By The Numbers
So far away
The beating up of the cheated migrant workers for seeking justice in Malaysia is a piece of news that is extremely shocking as well as provoking. The Daily Star carried this awful news on its front page on September 16, saying that Bangladeshi workers, who had been on a hunger strike on the premises of Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, were beaten up by the goons of the recruiting agencies.
The workers, 110 in total, who were on hunger strike for the fifth day, demanding the High Commission's intervention over the collection of their six months overdue wages, came under attack inside their own High Commission and were forcibly sent to an unknown destination on two buses.
The most ironical part of this sad episode is that the labour counselor at the High Commission, who was supposed to redress the grievances of his country's workers, denied the stark reality and told private TV channel ATN Bangla over phone that no incident of attack had taken place.
But Tenaganita, a renowned human rights organisation of the Southeast Asian nation, which came forward for helping the victims, held the Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur responsible for the abuse and the deplorable conditions suffered by its own citizens.
Condemning the September 15 assault on the Bangladeshi workers, Tenaganita said that more than 10 recruiting agency men, aided by the High Commission staff, beat up the workers inside the High Commission premises. Tenaganita also questioned the High Commission's commitment to helping the workers, and added: "This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are another 4,000 workers stranded at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport."
Meanwhile, the government has taken up the issue with the Malaysian government and has sent an inter-ministry probe team led by the expatriate welfare secretary to Kuala Lumpur for on the-spot investigation of the incident. The government should also call for an answer from the High Commission in Kuala Lumpur for its failure in tackling the migrant workers' problems.
The gross violation of the migrant workers' rights has not been going on in Malaysia alone, but also in some other countries. Bangladeshi workers are now spread over 100 countries across the world, prominently in Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Maldives, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Germany, Australia, Iran, Japan, Italy, and Spain. They are mostly engaged in various hazardous occupations, and their rights are frequently denied.
Maldives is another country where the rights of our migrant workers are often violated. It is a country of only 300,000 people, where more than 25,000 Bangladeshi workers provide essential cheap manual labour in the tourism and construction sectors.
Bangladeshi workers were attacked there on August 18, and four of them were injured seriously. They also faced a number of attacks during the month of August in different parts of Maldives, and a worker was found tied to tree by his employer for nine days while another worker was castrated and murdered.
Thousands of undocumented Bangladeshi workers in UAE faced acute problems while running against time to either regularise their immigration status or to leave the country under the three-month amnesty that ended on September 2.
More than five lakh Bangladeshi workers are now working in UAE, and many of them are victims of exploitation and breach of contract. The UAE, that needs more workers for its huge construction industry, has recently signed a MoU with many manpower exporting countries, including Bangladesh, in a bid to ensure rights of foreign workers.
Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait stormed our Embassy there because it did not agree to help them to get their five months overdue wages from their Kuwaiti employers.
There are widespread allegations that our missions abroad do not care about the migrant workers, even when they cry out for help. The labour counselors, who are posted there to act promptly to redress the grievances of our migrant workers, treat them very poorly. A greater responsibility, thus, is put on the caretaker government for protecting the rights of nearly five million migrant workers, on whose sweat the country's foreign currency reserves are increasing.
Very recently, the government decided to classify the expatriates into four categories, based on the amount of their remittances, who will be provided with some privileges that include quotas in public schools for their children, and police protection and priority in mutation for land and property. This is quite a silly idea, and will do no good to the poor workers who endure severe hardship abroad in menial jobs. What they really need is the protection of their rights in the foreign lands.
A big complaint of our migrant workers is that they get lower salaries than the same category of other countries. An unskilled Bangladeshi worker in the Middle East gets Riyals 300 to 500 per month on an average, while the workers from Sri Lanka, Philippines, and Pakistan get Riyals 700 to 800. Malpractices by the manpower recruiting agencies, and lack of strong monitoring by the government, are said to be responsible for it.
Everybody will clearly remember the tragic death of 11 Bangladeshi job-seekers, who died starving day after day on the sea while trying to cross the Mediterranean, and of the 24 job-seekers who were dumped in the deep Sahara desert where they wandered for several days without any food and drink and were thrown into jail in Mali after police rescued them from the deep desert.
Enraged by the Mediterranean and the Sahara tragedies, the government decided to take stern action against the unscrupulous manpower agents, who lure the youngsters to seek fortune abroad. The Expatriate Welfare and Overseas Employment Ministry formed two separate committees to identify manpower agents who were involved in such rackets. But the activism lost all its intensity as the days wore on and public outrage over the tragedies died down.
Foreign and expatriate welfare Adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury had told the media that the government would sign a protocol with 16 different countries for protecting the rights of our migrant workers working in those countries. Six months have already elapsed and we are yet to see any development.
We urge the government to immediately ratify the 1990 UN Convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and their families. This is the first international document that provides assurance to the rights of the migrant workers. But, after signing the convention in October 1998, Bangladesh is yet to ratify it.
A. N. M. Nurul Haque is a columnist of The Daily Star.
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