Saudi Arabia Exposed

I just finished reading a book titled Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis by John R. Bradley. He is a journalist who worked for Arab News for 2.5 years. His books cover familiar and well-known Saudi problems like increasing number of criminals, inequality towards immigrants, unavoidable meeting of gays & lesbians, sexual assaults, to the ones that sound unfamiliar to me like the discrimination towards the Shia community and the “secret” ongoing rivalry within the House of Saud, specifally between the powerful and dominant Sudairy Seven family and King Faisal’s more liberal children (whose father, the former king, was assasinated by his own nephew).

But nothing is interested me most other than the Saudi mistreatment towards the Asian immigrant workers, which make up about 5 million workers across Saudi Arabia. Ever since I lived in Jeddah and understood the meaning and importance of respect, my hatred towards the majority of Saudis grew bigger and bigger. Well, how could you pretend to like them, when everytime you go to the shops/restaurants they would innocently ask you if you are able to pay that amount of money, or when the people on the street intentionally ask you if you are maids and want to work with them, or when your Saudi neighbours would take advantage of you when clearly they would not do it to other Arab/Saudi neighbours, or when most teachers in the public school would pick on you just because you come from one of the Third World countries no matter how smart you are???

From the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, Americans were called first-class national (FCNs); Saudis, Britons, other Europeans and Arabs were called second-class nationals (SCNs); and Asians third-class nationals (TCNs). Of course, this was not an official segregation, but it was widely used and reflected the psyche of the Saudi manpower sector. Even non-Saudi Arabs are subtly graded from, say, Jordanians and Syrians down to Egyptians and Yemenis. But it is clear that Filipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Bangladeshis are at the very bottom of the scale. Out of nearly 5 million Asian workers, more than 75 percent are blue-collar workers like unskilled laborers, farm laborers, construction workers, plumbers, welders, electricians, carpenters, masons, drivers, maids, counter salesmen, butchers, vegetable vendors, and maintenance workers.

My hatred towards Saudi people have became my own “disease” since I was a kid. That became very clear when I chose not to speak Arabic at all in the public places. Of course at that time I was still a little girl who were perhaps still narrow-minded. But in the period of 16 years since I first came to the Kingdom, I see not even a single difference on how the Saudis treat us. As I live in Australia and become familiar with strangers throwing cans of beer, eggs, or cubes of ice to me, I sort of understood that this is one of the risks of me living in other people’s country. So I have to accept that mistreatment no matter what.

But Australia is different from Saudi Arabia. Many values, cultures, and attitudes that Aussies have are honestly better than us - Indonesians. Discipline is one of the things I always favored from the Western countries. They always follow the laws and rules that are made by their governments. But that’s not the case with Saudi Arabia. Laws are just piles of writings that are ignored by most people. Justice is a rare thing happened in the land “where the religion of Islam was born.” As a result, the abusers, rapists, molesters, and culprits are freely wandering around Saudi streets. It’s easy for Saudis to “escape” from law, but it’s a different case when it comes to the Asian immigrants. Moreover, their attitudes are soooo un-Islamic for sure. I gotta tell ya, they are the most hypocrite people on the planet! One day they’ll tell you that watching MTV is haram, but the second day you’ll discover them watching porn TVs. It’s not a surprising thing to find out that even a religious police (mutawwa) who is viewed by people as a very strict religious person and who patrols public areas to make sure that women wear abayas and scarfs, looks at us - women - and somehow managed to blink his eyes towards us! Hello??? Are you really a religious police?? Oh well, I forgot to tell him that he should shave his long beard first before doing that!! What a shame!

There’s one paragraph in the book that was very well written. It is exactly what I always think about them:

They [Saudi people] believe what they have been told for decades: that theirs is a perfect society and that they, as a consequence, are more completely civilized than anyone else. Quite innocently, they regard their maids and drivers as lesser humans, born in filth and ignorance, who should be grateful for the opportunity to serve them. Children in such matters tend to take their cues from their parents. Small wonder then that sexual abuse of maids is common at the hands of adolescent boys, some of them following in their father’s footsteps, some simply acting within the general climate of contempt for Third World nationals that pervades the kingdom. The maids are uniquely cut off from the contact with their community that sustains many other foreign laborers. Kept prisoners in the home, they are more likely to resort to desperate measures than others. Hence the suicides, which many maids attempt by jumping from balconies. Others run away. Each Indonesian and Sri Lankan embassy and consulate reports scores of escapes every month. They have set up shelters for the “runaway maids”, as they are known, where the often young women can be accommodated while their government attempts to settle the Byzantine paperwork necessary to repatriate them.

Sexual and physical abuses are found at most households in Saudi Arabia. Many Indonesian maids were charged guilty and later beheaded (Saudi’s type of death penalty). The reason? Their masters were about to rape them! It’s so sad that no one can’t do anything about it, even our embassy. There’s another case where (blue-collar) workers are not paid for months or even years! Unfortunately, that seems a usual story that one could frequently hear in Saudi Arabia. My mom once asked an Indonesian maid whom we met in the mosque to escape from her master because she was not paid for 7 years!! She then spent few years with us and went back to Indonesia for good afterwards.

Indians, and some Pakistanis and Filipinos, are making considerable inroads into white-collar jobs in a changing Saudi Arabia, through sheer skill and hard work, but also because they are cheaper than their Western counterparts. Still, the rule remains that it is Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis who clean the streets in the 40-degree Celsius heat, wearing orange uniforms reminiscent of nothing so much as the jumpsuits of the Guantanamo prisoners, earning a pittance and often living in conditions that would shame a Third World jail. They sleep six or more to a tiny, ramshackle room; they are often supplied only with some blankets to sleep on the raw concrete floor, a single window that provides the only access for a cooling breeze, if it ever comes, and a toilet and bathroom to share with countless others.

“Saudis are generally unwilling to undertake what they consider demeaning work.” That’s certainly true. They would NOT do the kind of job that the “lesser humans” do there. But unemployment is still a major problem in the Kingdom. The government is struggling to encourage the Saudis working for more lower level job, such as -in recent year- taxi driver. Few years ago, you would hardly find any Saudi taxi drivers roaming on Jeddah’s streets. But due to the government’s rule, almost all taxi drivers are now Saudi. It’s a good thing for them that finally they want to do such a job, but the problem is that: taxi became a quite dangerous transportation for women right now. My mom and I have experienced many bad things inside the taxis. There was a driver who always “wildly” looked at me through the car mirror as if it’s his first time seeing a woman, asked lots of questions about my nationality and easily insulted us, and intentionally grabed my hand when I gave him the money. If I’m in taxi, I’d rather speak only in English (keep in mind that they know exactly how our languge sounds like) and pretend to be a Singaporean or Malaysian. But still, they are not stupid after all. They would tell me that I lied! Part of me wanted to scream to the driver, but the other part of me thought that safety was the most important. There were many cases reported about women’s bones found in the middle of the desert and later found that these women were raped by the taxi driver. It’s indeed scary.

So the failed education policy, lack of motivation, and a never ending flood of Asians willing to brave the abuse and gruelling work conditions mean that the prospects of a Saudi one day picking up the garbage other Saudis have so liberally left behind them are slim.

I don’t understand what makes them think that we, Asians, are just a piece of craps? If we, all of us, leave the Kingdom, they would certainly be struggling! “Garbage would pile high in the streets, families would go hungry, restaurants would close, goods would remain undelivered and rot, and the water supply would stop. There would be no more farming the desert, no transport, no fixing and filling the all-important cars, no air-conditioning, no lighting the streets, no repairing of roads. There would be no trade in anything but sheep and camels, and the wind would whistle through deserted markets. And the sick, injured, and dying would pile up in the corridors of hospitals, if they somehow managed to make it there.” Can’t they just realise that they’re SOO dependent on us?? It’s OK if you don’t like us because we take most of your jobs, but hey man.. show us some respects!!! At least, treat us as a human being…

I once chose not to write too much about this in my blog. But after reading Saudi Arabia Exposed, all of my angers and pains of 10 years living in Saudi Arabia came to surface again. It’s not only me who complains about it, but also my friends, mom, sister (she was poorly looked down by her teachers because of her nationality, but later she moved to private school), and even my own brother… who basically is still young but he knows exactly what is going on (although he enrolled to arabic school, he used to refuse speaking Arabic). Practically every Indonesians who live in Saudi Arabia have the same experience. I want the world knows, that the mistreatment of immigrants in Saudi Arabia is a very very serious problem!! So if you have families who want to work in the Middle East as maids or drivers, I suggest you telling them before everything’s too late!! There are many blue-collar workers who are treated with respect by their employers, but it’s very rare. It’s just a matter of luck, you know???

But apart from those stories I wrote, I have met many nice Saudis who respect us just like we respect them. Remember, there’ll never be only the bads occupying the same land… Saudis too have many good and respectable people. Anyway, try googling saudi arabia abuse and you’ll find heaps of information about the foreign workers abuse and modern slavery in the Kingdom. There is also a complete report by Human Rights Watch about this matter.