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Four walls of captivity, stains of blood, and the weight of a body in a coffin. For a citizen of a free country, what could be a more tragic end? The news is not new, but its cruelty never gets old. Recently, two Bangladeshis were executed in Saudi Arabia on charges of immoral acts. The basis of the charge was a video recorded on the mobile phone of a Pakistani national. What is most frightening and insane is that, let alone a fair trial, the Saudi authorities did not even think it necessary to tell us the basic fact that these two were Bangladeshi citizens. Only after the sentence was carried out did the people of the country learn, through the media, that two more of our citizens had lost their lives in the deserts of the Middle East. But the scene behind this cruel execution is even more horrifying. Every year, hundreds of Bangladeshi women go to Saudi Arabia and come back after being brutally sexually abused and raped. Some return having lost their mental balance, and some return in coffins.
Let us show some old data: during the 2018–19 tenure, almost 23,515 women returned from Saudi Arabia, most of whom described unspeakable physical and sexual abuse. From 2016 to September 2020, the bodies of 473 women came back from the Middle East, 175 of them from Saudi Arabia alone. At least 81 women, unable to bear it, chose to take their own lives. Yet the so-called Sharia courts of Saudi Arabia, and our so-called responsible diplomatic circles, all seem blind, deaf and mute.
These are horrific stats, we must say!
In the interest of our bilateral arrangement, we need to uphold some theory regarding this situation. For this, if we look at Giorgio Agamben's political theory, this whole picture becomes clear. When a state deliberately suspends legal protection for certain people, those people are turned into “ Bare Life ”, people whose killing leaves no one answerable. Saudi Arabia's sovereign power uses Sharia law as a religious cover for its absolute authority. But the question is, is this Sharia law kept only to punish poor migrants? The Kafala (sponsorship) system in Saudi Arabia is another name for modern slavery. Under this legal setup, a worker's passport, visa and work permit are held entirely in the hands of the employer (the kafeel).
Without the kafeel's permission, there is no way to leave the country or change jobs. So when domestic workers suffer brutal abuse inside the home and run away to the police, they are declared runaways (Huroob) instead. Many police officers catch them and send them back to the same brutal environment. Do you remember what Amena Begum told the BBC? Even after staying five months in police custody, she was forced back to the same house where she had been starved and had her arm broken. In the tragic deaths of Kenya's Eunice Achieng and Uganda's Aisha Meem , the post-mortems showed broken ribs and burn marks from electric shocks, yet the Saudi authorities passed these off as natural death or heart disease. Saudi Arabia is said to have the law of blood money, or diyah. But where does that law disappear when it comes to these poor and marginalised workers? There is only one answer: they are poor, and they are citizens of the Global South, of marginalised countries. Oil-rich geopolitics and the interests of the state machinery weigh far more than their lives.
A big partner in this structural violence is our own state and its foreign policy. Remittances are the lifeblood of Bangladesh's economy, and the Middle East is one of our largest labour markets. But when the state values the foreign currency in its bank balance above the lives, dignity and human rights of its own citizens, a terrible moral crisis is born. Under international law, and especially Article 36 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, when a citizen of one country is arrested abroad, that country's embassy must be told immediately, and the person must be given a chance at legal help. But Saudi Arabia trampled even that basic right, and our Foreign Ministry and embassies did not dare to make even a token protest. Why? Because in the books of diplomacy, keeping the flow of remittance steady is their only goal. Is the job of our embassies then just to arrange clearance papers for dead bodies and keep count of coffins? When a worker or housemaid goes unpaid for years, is raped, or is thrown onto the street in the dark of night, who wakes the embassies up? Meanwhile, some of our policymakers, diplomatic analysts and intellectuals talk loudly on TV shows and international stages about pro-Bangladesh diplomacy and national honour. Seeing this double face, one feels ashamed. Those who shout themselves hoarse when a small citizen's right is violated in a Western country keep their mouths sealed when it comes to the oil-rich states of the Middle East. Those who run around the corridors of power hoping to get into the Mecca agreement or to win a big post in an international body: when a Bangladeshi is killed in a Saudi prison without any chance to fight in court, where does their so-called backbone go and stand? Have they ever shown the courage, even once, to question this inhuman system of justice? Or will human life always stay cheap before the fear of power and geopolitical oil flattery?
The events happening on Saudi soil are not isolated accidents; they are an ongoing structural crime. When the courts of countries that call themselves lighthouses of Sharia and justice sell the blood of the poor for the price of water, while rich employers commit crimes and walk free, the moral ground of that justice system is bound to collapse. Some Bangladeshis have a strange mindset: Saudi Arabia means holy land, and nothing wrong can happen there. We must bring society out of this blindness. The economy turns on the money earned by migrants' sweat, and when a migrant's body arrives at the airport, the state's indifference shows that, as a free nation, we have failed badly to protect the dignity of our citizens. If the state does not know how to value the lives of its citizens, then the glitter of remittance will one day turn into a curse. This silence must be broken. The time to question this structural exploitation is now.
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