Mar
22
God Forbid They’d Just Live Together
Filed Under Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, gulf, migrant workers | 3 Comments
I still remember the few words I exchanged with my father one afternoon after exiting a popular supermarket chain in Riyadh. Our groceries, after purchase at the checkout counter, had just been packed by a young Saudi Arabian. His nationality had revealed itself to us after he had muttered an offering of his services in our direction, unveiling the gruff accent of Riyadh’s locals. The man had either yet to complete or just finished his job training; the routine of his grocery packing was neither as quick nor fluid as that of his foreign predecessor, who obviously had a better hold of this mundane, depressing work.
Once we had made our way out to the parking lot, I asked my father why a Saudi man had just packed our groceries. After explaining the government’s push to steadily replace foreign workers with Saudi nationals, he laid out the problem at the crux of this policy in blunt terms: “The people they are hiring are rarely as good as those they are replacing.”
At my age of 18, this was something I had never seen before. Low-skilled jobs were the exclusive domain of foreign guest workers, who would often possess far more ability than the Saudis who refused those jobs on grounds that work at the lower end of the cooperate hierarchy was demeaning.
The presence of a young Saudi Arabian at the end of the checkout counter (as opposed to a middle aged Indian, Pakistani or Pilipino) was evidence of the policy of ‘Saudiazation’, a national policy that mirrors those of neighboring Gulf states whose attempts to integrate the local population into their private sectors have been met with little success. The policy itself is the source of much debate over its efficiency and role as an imprecation to merit-based employment. Debates on the issue aside, however, the policy is the resultant of a workforce dominated by foreigners whose presence has sparked a stream of initiatives aimed at separating the migrant population from that of the locals.
A recent article in Arabian Business called my attention to the issue, in which a morbidly comical initiative by the Bahraini government to allocate land for the construction of ‘safe cities’ is detailed. The following excerpts are reproduced from the article itself, with the emphasis added being mine:
A council leader in the capital has called for the move following complaints from a group of construction workers living in Bahrain’s Diraz area who say they are being persecuted by the local population who throw rocks at them and start fights.
One labourer said he had recently received three stitches in the head after being hit by a rock that was thrown through the camp’s front window, according to Construction Week.
…
“There are big cultural differences between the way we live and we don’t want these bachelors living in our family areas,” he said.
“In Manama there are more than 100,000 Indian bachelors - this is a demographic bomb and the biggest concern is that we are losing our identity in our own villages.
“This demographic shift is very important, let alone the other problems like cultural problems, social problems and crime rates,” he added.
An astute reader can find much to pick at in this selection of words, perhaps most notably the reality of assault that these migrants face. Consider the inanity of the notion that the same workers who construct houses that they may never occupy, in a country where they are made to feel like they do not belong, are made to do so on the condition that they stay away from those who benefit from their work.
Consider, furthermore, the language used to justify the proposition to segregate the city on the basis of culture and identity and the ‘concern’ they pose to the host nation. Isn’t this language strangely reminiscent of a political and social phenomenon we can witness in Europe?
From the Wall Street Journal, November 28th, 2008:
He acknowledges that “the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people.” But he says “it really doesn’t matter that much, because if you don’t define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change — all the freedoms we have will change.”
The words spoken above are those of Geert Wilders, seemingly the most popular politician in the Netherlands today and the man at the front of a movement aimed at stemming the immigration of Muslims to his country. While the diatribes of Wilders can necessarily be distinguished in character from the policies of Gulf states toward their migrant workers, the sentiments of fear used to justify each are eerily similar.
Mar
14
Just A Thought
Filed Under international community, justice, sudan | Leave a Comment
How communal is the international community?
A community is “the lasting and genuine form of living together” wrote Ferdinand Tonnies in his seminal distinction between the sociological concepts of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). His work, published in 1887, presented the dichotomy of communities and societies as two collective forms of human bonding. Tonnies considered the community to be characteristic of a group of individuals who placed the interest of the larger association on equal footing with that of their own. The theory, considered to be at the root of the conceptualization of ‘community’, sprung out of the depths of a well of European discontent at the modern forms of human bonding, considered at the time to lacking in both collective affinity and meaningful affiliation.
This new form of association was termed ‘society’. Characteristic of a co-existence of people independent of each other, ‘society’ is transitory and superficial. Members express far less loyalty to the greater ‘society’ than they do to their own individual interests. Tonnies drew on a comparison of rural villages and developed, urban cities; the latter constituting the foci of developed nations. Forms of human bonding were found to be markedly distinct in each of those settings, which gave rise to a challenge of the sociological construct of community.
A similar challenge may very well be in order in the realm of international politics. Recently, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir became the first-ever sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). While the likelihood of a significant aftereffect remains ambiguous (al-Bashir reportedly responded to the arrest warrant with a common phrase of derision in Arabic, telling his prosecutors to “boil the warrant and drink its water.”) reaction to the warrant has revealed the apparent neurosis of the ‘international community.’
Amnesty International’s deputy director of the human rights organization’s Africa program released a statement shortly after news of the warrant, claiming that it sent “a strong signal that the international community no longer tolerates impunity for grave violations of human rights committed by people in positions of power.” A U.S state department spokesman, when pressed on whether or not his government supported the indictment, stated that “(The United States) recognize(s) that by the international community, this has been a move that will try and help resolve the problems in Sudan.” The BBC’s Amber Henshaw, in an article for the news organization’s website, tied the Sudanese government’s claim that the ruling represented a ‘Western’ conspiracy to “blame (of) the international community.” Madeleine Albright, former U.S secretary of state under President Clinton commented that “the international community can(not) stand by and watch as thousands more people starve to death.”
The last statement may hold true and certainly appeals to the morality of a responsibility to protect. Consider, nonetheless, the character of any force that may intervene to resolve a conflict that has, among other tragedies, produced an accepted reality of war rape amongst 1.45 million displaced members of our species. Such a force would undoubtedly be composed of U.S or NATO troops, ‘Western’ troops if you would allow me the use of that phrase. Is the ‘international community’ a euphemism for the ‘Western’ world?
Perhaps; the ‘international community’ that roundly voiced either overt or veiled approval of the indictment would not seem to include members of the African Union, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and China, among others. Those nations either expressed regret or concern over the indictment, and would not seem to factor into the formulation of the ‘international community’ and its tolerations.
This point, however, seems an obvious linguistic hypocrisy that the world’s most powerful nations are privy to. Assuming that the term is indeed an inflation of the ‘Western’ world, the ‘international community’ that is championing justice for millions of Sudanese would be the same ‘community’ that was responsible for the colonization of Africa or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yet that premise does not hold, since many ‘Western’ nations opposed the war in Iraq and did not participate in the enterprise of colonialism.
What we are left with is a conception of the ‘international community’ whose composition of nation-states do not exhibit a collective will nor action. This ‘community’ is neither entirely international nor Western in composition, and has acted in manners that have been opposed by its own members. The ‘international community’ cannot seem to be defined from a global perspective, but rather finds its identity in its many composite parts. In view of Tonnies’ distinction, what is considered a ‘community’ in this case may well be regarded as more appropriately as a ‘society’.
The ‘international society’, then, looks to be a more appropriate terminology for the collection of states that co-exist to maintain a global order of peace and prosperity. The distinction here is significant in that it changes the assumptions with which an observer can (and should) expect the society to act.