I wrote a diary on modern slavery that is blatantly occurring (and still is) in Dubai back in May. As a frequent reader of Middle East news I have been following these horrific stories: a 15 year-old French boy was raped by three men (trial is currently going on) and two filipino girls were also raped by local men, no trial there as the 14 year-old girls were deemed "whorish" and the men who repeatedly raped them over a period of two years are innocent in the eyes of the local government.
When the French boy, named Alex, went to the police, the officers discouraged him from filing a complaint. And, what’s more, he can’t call it "rape," because the United Arab Emirates don’t have male rape. Only "forced homosexuality". Yeah, right, just like Iran does not have a gay community.
Follow me over the jump.
Dubai and the world. These are the people we're doing business with (as well as the home of Halliburton) and they are buying everything from a 5% stake of Citigroup to owning hotels in Las Vegas, a number of ports worldwide, military production facilities, a chunk of Nasdaq, they own a truckload of prime properties world wide and even a slice of Airbus and Sony.
With "Friends" like These who Needs Enemies? Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.
Just after sunset, Alex said he was rushing to meet his father (a hotel manager) for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.
There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.
Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers. Alex stayed in Dubai in order to testify against his attackers, and went back to school despite suffering unsettling flashbacks. The family lawyer warned Alex that he was in danger of facing charges of homosexuality and a prison term of one year.
In business and finance, the nation has worked hard to earn a reputation for impartial and speedy justice. But the criminal justice system has struggled, balancing a penal code rooted in conservative Arab and Islamic local culture, applied to an overwhelming non-Arab population of foreign residents.
The other case is seriously disgusting, and only the German press via Stern has picked it up so far. Since Ms AAF is a German-born, I was able to get it translated. Their stories are commonplace since the UAE’s Ministry of the Interior is reported to estimate the number of domestic workers at about 600,000, most from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The two girls both aged 14 arrived in Dubai from the Philipines about 18 months ago to work as housemaids for a local family. One is now pregnant after being raped by her employer. "I don’t want to keep the baby, I need to provide for my family back home". Many immigrants arrive in the UAE looking for domestic work so they can send money home to their impoverished families. Each worker needs to be sponsored for a work permit by the family that employs them. The girls employer actually warned them to be careful. "The wife warned me that her husband had done this before, and not to speak to him too much," one said, sobbing. "But one night he came into my room, threw me on the floor and raped me, while one of his children, a three-year-old, stood in the room and watched." She did not report the incident to the police for fear of being deported. Nor did the other.
According to an international watchdog, Human Rights Watch (HRW), there have been no cases of the prosecution in the UAE, of employers accused of raping domestic servants. "This provides a culture of impunity that perpetuates sexual crimes against domestic workers. Our research indicates that all rape cases of domestic servants that are brought to the attention of the authorities, are settled out of court and no one has been prosecuted," said Hadi Ghaemi, HRW’s Researcher for Middle East and North Africa.
Although the French boy rape case has attracted international attention, no such luck for the poor girls, it seems they are treated as mere grains of sand, plentiful and expendable, a pattern. The UAE government should modify its labour law so that domestic workers are entitled to the same rights as its citizens, but I guess this will fall on deaf ears. Again.