Maid In Lebanon: A List of Shame

I have written before about the abuse of foreign maids in Lebanon. And in writing about Lebanon again, I do not mean to single out the nation. Abuse of migrant workers in the Middle East - especially the Gulf - is rampant and a horror. And Lebanon is not the worse offender: The now-empty skyscrapers of Dubai were built on indentured servitude: workers would have their passports seized upon arrival, their pay would always be delayed by several months (and they were always poorly compensated), and they were frequently subject to further abuse in the form of beatings and arrest if they dared complained and sought unionization. Not to mention forcing all the workers to live in cramped quarters (four people to a room, if not more) miles away from the fabricated glitz of Dubai so that tourists do not see that the city is built on modern slavery. As one Qatari worker put: 'we are treated like quasi-slaves'. [If you feel for the now bankrupt Dubai, feel not. It has got its comeuppance.]

And the abuse of maids also extends beyond Lebanon. There are countless horror stories of south Asian maids being cruelly beaten, raped by sexually-deprived Saudi perverts, and mistreated in other sadistic manners (such as having hot water proved over them) in the Gulf:

But Lebanon still has a very high and disproportionate record of abuse of maids. Without exaggeration, any casual reader of the Lebanese press will come across several cases of abused maids and maids that killed themselves out of desperation every week! If not killed by their employers. And the Lebanese government and police force never persecute anyone [Syrian workers are also horribly abused, shot at and sometimes even killed, a young 17-year-old was recently killed by gunfire; but that is a post for another time]. Maids simply have no rights in Lebanon and have been so horribly abused that several of their countries of origin have issues ordinances preventing their nationals from seeking work in Lebanon.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch disclosed that at least 95 migrant domestic workers have died in Lebanon since January 2007. About 40 of the cases were classified suicides. And 24 were described as workers falling from high-rise buildings, often in an attempt to escape their employers.

Just to demonstrate the horrific level of abuse and the frequent level, I will link to stories that appeared in just the last month [many links in Arabic]:

Ethiopian maid kills herself.

While working at my house in the Sanayeh neighborhood of Beirut I noticed some commotion in the street below. I saw a bunch of people and police gathered pointing up at the building. I knew already what had happened. Suicide by domestic workers in this country is not a rare occurrence.As I went down I stopped the first two people I saw, they were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I asked them what happened. One of the men replied, “A Sri Lankan woman (“Srilankia” in Arabic) died.”

A Filipino maid. Her body was left in the streets of the self-described 'Paris of the Middle East' for three hours:

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A Bangladeshi maid "fell" from a balcony and another is run over by a car.

This is a national shame and scare on Lebanon. And the nice beaches and restaurants of Beirut do not obscure that.

What underpins all this abuse is pure Lebanese racism. Lebanese often like to think very highly of themselves as "special" and "superior" and promote an extreme nationalism of a supposedly "great civilization". Truly great societies are build on the respect of the individual. If Lebanese actually believe their nationalism, they certainly have an odd way of demonstrating it.