The Plight of Asian Maids

In Bad Dreams, a report issued three years ago, Human Rights Watch leveled a moral indictment against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for alleged abuses against migrant workers, including household maids. It cataloged alleged mistreatment from the beginning to the end of their employment, including ungodly hours, unpaid salaries, lack of medical care, summary dismissal and physical abuse including rape.

The lives of these ladies is already hard enough, even when their employers respect their contracts and human dignity. About 2 million of them come from Indonesia, the Philippines and other developing Asian countries to work six days a week or more, in 8-12 hour days, unable to return to their home countries for years at a time, for the sake of a few hundred dollars a month. Much of the money they make is immediately sent home to support parents, siblings or even their own children. Many are Muslim, but if they are not, they are legally forbidden from practicing their faiths. Saudi Arabia owes them a considerable debt. Nearly every single family in the Kingdom employs an Asian maid to do the dirty, often back-breaking jobs around the house. Many maids are partly raising the children.

"In 1962, then-King Faisal abolished slavery in Saudi Arabia by royal decree," HRW's report said. "Over forty years later, migrant workers in the purportedly modern society that the kingdom has become continue to suffer extreme forms of labor exploitation that sometimes rise to slavery-like conditions. Their lives are further complicated by deeply rooted gender, religious, and racial discrimination. This provides the foundation for prejudicial public policy and government regulations, shameful practices of private employers, and unfair legal proceedings that yield judicial sentences of the death penalty."

It's a shameful record that HRW's 2004 report seems to have done little to change, either in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere in the Arab world where mistreatment of foreign domestic workers appears widespread. In 2005, an Indonesian maid named Nour Miyati suffered the amputation of four of her fingers at the Riyadh hospital after reportedly developing gangrene in her hands and feet while being tied up for a month in a bathroom by her employer. She was subsequently charged with making false accusatons against her employer and sentenced to a whipping.

Now comes the stories of Siti Tarwiyah Slamet and Susmiyati Abdul Fulan, Indonesian domestic servants that HRW says were beaten to death by members of a Saudi family a few weeks ago. The two were killed and two other Indonesians critically injured after the family allegedly accused them of practicing black magic on a teenaged boy.

Such murder may be rare. Most Arabs treat their domestic servants well, some generously. But abuse of household help, along with the silence that greets the abuse, has been out of control for too long. It's a problem that Arab societies must urgently address. Saudi Arabia has a particular duty, given its role as the custodian of the holiest places in Islam, a religion that places a high priority on achieving justice.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo