Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Published On: 2008-05-14      EDITORIAL

Our citizens abroad -- harassed, hounded and humiliated
By Syed Badrul Ahsan

POLICEMEN in Saudi Arabia have been tearing up work-related documents
of Bangladeshi migrant workers in that country. And they have been
doing that without any thought to the predicament such action can and
will cause to these hapless people. That is impunity of the highest
order, especially when you think of the sheer high-handedness of
people who are unwilling to abide by norms, by the general standards
of civilised behaviour we expect from governments everywhere. And then
there are the many instances in which Bengali workers have been and
are being mistreated in Malaysia, with really no one to speak up for
them.

You could now fall back on the cliché of informing us that the problem
has really to do with the state of our economy. After all, a nation
that ekes out a bare existence and cannot do without the remittances
of its citizens slaving away from dawn to dusk in foreign lands must
pay the price for its poverty. That is the argument, albeit a spurious
one, you can make as a way of explaining away the misery that has been
descending on our people in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and other places
around the globe.

We do not buy that argument, because it is a spurious one. Now, when
you consider what has been happening to Bengalis in Saudi Arabia, you
will agree that some of them may have been working on fake visas or on
documents the validity of which has expired. If the Saudi authorities
had told us that such has, indeed, been the reality and that they are
cracking down on the law-breakers among Bengali workers, we would have
stayed quiet. But that is not what has been happening. We were told
not long ago that Bengalis are engaging in criminal activities, which
is why the law is being applied to them. Are we to suppose that all of
our citizens have suddenly turned to criminality in Saudi Arabia?

While you deal with that question, turn your gaze on the manifestly
crude behaviour that the authorities of the host country have been
demonstrating toward these workers. These workers are being herded up
and carried off to deportation camps, from where they will be put on
flights back home. And what is not being done by the police is
ensuring the provision of an opportunity for these poor, helpless
individuals to come up with documentary evidence that they are a
peaceful lot engaged in lawful employment, that they have employers
who can speak for them.

But nothing of this has made sense for the authorities in Saudi
Arabia. We understand that our adviser for foreign affairs has been
soliciting the chance of a trip to Saudi Arabia for quite sometime,
without the Saudis making any response. So much for diplomatic
niceties on the part of the Riyadh authorities. But that is not really
the point. The point is simply this, in the form of a question: to
what extent has our Foreign Office taken up the issue of the
mistreatment of Bengali workers in Saudi Arabia? You can expand that
query to include the misery Bengalis have been experiencing in
Malaysia, South Korea and other places.

In circumstances where your own nationals are made the target of
ridicule and outright humiliation (as in Saudi police tearing up the
documents of your workers), it is expected that your government will,
as they say, rise to the occasion and come forth to demand an
explanation from those busily going about harassing your people. There
is something of self-esteem that matters in life, for the individual
as also for the society or nation he is part of. In these past few
decades, or so it appears, the dignity or self-esteem of this nation
has been on a slide. And who do we blame for it? Let it suffice for
now to suggest that had we had the confidence, had we been supremely
self-assured about our place in the global scheme of things, matters
would not have come to this pass for us.

Recall the old days, when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman brushed
aside King Faisal's questions about the dismemberment of Pakistan (and
that was in 1973) with the indifference, even contempt, it deserved.
He told off Nigeria's Yakubu Gowon when the latter mused aloud about a
weakened Pakistan after 1971. And then there was Tajuddin Ahmed, to
keep us anchored to the thought that we had it in us to climb the
peaks without the assistance of those who had done everything they
could to prevent our rise as a free nation. Abdus Samad Azad and Kamal
Hossain, as the earliest of our foreign ministers, strode across the
world stage letting everyone know we had arrived.

But that is all in the past. Things do not happen that way any more.
With so many of our pre-eminent citizens regularly and happily
agreeing to be guests of the Saudi government, on hajj or umrah,
something of dignity appears to get compromised. With all that chunk
of money coming in as remittances from the Middle East and the Far
East, to say nothing of the various forms of dole we have by now
become accustomed to, we are not sure if we should raise our
collective voice against the patently obtuse behaviour of others
toward our people.

With so many among us eager to get our hands on camel meat coming from
the desert kingdom every year on Eid-ul-Adha, there is a distinctive
slicing away of our self-respect. And that is not all. Here in the
country, the freedom and sometimes arrogance with which
representatives of the donor agencies often upbraid our government and
our politicians about what we need to do to improve (?) the quality of
our lives leave us all outraged. And they do that because we give
these people the opportunity to proffer advice we can do without. Why
must our media people, for no credible reason, ask a foreign diplomat
what he thinks of the next elections or of the level of corruption in
the country? What is it in us, in our administration, that makes us
believe a visiting junior official from a developed nation merits
meetings with everyone who matters in the Bangladesh government
hierarchy?

The fault, Sir (with apologies to Shakespeare and Brutus), is not in
our stars, but in ourselves that we are thus laid low. This business
of our harassed citizens in Saudi Arabia calls for a firm response
from the Foreign Office. We are not aware of the Saudi ambassador here
being summoned to Shegun Bagicha to be informed of our sense of
outrage. And we are still in the dark about the way our High
Commission in Kuala Lumpur has handled, or not handled at all, the
matter of our exploited migrant workers there.

Foreign policy is much more than a mouthful of platitudes. It
encompasses areas where the interests of your nation are constantly
monitored and endlessly upheld, and not just abroad. Here, within the
country, it becomes the responsibility of the administration to
inquire into the pretty serious matter of whether or not certain
foreign governments, through their diplomats, may be energetically
engaged in spurring our indigenous communalist fringes into action
against such enlightened moves as equal rights for women and demands
for a trial of the war criminals of 1971. You know, you just might
strike gold, or ferret out the truth.

Is our diplomatic structure morally strong enough and intellectually
self-assured to do the job?