UAE: Sheikha Fatima visits shelter for victims of human trafficking, donates AED 1 million

Abu Dhabi, 8 Nov. 2009 (WAM) - H.H. Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, Chairwoman of the General Women's Union and Supreme President of the Family Development Foundation today visited the centre for sheltering women and children who are victims of human trafficking which operates under the umbrella of the UAE Red Crescent Authority.

Sheikha Fatima donated AED 1 million to help the victims regain their normal lives.

Sheikha Fatima was received at the centre by Sara Shuhail, Executive Director of the centers and the women working there.

Sheikha Fatima, who was accompanied by Dr Maitha Al Shamsi, Minister of State, was briefed on the conditions of the victims. She talked to the victims and comforted them. She also reassured them that the centre was created to shelter and to protect them.

She reiterated UAE's rejection of such terrible crimes committed against innocent women and children and expressed support to all efforts to guarantee their financial and morale rights.

Sheikha Fatima toured the centre's different sections and praised the levels of services offered to the victims of human trafficking.

Saudi Arabia: Campaign against maid abuse

By Magdi Abdelhadi
BBC Arab Affairs Analyst

A Saudi Arabian campaign against the abuse of domestic workers in the country has sparked controversy.

There are an estimated 1.5 million foreign domestic workers in Saudi. Many complain of abuse.

Critics say the ads misrepresent Saudi society. Rights activists say abuse is common, and acknowledging it is a first step towards solving the problem.

A report by Human Rights Watch earlier this year said some foreign workers are treated like slaves.

The adverts appeared on Saudi-owned satellite channels and newspapers.

A television advertisement, the first of its kind, shows a Saudi man shouting angrily at a foreign maid for failing to iron his clothes properly. We are obliged to treat servants well. Why ask them to do things that we can't bear ourselves? If we have mercy on them, then Allah will have mercy on us.

Another sequence shows the man in his car honking and yelling racist abuse at an Asian man.

The sketches end with him praying, asking God for help and mercy as a caption appears with the words "man la yarham, la yurham (He who shows no mercy, will receive no mercy [from God])".

This is the slogan of the Rahma (Mercy) campaign which has appeared on Saudi-owned satellite channels , MBC and Rotana, and some newspapers.

The print version of the campaign, which appeared in the London-based Al Hayat, showed a maid held inside a kennel with a dog collar around her neck, and a foreign chauffeur harnessed like a horse with a Saudi woman holding the reins.

'Misrepresentation'

But major Saudi newspapers have refused to publish the advertisement, apparently because for them, it was too shocking.
A campaign image showed a maid being fed from a dog bowl

Some writers and journalists have called for an end to the campaign because they believe it shows Saudi people as cruel and heartless.

Journalist Terad Al al-Asmari, told Islamonline, that the campaign overlooked abuse of domestic workers in other societies.

"It could lead to hatred between foreign labour and the Saudi citizen," he argued.

A Saudi academic, Dr Moutlaq al-Mouteery, criticised airing the campaign on satellite channels. Dr Mouterriy wrote saying that "discussing domestic problems on satellite channels turns them into a scandal [for Saudi Arabia]".

The director general of the Saudi advertising agency, behind the campaign, Qaswara al-Khateeb, defended the media drive.

"We sometimes forget that those who we deal with helpers are actually human beings," Mr Khateeb told the Saudi newspaper Arab News.

"We are obliged to treat them well. Why ask them to do things that we can't bear ourselves? If we have mercy on them, then Allah will have mercy on us."

Mr Khateeb told the BBC that the campaign was financed by a big Saudi corporation, but he refused to disclose which, adding that the backers did not want the message of the campaign to be associated with any particular group.

BAHRAIN: NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO COMBAT HUMAN TRAFFICKING HOLDS ITS FIRST MEETING

THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO COMBAT HUMAN TRAFFICKING HELD ITS FIRST MEETING TODAY UNDER THE CHAIRMANSHIP OF FOREIGN MINISTRY ASSISTANT UNDERSECRETARY FOR COORDINATION AND FOLLOW-UP SHAIKH ABDULAZIZ BIN MUBARAK AL KHALIFA AND IN THE PRESENCE OF THE COMMITTEE MEMBERS REPRESENTING FOREIGN, INTERIOR, JUSTICE AND ISLAMIC AFFAIRS, INFORMATION AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT MINISTRIES AS WELL AS REPRESENTATIVES OF BAHRAIN HUMAN RIGHTS SOCIETY, BAHRAIN YOUNG LADIES ASSOCIATION AND THE MIGRANT WORKER PROTECTION SOCIETY (MWPS).

SHAIKH ABDULAZIZ WELCOMED THE COMMITTEE MEMBERS AND CONVEYED TO THEM THE GREETINGS OF FOREIGN MINISTER SHAIKH KHALID BIN AHMED BIN MOHAMMED AL KHALIFA AND HIS BEST WISHES FOR THE COMMITTEE TO SUCCEED IN ACHIEVING ITS GOALS.

HE ALSO STRESSED THE NEED FOR THE COMMITTEE TO PLAY AN ACTIVE ROLE IN THE UPCOMING CONFERENCE WHICH WILL BE HELD IN BAHRAIN ON NOVEMBER 16 AND 17.

SHAIKH ABDULAZIZ CALLED UPON ALL CONCERNED SIDES TO POSITIVELY COOPERATE WITH THE COMMITTEE POINTING OUT THAT A WORK TEAM HAD BEEN FORMED TO LOOK INTO THE PHENOMENON OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING.

-- BNA

Saudi Arabia: AGFUND joins fight against human trafficking

AGFUND joins fight against human trafficking
Nuha Adlan | Arab News

RIYADH: Prince Talal, president of Arabian Gulf Program for United Nations Development Organization (AGFUND), signed an agreement recently to finance and sponsor a project to fight human trafficking.

The project will cost $400 million and the International Labor Organization will be involved to make sure that labor rights are not violated.

This project is one of the global initiatives of the international program to fight human trafficking. According to the United Nations, 600,000 to 800,000 people are traded annually across international borders; most of the victims are women and children.

Human trafficking includes deceptive recruitment practices that lure laborers into working in foreign countries under false pretenses.

Foreign workers in the Kingdom often complain that they were duped by recruiters in their home countries. Employers in the Kingdom sometimes replace original labor contracts, a process known as “contract substitution”. Employers sometimes pass the expenses of acquiring visas onto the workers who were led to believe that the visa expenses were already paid for via the labor recruiter.

Workers find themselves stuck in their situations, unable to leave their job premises or afraid to approach authorities to complain.

AGFUND aims to gather government as well as international organizations and NGOs to support the fight against human trafficking. It also aims to spread awareness of all different types of human trafficki

---arabnews.com

Bahrain: US honour for Bahrain activist

A BAHRAIN activist is one of only 12 people worldwide to have been praised by the US government for helping combat human trafficking, it emerged yesterday.

Migrant Workers Protection Society (MWPS) action committee head Marietta Dias is among those honoured for their "exceptional commitment" towards fighting the crime.

Each year the US State Department releases names of a number of "heroes" in conjunction with the publication of its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report.

"These individuals demonstrate an exceptional commitment to fighting the crime of human trafficking in their countries," a US embassy spokeswoman said yesterday.

"For last year, only 12 heroes were named worldwide."

The embassy will hold a reception in honour of Ms Dias at the home of Charge d'Affairs Christopher Henzel in Budaiya on Thursday to announce the honour.

Bahrain was one of 170 nations worldwide included in the eighth annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) study.

The US State Department is required by law to submit an annual report to Congress on foreign governments' efforts to eliminate severe forms of human trafficking.

Ms Dias was one of the founding members of the MWPS in 2005 and during more than four decades of voluntary work for the non-government organisation has spearheaded the cases of many labourers and housemaids.

Originally from Bangalore, India she has been doing social work since first arriving in Bahrain in 1964.

Ms Dias, who received a call from the US Embassy in Bahrain informing her of the news, last night said she was "overwhelmed" by her inclusion on the list.

"I never consider myself as doing anything extraordinary," the retired Royal Flight administrator told the GDN.

"There are a lot of people in Bahrain that need to be commended and recognised, so I will be accepting this on behalf of these people.

"This gives me an even bigger responsibility to people who are putting their trust in me."
Bahrain was placed in the Tier 2 Watch List of the TIP for failing to enforce laws against trafficking in persons and prevent the punishment of victims of trafficking.

But it was praised for introducing a comprehensive law prohibiting all forms of trafficking and establishing a specialised anti-trafficking unit within the Interior Ministry to investigate such crimes.

Ms Dias said there had been dramatic changes in Bahrain, particularly regarding religious freedom, the introduction of laws to protect overseas workers and freedom of the Press.

"There have been tremendous changes for the better but we still need more people to work on this," she said.

"The government has been quite progressive and introduced an anti-trafficking law and there have been changes to the Labour law.

"There is a vast difference and they have come to realise that what they have done in the past was not the best for the country."

Ms Dias, 64, puts her involvement in social work down to her upbringing and the ethos that everyone should be treated fairly. "I think we all have a moral obligation to do something to help the less fortunate and we all have ways of doing that," she added.

-- Gulf Daily News, By Geoffrey Bew

Yemen: WOMEN 'STRUGGLE TO OVERCOME ILLITERACY'

Sana'a: Illiteracy among Yemeni women is still very high despite external and internal efforts to eradicate it, a senior UN official said.

More than 75 per cent of women living in rural areas are illiterate, and more than 40 per cent of urban women, according to recent statistics of the Sanaa-based Unicef.

About 70 per cent of Yemen's population of 22 million live in rural areas.

Unicef regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Sigrid Kaag, told Gulf News in an exclusive interview in Sanaa concerted efforts were needed to overcome the many challenges facing women.

"We can't say Yemen is there yet, but that is not the major question; the question is about leadership and the courage to speak out about issues that are important to women," said Kaag.

She was on her first visit to Yemen since she assumed responsibility as Unicef director for about 20 countries in the region earlier this year. She is based in Amman, Jordan.

"It is a process of change and transformation," she said.

The UN official confirmed there was a wide gap between women in rural and urban areas in terms of access to education, health and other basic services.

Women in rural areas have very little access to these services. They sometimes work up to 16 hours per day on farms, carrying water and wood, and doing household chores.

"We need to focus on and accelerate the provision of education and health services in rural areas," the UN official said.

Child trafficking is very common from Yemen to its wealthy neighbour, Saudi Arabia. Poverty, domestic violence and illiteracy among parents are the main reasons for this.

Unicef has helped the Yemeni government tackle these issues in the past.

"The government and Unicef have taken steps towards building reception centres and helping trafficked children reintegrate into society," she said.

A recently established reception centre in Sanaa can accommodate as many as 60 victims of child trafficking.

Thousands of children are trafficked every year to Saudi Arabia for begging and working. They are deported back home almost on a daily basis.

Unicef also helps Yemen tackle child labour. Recent official reports have shown that some 3 million children, half of them girls, are working in Yemen.

Some 92 per cent of these children work in agriculture. The law which bans child labour in about 70 hazardous jobs does not apply to agriculture.

Kaag said Unicef would do a survey on poverty in Yemen, which is one of the main causes of child labour in the country.

Source: Gulf News

UAE: Voice For Abused Women Upsets Dubai Patriarchy

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - For years, Sharla Musabih has fought a lonely battle to protect battered wives and victims of human trafficking here.

She founded the Emirates' first women's shelter here and she became a familiar figure at police stations, relentlessly hounding officers to be tougher on abusive husbands.She has also earned many enemies. Emiratis do not often take kindly to rights advocates drawing attention to the dark side of their fast-growing city-state on the Persian Gulf, better known for its gleaming office towers and artificial islands.

Still, no one was quite prepared for the stories that started appearing in Dubai newspapers this month. Suddenly, unidentified female victims were coming forward to say that "Mama Sharla" herself had abused them, forced them to work as servants and sold their stories to foreign journalists for thousands of dollars, pocketing the proceeds. She even sold one woman's baby, the articles said, hinting at criminal investigations.

To Ms. Musabih and her supporters, the accusations, which appear to be baseless, are the latest chapter in a long campaign of threats and defamation that began with angry husbands and has grown to include prominent clerics, and even the directors of a new government-financed women's shelter, who, she says, would like to silence her.

The ferocity of the dispute is unusual for Dubai, and underscores a major challenge facing this proudly apolitical business capital. The city's few rights advocates have always been quietly shunted aside. But as the conservative Muslim ethos of Dubai's native Arab minority rubs against the varied perspectives of a much larger foreign population, debates about how to approach taboo subjects like domestic violence and the city's prevalent prostitution are getting louder.

Battling Tradition

Ms. Musabih, 47, a boisterous American transplant who was born and raised on Bainbridge Island, Wash., argues that confrontation is essential in fighting the patriarchal Arab traditions that allow men to beat their wives with impunity.

She and her supporters also say the Emirates have not acknowledged the severity of their problem with human trafficking, the brutal business in which foreign women are lured here with promises of jobs and then forced into prostitution or servitude. Last year the United States State Department placed the Emirates and 31 other countries on a watch list for failing to effectively combat the illegal trade.

"When a woman has three broken bones in her back, and the police don't take it seriously, yes, I get angry," Ms. Musabih said.

Others say Ms. Musabih's aggressive approach - which includes appeals to foreign news media as well as tough, face-to-face lobbying - is inappropriate in the Arab world, and has needlessly fueled the backlash she now faces. That assertiveness may also have made it easier to dismiss her as an outsider.

Although she has lived here for 24 years, converted to Islam, is an Emirati citizen, wears a veil and has raised six children here with her Emirati husband, Ms. Musabih is still unmistakably American, from her moralistic zeal to her habit of calling the women in her shelter "darlin'."

"I have told her sometimes I think she is wrong, she goes too far," said Lt. Gen. Dahi al-Khalfan, the chief of the Dubai Police, who has supported Ms. Musabih in the past but now tends to criticize her work as divisive. "There is a case between husband and wife; let the court decide! Leave it."

Safety and a Ticket Home

Ms. Musabih dates her work as an advocate from 1991, when she started tracking domestic violence cases and offering women shelter in her home in Dubai. In 2001, she rented a two-story house in the Jumeira district and opened a shelter for abused women and their children, naming it City of Hope.

On a recent afternoon, children's toys littered the floors in the shelter's sunlit living room, and several women snacked in the kitchen, while others sprawled on couches watching television upstairs. Although Ms. Musabih has had some dedicated assistants over the years, it is basically a one-woman show; she deals with everything from belligerent former husbands to buying plane tickets, sometimes with her own money, for foreign women to return to their home countries.

"I've repatriated 400 victims in the past six months," said Ms. Musabih, a fast-talking, energetic figure who presides over the shelter like an overworked mother.Establishing the shelter was unusual enough in the Arab world, where going outside the family to resolve domestic conflicts has little basis in law or custom.

Ms. Musabih's personal advocacy made her work even more startling. She would counsel women to leave their husbands if they were being beaten, and help represent them in courts or foreign consulates.

She would also march into police stations and yell at officers if she felt they were not protecting women in danger. In the Arab world it is virtually unheard of for a woman to behave this way toward a man, and the officers sometimes felt they had been publicly humiliated.

Some women who have spent time in the shelter say this tough approach is necessary. The police in Dubai "won't do anything to protect you while you're legally married," said one former resident of the shelter, who declined to give her name because she still fears repercussions, from her husband and from others who oppose Ms. Musabih.

After her husband beat her repeatedly, the woman said, she appealed to the police, who made her husband sign a promise that he would not do it again. He violated the pledge again and again, she said, but the police did nothing, even after he broke into another house where she was seeking refuge and raped her.

"The police told me, 'We can't do anything, he's your husband,' " she said.But Ms. Musabih's approach clearly shocked and angered many, and not just the husbands whose wives found shelter.

A prominent cleric, Ahmed al-Kobeissi, recently gave interviews to Dubai newspapers in which he said Ms. Musabih's work "goes against the traditions of Emirati people" because she "instigates wives against their husbands." Mr. Kobeissi also voiced indignation at Ms. Musabih's suggestion that Emirati men are among the clients of Dubai's many prostitutes.

Ms. Musabih's work took on a higher public profile when she joined a crusade against the practice of using children, some as young as 4, as camel jockeys, once common in the Persian Gulf. Her advocacy led to a number of television and newspaper reports about the horrific abuses practiced on young jockeys, and appears to have helped lead to a ban on the practice in the Emirates in 2005.

Ms. Musabih is full of praise for the Emirati government's response on this issue, and says it responded quickly and effectively to her appeals to change the laws. But her highly public approach to the problem is said to have angered some influential Emiratis, who felt she had embarrassed the leadership instead of allowing the matter to be settled quietly.

In the early spring of 2007, government officials approached Ms. Musabih about plans for a new state-sanctioned women's shelter, apparently intended to replace hers. At first she welcomed the idea, because her shelter was often crowded and she was struggling to manage financially. They praised her pioneering work and said she could help direct the new shelter as a board member.

As the project evolved, it became clear that the government's approach was vastly different from Ms. Musabih's. It hired a director with a background in management and a more subdued style. On the grounds of an old rehabilitation center 20 minutes from Dubai with high fences and guards, the new shelter, known as the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children, resembles an American low-security prison.

Ahmed al-Mansouri, the chairman of the foundation's board, says there was a need for a more organized approach and a shelter that, unlike Ms. Musabih's, was licensed by the government. He says she was not making adequate progress on the legal cases of the women in her shelter, a claim she vehemently disputes. He also describes the familial chaos of the City of Hope shelter as a "horrible way of living."

Certainly, the new shelter is more spacious, and has better access to schooling for the women's children.

Feeling of Betrayal

In October, buses arrived at City of Hope and they moved 35 women to the foundation shelter.

But Ms. Musabih soon began to feel that the directors of the new shelter had betrayed her and were negligent with the women in some cases, a claim the foundation denies. She says the foundation was more interested in getting foreign women back to their home countries with a minimum of embarrassment, than in investigating wrongs that had been done to them and preventing those wrongs from recurring.

If the new shelter was meant to replace Ms. Musabih and quiet her down, it became clear over the following months that it would not work. City of Hope continued to take in new women, and as Ms. Musabih kept criticizing the Dubai Foundation's approach, her relations with its directors became steadily nastier.

When one of the women who was moved to the foundation tried to commit suicide in December, Ms. Musabih accused its staff of negligence. After a heated exchange, the foundation's director, Afra al-Basti, sued Ms. Musabih for slander.

It was then that the scandalous articles about Ms. Musabih began appearing in Dubai newspapers.

The sources for those articles appear to have been women at the foundation shelter who, like some of their counterparts at the City of Hope, are vulnerable or unstable, and have been drawn into the dispute boiling around them. Some speak no English or Arabic, and are easily manipulated. How exactly they came to spread false stories about Ms. Musabih's selling babies or taking thousands of dollars from foreign journalists is still not clear.Ms. Musabih, speaking by phone from Ethiopia, where she is setting up a shelter, said she felt betrayed.

"I never thought it would go this far," she said. "These people think I'm an enemy of the state and that I need to be controlled.

"But even some of her supporters wonder whether Ms. Musabih, for all her pioneering accomplishments, could not have avoided all the ugliness if she had been willing to do things more quietly.

"With Sharla, it is 'No, I am right,' and she always deals with people straight on," said Awatif Badreddine, a supervisor at City of Hope.

"But I tell her you have to deal with people differently here. The Arabs don't like this. Sometimes you have to go around to get what you want."

By Robert F. Worth, The New York Times

Qatar: Arab schools urged to teach ills of human trafficking

Qatar proposed on Wednesday that Arab countries introduce material on the fight against human trafficking into their school curriculums in order to raise awareness of the scourge.

"The issue of human trafficking must figure in modern curriculums in order to raise awareness and ensure a secure future for our societies," the secretary general of Qatar's Higher Family Council, Abdullah bin Nasser al-Khalifa, told the opening session of a conference on human trafficking.

Mariam al-Maliki, who coordinates the drive to combat human trafficking in the gas-rich Gulf state, said the campaign had been made more pressing by "the big economic and social changes experienced by Gulf societies," in particular population growth and the growing need for expatriate labour.

The two-day conference is organised by Qatar and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, with the participation of representatives of the United Nations Children's Fund.

The United States and international human rights groups have highlighted the problem of human trafficking in the oil-rich Gulf states, home to more than 13 million expatriates, many of them unskilled and low-paid Asian workers vulnerable to abuse.

The US State Department human trafficking report in 2006 upgraded the United Arab Emirates from the "Tier 3" of worst offenders to "Tier 2 Watch List" comprising countries which are making "significant" efforts to deal with the problem.

The UAE maintained its rank in the 2007 edition of the report, but other Gulf countries -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar -- were downgraded to Tier 3, joining Saudi Arabia.

According to UN estimates, around 2.5 million people -- 80 percent of them women and children -- are being trafficked around the world at any given time for purposes such as forced labour, sexual exploitation, the removal of organs and body parts, forced marriages, child adoption and begging.

Global annual profits from the exploitation of trafficked forced labour are estimated at 31.6 billion dollars.

-- Agence France-Presse