Preamble The Middle East, and by that I mean the Gulf states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, is facing a major humanitarian crisis.
This is the ostensible enslavement of foreign domestic servants (by that I mean maids) in their societies and the resulting physical and mental abuse, torture and sexual harassment of these people.
This article gives an insight into this blackhead on the skin of the Arab conscience, and its endeavours to prise out the pus of understanding and if a resolution to this serious problem is in fact achievable or even wanted.
The article further investigates those in that it illustrates the trials and tribulations of foreign maids inside the Middle East today.
It is a scurrilous indictment of the disdain with which middle-class Arabs hold for their fellow human beings.
This is simply due to the maids' ethnic origins and quite frankly would be classified as racism in anybody's language.
But having witnessed this phenomena first hand, I suspect this racist attitude has deeper roots.
Housemaids It is a fact of life that domestic helpers are not governed by the labour laws in most of the six Gulf States.
Only Kuwait has a special law for them but it has so far failed to curb abuses.
Bahrain extends the labour law to partially cover maids, while there is no solid form of legal protection, outside existing general legislation, in any of the remaining GCC members.
It is general knowledge throughout the Gulf that physical abuse and beating, in addition to sexual harassment and rape, are at the top of a list of abuses to which domestic helpers are subjected.
Other problems include non-payment or delay in payment of salary and forcing them to do hard work and work long hours and also at weekends.
In fact a maid can be regarded as being 'on call' 24 hours a day.
The statistics are quite remarkable.
By the end of 2003, there were 812,000 domestic helpers in Saudi Arabia, 400,000 in Kuwait, 30,000 in Bahrain and 66,000 in Oman.
The UAE had 450,000 domestics at the end of 2002, the last available figure, and as I write, it is virtually impossible to learn of the number of maids working in Qatar.
Today, in the Spring of 2010, it could be estimated that there could be as much as 2,250,000 maids working here in the Gulf States.
A good picture of the ratios involved can be seen by the fact that in the UAE and Kuwait, there is one domestic helper for every two citizens, while in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain there is one domestic helper for each family on average.
The oil-rich GCC states have a population of about 33 million people, including some 11 million guest workers and their families.
Foreign workers' remittances exceed 25 billion dollars a year.
So this is big business! So who comes here, why and how? Sponsorship Let's take Maria from the Philippines.
She's pretty, a 24-year-old girl from a peasant family, Now she's heard about the Middle East and it's riches and the fabulous opportunities to make money.
A woman coming to the Gulf to work as a maid requires a sponsor.
These sometimes shady characters, act as worker-employer go-betweens.
In many instances, exploitation by recruiting agents in the 'Sending and Receiving Countries' is rife.
Like Maria, many of these migrant workers do not come freely out of their own will.
The sponsor, or middleman, will arrange a "transaction" of labour between an employer in the host country and interested labourers in the sending country.
Like all businesses, these agencies are out there to make money.
They are trying to make a profit out of trafficking human beings.
As such, their priority is money, not the rights of people.
And in many cases it is indeed a rare sight to see a worker in possession of legal contract of employment and yet this is the one document the authorities demand to see when a complaint arises.
But if the maid does not have this document, then she is basically working illegally in that country.
Accordingly, current sponsorship rules literally give sponsors exclusive and extensive powers over the workers employed by them.
So, when Maria is all fixed up with the necessary documentation, she unwittingly and literally becomes the sole property of the sponsor to do with as he wills.
She does not know it, but Maria becomes a modern-day slave", a vassal, subservient to every whim and fancy of the 'Sir' or 'Madam'.
The following could have been Maria's story: A runaway maid told a major Arab newspaper that she went to Saudi Arabia after spending 12 years in Kuwait.
Within four months, she discovered that living with the family of her Saudi sponsor was "so hellish" that she had only one option: to flee to the Sri Lankan Consulate.
She literally was scared to death and took refuge in the only place where she felt safe.
Another maid said she was in her teens when she was sent by an agent in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to work with a Saudi family there.
The maid, who also took refuge in the consulate, said she received no remuneration during her 18 years of service to her employers.
Where did the money go? Right into the sponsor's pocket.
Maria, soon after arriving in, say, Saudi Arabia, finds herself NOT in the comfort of her employer's home but in a frightening prison of an environment where her every move and nuances of behaviour are scrutinised by the hour.
She doesn't know it but she will soon be treated on equal terms with the family dog.
These are the facts - make up your own mind!