Tragic fate of Indonesian women workers in Arab countries

An Indonesian maid badly beaten by her Saudi employer is recovering but faces more operations, an Indonesian diplomat said on Saturday, as the Saudi labour ministry said it regretted the case.

Members of Migrant Care Indonesia protest over the torture of domestic worker Sumiati Binti Salan Mustapa, outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in Jakarta on November 19. An Indonesian maid badly beaten by her Saudi employer is recovering but faces more operations, an Indonesian diplomat said on Saturday, as the Saudi labour ministry said it regretted the case.

Sumiati Binti Salan Mustapa, 23, remains in hospital in Medina but faces more operations after being found two weeks ago suffering from stab wounds, burns to her scalp and other injuries from an abusive employer, said Diddi Wahyudi, an official of the Indonesian consulate in Jeddah.

"Sumiati is recovering now. She is in a good state of health... her appetite is good," Wahyudi told AFP.

"But she needs to be operated on at least once again, on her abdomen," he added.

The case shocked and outraged rights groups and labour activists as another example of the paucity of protection for millions of mostly Asian domestic workers, especially in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Her employer, a Saudi woman who has since been arrested, allegedly beat the maid, causing internal bleeding and broken bones, put a hot iron to her head and stabbed and slashed her with scissors.

On Saturday Saudi Arabia's labour ministry said in a statement it was sorry about the case, but called it an isolated incident.

"The ministry expresses its regret for what happened to the Indonesian woman Sumiati," it said in a statement on the official SPA news agency.

"What happened is an individual case and it should not be generalised. "

"There are more than 670,000 domestic workers of all nationalities in the kingdom and they enjoy full rights. Such individual cases are offensive to everyone," it said.

Sumiati was visited in her Medina hospital room on Thursday and Friday by Indonesian state minister for women's empowerment and child protection, Linda Agum Gumelar.

Wahyudi said Sumiati is still seeking her pay and other benefits from several months of employment in Saudi Arabia.

"She has nothing, she does not even have a single abaya," Wahyudi said of the black cloak that all women in Saudi Arabia must wear in public.

"She wants her employer to be punished severely," he added.

He said the Indonesian government was still pursuing the case of another Indonesian maid, Kikim Komalasari, whose beaten body was found near Abha earlier this month.

Two people, her employers, have been arrested in that case, Wahyudi said.

Comments

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog