia and Philippines stopped sending female workers there, but we opened our doors wide. We could not follow the example of the Philippines and Indonesia in saving their women. Hunger is the hardest war and that war has stretched up to the Middle East.
No one ever leaves home unless compelled. No one takes a perilous voyage over the oceans if safe on shore. If one could survive in one's own country, no one would leave for the menacing forests in Thailand or the sands of Libya. Bodies are arriving from far away. Of such woman who "looks like a deer ..seeks children for a gift of love,/holding a newborn child with her one hand and managing the hearth with another/She who dotes on her family;/always bidding the ominous away/’ Omar Ali writes. The lives of women are pathetic here.
We receive bodies in lieu of live beings. Some 11 coffins are being sent from the Middle East every day, totalling 2,611 in eight months. There are many women among these victims. A total of 260,000 female workers were sent to Saudi Arabia in three and half years. Around 350 bodies of expatriate women workers arrived in three and half years, among whom 153 committed suicide as per the Saudi authorities. The ratio of suicide is 17 times higher than three years ago. So torture has increased by 17 times. Who will decide which one is suicide and which is murder? What kind of situation compels a woman who went abroad to sustain her family to take her own life? How much torture is required to opt for death over life? Among the 350, some 120 died due to 'stroke'. Normally, women suffer less heart disease than men, but in a land of death young women of 20-40 years fall victim to strokes.
Nazma repeatedly asked her family to save her. She urged them to sell her homestead to rescue her, but a house is far more worth than a life here. Money was not arranged to bring her back. A mother can sacrifice her life for children, but there's no consolation in her death when she is a sex slave and tortured to death in a foreign land. Had she been in her homeland, she would have been carried on the simple 'khatia', but instead she arrived in a coffin by plane. That is development! Is this the ultimate destiny of our expatriate workers? Are they treated same as the stateless Rohingya refugees in the Middle East? In six years till 2014, some 14,000 coffins were received and still it could not alert the country which is so proud with its development.
Nazma Begum is not an exception. Videos of lamenting expatriate Bangladeshi women workers are prevalent on the internet. These bruised, weeping women only plead for life, "Save me, take me back". This is not a plea to their families, but to the government and embassies too. They urge their country which depends on their remittance for all the luxuries. It's said that money can talk, but the consumers of the money sent by the expatriate workers are silent. The expatriate workers are ill-treated and even assaulted when they seek assistance from the Bangladeshi embassies abroad. There's no end to the humiliation of this country.
Philippine president Duterte is a hotheaded autocrat, but it took just one meeting for him to stop sending housemaids to Kuwait after a worker was killed and stuffed in a fridge in Kuwait. The body of Nazma Begum who was tortured and killed remained in a Saudi morgue for a month, and it did not affect us. We need remittance, but we have no responsibilities to the people who earn that. This silence results in no steps taken to safeguard the professional life of the expatriate workers and not doing anything to stop the illegal human traffickers.
Every action has its consequences. Police assaulted primary school teachers who were demonstrating for a pay hike last week in Dhaka. It was the same in the case of Nazma's pleas. Trampling their demands as well their honour is tied together. If you don't spend more money on education, more skilled manpower will not be created. The children will grow up physically, but will hardly be more qualified than beasts. If they are women, then they would be sent to readymade garment factories or ship breaking yards. Or else remittance will be earned by sending them abroad for the wealthy Arabs’ pleasure. We are not giving them that standard of education which will enable them to make a phone call to an appropriate place or seek a better option. We could have sent the teachers who are being assaulted here to serve abroad in the sectors of education, health or services.
The people of the countries that respect their teachers, students and education, do not die unheeded in foreign lands. It is unimaginable how a country that beats its teachers would prioritise the safety of its migrant workers abroad.
*Faruk Wasif is assistant editor of Prothom Alo. He can be reached at [email protected]. This article appeared in the print edition of Prothom Alo and has been rewritten in English by Nusrat Nowrin.