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.
Nov
19
King Abdallah, Religious Harmony, and a Constructive Saudi Arabia
Filed Under MidEast Foreign Policy, Peace Deals, Saudi Arabia, religion | Leave a Comment
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdallah is set to lead a religious conference hosted by the U.N today, with the monarch providing the opening address to the event. While much of the commentary on this story has centered on the dialectical tension between the Saudis and religious tolerance, when viewed within the framework of the Kingdom’s foreign policy initiatives of late it reflects a sustained effort to improve Saudi Arabia’s image internationally, meanwhile solidifying its role as a key player in Middle Eastern affairs. The King’s visit to the Vatican, the religious summits hosted by the Kingdom which culminated in the Madrid declaration signed in July, and the increased chatter about opening the country’s first Catholic church all serve to obscure the Saudi reality of religious tolerance.
The transgressions on religious freedom in Saudi Arabia are well documented and form a list that would be too tedious to repeat in this space. The Kingdom’s international role, however, has reached new levels of stature; it has been courted by Western leaders (most notably during a recent visit by British PM Gordon Brown) to play a significant role in the handling of the latest financial crisis (no pledges of Saudi support at the last G-20 summit, but the significance of the enhanced status in the crisis speaks for itself). The Saudis have also stepped up their roles in regional conflict resolution, exercising clout in the conflicts of Lebanon and Israel-Palestine (Obama will apparently base his MidEast peace efforts on the ‘Abdallah plan’, a road map to peace drafted in 2002. A careful look at the language of the plan reveals how likely it is to work, but will still serve the Saudi’s well by creating constructive image of the country). (Update: Obama does not support the plan, according to peace-envoy Dennis Ross.)
All of this is to say that Saudi Arabia will likely be called on by the next U.S administration for help in cobbling together some sort of MidEast peace initiative, in large part due to a conscious effort since 2001 to improve the Kingdom’s international image. How successful will the Saudis be? If successful peace-talk mediation is going to come from anywhere in the Gulf, it may well be a country with a better recent track-record of MidEast solutions and less conflicting interests.