Death and torture - at the hands of Saudi employers

A senior Saudi Prince was recently convicted in a British court of having murdered his servant (aka 'slave') in a London hotel. This was reported extensively in the British media.

However, through the London Muslim blog I have just come across another shocking incident in which a Sri Lankan maid employed by a Saudi family had 24 nails hammered into her hands, feet and forehead, later requiring removal with surgery:



Amnesty International has just condemned Saudi Arabia for abuse of Indonesian migrant workers. See this Amnesty International report, also.

These incidents shock me, but they do not particuarly surprise me. Having said this, I know a few British people who treated domestic servants appallingly, and not so very many years ago either, although in fairness with nothing like the same degree of physical bestiality, rather with what I would characterise as emotional and mental cruelty.

PS/ This evening's Panorama on BBC1 should be interesting - it reports on the curriculum used in certain Islamic schools ('Saturday clubs') in the UK, financed it seems from Saudi Arabia. The Royal Saudi Embassy in London has denied all knowledge; as someone once said in another context - "well they would, wouldn't they".

Saudi princess robbed of her 'pocket money'

A wave of crime in luxury hotels in Sardinia's Costa Smeralda has been taking place over recent days, in hotels of one particular hotel chain - insider skullduggery is suspected of having provided a professional gang with information to enable them to perpetrate their heists; a significant raid has also taken place in Portofino on Italy's north-west coast.

What drew my attention to this story was the headline about a Saudi princess having 11mio Euros stolen from her roomsafe; one presumes what we are actually describing here is a suite of rooms - I cannot imagine someone so wealthy having a mere room. What was she thinking? Holding such a large sum in her roomsafe seems to me to be most 'unwise', not to say completely mad. Possibly she was planning to buy a property, or more likely it was simply a reflection of habits in Saudi Arabia which favour holding cash rather than relying on banks - and in these parlous financial times such reticence is perhaps understandable, always provided that one ensures that the cash is securely held and a hotel roomsafe cannot by any stretch of the imagination be expected to foil a determined thief. The hotel's own main safe might be a better bet, I suppose, but even there I think you are taking a major risk. Ultimately one really needs to have one's own personal guard to guard the roomsafe or hotel safe when such sums are involved and the costs of doing so are likely to be trifling in comparison.

Early on in my banking career, whilst I was still in London as a management trainee, I often used to accompany a senior arab personal banking officer from our office, usually on Thursday or Friday afternoons, around various of the 'swankier' hotels in London to deliver to various clients of the bank their 'pocket money' for the weekend - this was in the 1970s and the sums were usually of the order of GBP10-30k (depending on which methods you use to evaluate current values, that might be equivalent to GBP40-120k to GBP100-300k in today's money) and usually we did two or three such deliveries during the afternoon, more during the summer when there were more visitors from the middle east in town. Normally we had to provide them with unused banknotes, not for any 'nefarious' purpose, but simply because of their desire not to have other people's fingerprints on their notes and in those days we had to get these notes specially from the Bank of England, with whom we had standing arrangements. Of course, those were still quite large sums of money, but most of it would have been 'blown' by their normal spending habits by the time the end of the following week came and they needed further injections of cash to keep the party going, but at least they didn't hoard massive amounts of cash in an unsecure roomsafe. Doh!

Solidarity with Susie

I've just come across a story about an American expat (lady) blogger, married to a Saudi Arabian national and living in Jeddah, whose blog susie's big adventure has been blocked from being accessible within Saudi Arabia, although it remains viewable elsewhere. There is no clear reason why the Saudi Arabian Communications and Internet Technology Commission have taken this action, although it may be that the fact susie's big adventure was recently mentioned in a high-traffic website, which resulted in a dramatic rise in visits to her site in April, in particular, may have brought the blog to the Saudi Arabian authorities' attention.

As you can see from reading her blog, it is pretty anodyne and level-headed, although she does allude to the restrictions placed on women there, for example in a recent article about the fact that women are not permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia she links to a video showing Saudi Arabian cleric Dr. Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Fawzan explaining why women should not be allowed to drive. It's laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, of course, but it perhaps goes some way to explaining the action taken against her blog within the Kingdom by a very sensitive, some would say paranoid, regime. Embedding has unfortunately been 'disabled by request', so you'll have to visit YouTube to see it here.

I don't know what, if anything, fellow-bloggers can do to help Susie, but at least I can do my little bit to publicise the domestic censorship that she must contend with in Saudi Arabia. As she writes, though, her own family and friends back in the States can continue to read her blog (one of the principal reasons she started it) so even though she has been obliged to switch commenting to pre-publication 'moderation' (so she can retain some control over what is said in her comments area) she remains able to post new blog entries and modify the template. However, she cannot any longer respond to comments through her own comments area as she cannot visit her own blog. I lived in Saudi Arabia before the internet was even thought of and quite enjoyed being there; we had our own problems there in those days, just as those who live there today have their own. A deeply weird and disfunctional society it remains.

(PS/ Funnily enough I wrote fairly recently about possible changes which might one day in the not too distant future permit women to drive in Saudi Arabia. However the power of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices can never safely be overlooked there, even by those who in theory govern the country.)

Saudi Arabia may permit women to drive

One of the curiosities of living in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah in my case) many years ago was that women were not permitted to drive; that is still the case today, around thirty years later! Of course this caused frustration to women and I certainly know that many of the foreign women whom I knew (mainly the wives of colleagues or friends working for other companies or embassies) led rather bored lives because they weren't allowed to work either - a few did manage this trick, indeed we had a few working for our company, but very definitely on a 'need to know' basis. But of course some younger Saudi women, and their husbands, were also frustrated at the restrictions they lived under, specially those who had attended universities in either Europe or the US, and they used every opportunity to escape for a few weeks to other counrtries where they could be rather more relaxed. At home they had to conform - although a few did try and bend the rules, with young husbands allowing their young wives to drive on isolated roads. Fine until the religious police caught up with them - I witnessed that at the 'Creek' just north of Jeddah on quite a few occasions.

Anyway, it appears that a very slow programme of 'softening up' the Saudi population to the possibility that women might one day soon be permitted to drive seems to be making progress. The Telegraph reports today recent comments by the Deputy Information Minister, Abdulaziz bin Salamah:

"In terms of women driving, we don't have it now because of the reticence of some segments of society. For example, my mother wouldn't want my sister to drive. "It's something she cannot grapple with. But there is change on the way. I think the fair view is that one can be against it but one does not have the right to prevent it."

Limited as this is, and however bizarre it would seem if it were sopken by a government official in almost any other country on the planet in the 21st century, I nevertheless recognise that it does represent a kind of progress in this very traditional Moslem (Wahhabi) society. Comments attributed to Mohammad al-Zulfa, a reformist member of the Saudi consultative Shura Council, indicate that he considers the possibility of reversing the driving ban to be part of a "clever" strategy by King Abdullah to bring about incremental reform:

"When it was first raised, the extremists were really mad. Now they just complain. It is diminishing into a form of consent."

Not everybody is convinced by these modest steps toward change! A letter in al-Watan ('The Nation') newspaper illustrates this only too clearly:

"Allowing women to drive will only bring sin. The evils it would bring - mixing between the genders, temptations, and tarnishing the reputation of devout Muslim women - outweigh the benefits."

Certainly when I lived there in the late 1970s I think such attitudes were pretty commonplace amongst most Saudis (possibly not some of the younger senior Princes and the growing numbers of the foreign-educated middle classes and merchant classes, though, but they generally kept their views on such matters strictly to themselves) and whilst I would wish to see the ban on women driving there to be dropped at once I think one has to recognise that the tensions in Saudi society probably mean that a process of gradual change is the correct one.

Not too gradual, however, I hope! Let's wait and see if the ban is overturned before the end of this year as the article indicates may happen - I hope it will be, but I'll not be terribly surprised if it remains in place for a while longer after that.