Sri Lankans Forced Into Labor In Iraq

Taken from Yahoo News, Sat Feb 17 2007
By KRISHAN FRANCIS, Associated Press Writer

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - In Sri Lanka's war-torn north and east, where killings happen every day and work is nearly nonexistent, it doesn't take much to entice a man to leave.

So when an employment agency offered a steady paycheck for laboring amid Dubai's soaring glass and steel towers, 17 young Sri Lankan men paid their fee to the job brokers — $2,000, a small fortune on this tropical island — and signed up.

But instead of going to work, they were locked in a room guarded by a man with a pistol. They had been sold to another agency, they were told, for $1,200 apiece.

It took them two weeks to realize where they were in IRAQ.

"We knew Iraq was dangerous, and Sri Lanka was dangerous, but at least we thought our parents will get to see our corpses if we die here," said Krishnan Piraitheepan 32, shortly after returning to Sri Lanka this month with the help of the International Organization for Migration, a Geneva-based intergovernmental organization.

Thousands of Sri Lankans, and tens of thousands of other people from such poverty-battered countries as the Philippines, India and Nepal, go to the oil-rich Middle East every year to work.

Their pay, usually $200-$400 a month, can be many times what they would earn at home, even after the agency fees that can leave families deeply indebted.

So they become maids in Kuwait, and drivers in Saudi Arabia. They work as nannies in Dubai and Bahrain.

Some, like the 17 Sri Lankans, end up in Iraq.

While there are no reliable statistics on forced labor in Iraq, government officials and aid groups warn the Sri Lankans' case highlights the potential for abuse. The situation is further distorted because a number of countries that are major labor suppliers to the Middle East, including Sri Lanka, ban their citizens from traveling to Iraq.

"This case should be an eye-opener to all of us, especially the governments and the job agencies," said Priyantha Kulatunge, an IOM official helping oversee the group's return.
Pratap Chatterjee, executive director of the Oakland-Calif.-based corporate watchdog CorpWatch, estimates only a small percentage of the 30,000-50,000 migrant workers in Iraq are there against their will — but many more may not have realized what it means to work in a war zone.

"Many people have claimed to be trafficked," Chatterjee said. "Probably many were, probably others discovered a situation that was dangerous."

He worries more about workers' inability to leave. With some employers still holding employee passports — a practice the U.S. Defense Department has forbidden for its contractors since mid-2006 — leaving a job can be extremely difficult.
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When the Sri Lankans arrived in Dubai in mid-December, they were met by a representative of Arabian Express, the Colombo-based company that arranged their jobs.

The man told them they would be working elsewhere in Dubai, and put them on another plane. There was a sign on arrival saying they had landed at Irbil Airport.

"I had no idea what country Irbil is in. The only city that I knew in Iraq was Baghdad," said Karunapandy Jeyaruban, 24, who had left his wife and infant son for what he thought would be a construction job.

The men were taken to a house and put into a room. Their passports were confiscated. An armed guard was posted.

When they asked about work, they were ignored. When two men insisted, they were pistol-whipped.

But when a handful of the men spent a few days building a grocery store, and others were sent to clean a home, each group heard the same strange story: They were in Iraq.

It turned out they were in northern Iraq, in the semiautonomous Kurdish area. The violence is more muted than in southern Iraq — but still occurs regularly.

When the men discovered what had happened, they were furious.

"We protested because we had been promised work as carpenters, but were told that we had been bought for $1,200 each ... and that we can't leave," said Jeyaruban.

Arabian Express insists it doesn't know how the men ended up in Iraq.

Its agent waited for the Sri Lankans at Dubai's airport but they never arrived, said Fazal Marzook, the managing director. "I suspect that they met some other people who may have brainwashed them, promising higher salaries in Iraq."

But the Sri Lankans' story is not uncommon. Since 2003, the IOM has evacuated more than 6,000 foreigners "in difficult situations" from Iraq.

Others have been less fortunate.

In 2004, a dozen Nepalese workers, some of whom did not know they were being sent to Iraq, were taken hostage by militants and killed in videotaped executions.

At the time, Nepal had already banned its citizens from working in Iraq, but an estimated 17,000 Nepalese were believed to be there, mostly as laborers, cooks or security guards. Today, officials estimate 3,000 Nepalese are still working in Iraq.

Vincent Houver, the International Organization for Migration's regional coordinator based in Jordan, said anecdotal evidence suggests most new migrants are going to the Kurdish region.

Yazaqr Anwar, a residency official in the Kurdish region, said about 30,000 foreign workers live there.

Many are lured by promises of well-paying jobs, but some go unwittingly.

The increasing violence has pushed up prices for migrant labor, "encouraging smuggling activities and abuse by some recruitment agencies," the IOM warned in a statement.

The IOM also has received reports of "significant groups" of foreign workers stranded in Baghdad's heavily guarded Green Zone, Houver said.
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For the Sri Lankans, the knowledge they were in Iraq changed little. They had no access to telephones and no passports. They were terrified to flee.

After three weeks, though, they decided they had to escape.

The house was under construction, and some walls were just plastic sheeting. So one man sliced through it, and the rest followed him into the streets of Irbil.

Eventually they found a U.N. office, and officials there handed them to the IOM, which got their passports back and flew them home.

Back in Sri Lanka, it's easy to see why they left.

While much of this country remains idyllic, the northern and eastern regions — home to all 17 men — have been savaged by two decades of fighting between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels, who want a homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. More than 3,600 people have been killed in the 18 months since a 2002 cease-fire collapsed.

Most of the 17 men know of dead bodies, of neighbors who disappeared. And, as Tamils, they also have faced constant government scrutiny, with roadblocks and random arrests.

So when Arabian Express offered two years of work at $500-$600 a month, they jumped.

"Every day at least two people are shot ... so my family wanted me to leave," said Nadaraja Vanitharajah, 22, again living in his village of Thandikulam, not far from the front lines.

His story would surprise few here: Injured by a land mine, he dropped out of high-school and sold vegetables until he was attacked by men from Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority.

At that point, simply getting by seemed too dangerous. So his women relatives gathered their gold wedding jewelry and brought it to him.

"We pawned all the family jewelry to get the money," said Vanitharajah. Now, he's out $2,000 and has no work. "The lenders could come anytime. I don't know what to do."
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Associated Press correspondents Frank Jordans in Geneva, Sarah DiLorenzo in New York and Binaj Gurubacharya in Katmandu, Nepal, contributed to this report.