McClatchy's top story today tells how a Kuwaiti subcontractor to our old friend KBR has been holding about a thousand men from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in warehouses near Bahgdad for three months. These poor guys paid more than $2000 for the privilege of being treated this way.
The story has more heartbreakers in it than I have time to extract, so go read. Just a taste:
A group of about 50 men living in tents about a mile away were even worse off than the men in the warehouses, and they appeared to be victims of human trafficking. They live in huts they built with tarps and pieces of carpet, and said they had no access to food or water.
..."We came to make a good salary and go home, but we're not lucky," said Ganesh Kumar Bhagat, 22, a Nepalese man who sleeps with four others in a tent along the main airport road.
He hasn't told his family that his plans did not succeed in Iraq, instead assuring them that he lives and works safely on an American base.
This is how poverty works. Them as has gets, them as has not pays to get taken.
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Can't Say I'm Surprised
This is practically what they do in places like Kuwait and the booming Dubai in the UAE. They basically import South Asian workers from places like India and Pakistan and enslave them once they reach the country. Hell, nearly 75% of the population of the UAE are non-citizens most of them South Asian, and in Kuwait 2 million of the 3 million residents aren't citizens. They aren't given citizenship and thus almost no recourse when they are abused or discriminated against. They are treated as cheap labor. They are more than happy to 'bus' these people in, but deny all but a few a chance to become one of them. They've been doing this to them since antiquity, and no one really ever talks about it over on this side of the world.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
The only twist is that these people were trafficked
not to serve as house slaves for rich Kuwaitis, but to serve American military people. The trafficker was Najlaa Internation Catering Services, a subcontractor for KBR, and it's likely the workers were intended to be shipped to American bases. Of course, our people aren't responsible, since
"Urged". Very impressive. I know if I were KBR I'd be shakin in my shoes.
Policy not party!
Kuwait
I wasn't implying that we don't know how to exploit historic relationships between other peoples and nations for out own, rather to bring some background to this. We contracted this stuff out explicitly because we knew that people like the Kuwaiti's could get this kind of labor for dirt-cheap because of their exploitation of South Asians. I was just trying to point out that there is a non-innocent middle man, here, who all too often gets overlooked in discussions of Middle Eastern labor.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
Indeed,
plenty of blame to go around.
Is there an evil racket anywhere in the world that our tax dollars don't subsidize in some way?
Maybe we're not complicit in trafficking in the organs of albinos in Africa. Please, nobody bring proof to the contrary!
Policy not party!