But bidoons found themselves on the receiving end of a groundswell of support after dozens of them were sacked from their temporary jobs in Kuwait’s health and religious affairs ministries. More than 7,000 tweets were posted with the hashtag #bidoons_fired - a relatively large number in a country of 1.2m people. Many ordinary Kuwaitis tweeted their support and criticised what they saw as unfair treatment by the government.
The commerce and industry ministry said it has revoked the commercial licence of the company that owns the channel after it lost most of its capital.
Kuwait City — Kuwait on Thursday closed the privately-run Al Watan satellite television channel, which has been critical of the government, citing financial reasons.
The commerce and industry ministry said it has revoked the commercial licence of the company that owns the channel after it lost most of its capital.
The information ministry followed the measure by withdrawing Al Watan’s media licence.
The station went off the air after police ordered staff out of the building.
The move comes almost five months after authorities revoked the commercial and media licences of Al Watan newspaper for the same reasons.
The decision to close the daily has since been upheld by the lower and appeals courts. The case is currently before the supreme court.
Al Watan TV and newspaper are owned by former oil minister Sheikh Ali Khalifa Al Sabah, a member of the ruling family, and it is managed by his son Sheikh Khalifa.
The two media outlets had traditionally supported the government, except over the past two years when they adopted a tougher line.
Immigration au #Qatar : la #kafala toujours en place malgré les promesses
L’ONG Amnesty International publie ce jeudi un rapport pour rappeler au Qatar qu’il n’a pas tenu ses promesses en matière d’amélioration des droits des ouvriers, et notamment la réforme de la Kafala, ce système qui met tout employé à la merci de son employeur pour changer de travail, sortir du territoire…Une réforme annoncée il y a un an et qui n’a pas eu lieu.
▻http://www.rfi.fr/moyen-orient/20150521-immigration-qatar-kafala-rapport-amnesty-travailleurs-migrants
#migration #travail #exploitation
Qatar lifts exit permit system for migrant workers
Majority of migrant workers in the country will no longer need permission from the employer to leave the country.
▻https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/qatar-lifts-exit-permit-system-migrants-workers-180905092910224.html
Will Migrant Domestic Workers in the Gulf Ever Be Safe From Abuse?
Jahanara* had had enough. For a year, the Bangladeshi cook had been working 12 to 16 hours a day, eating only leftovers and sleeping on the kitchen floor of her employer’s Abu Dhabi home – all for half the salary she had been promised. She had to prepare four fresh meals a day for the eight-member family, who gave her little rest. She was tired, she had no phone and she was alone. So, in the summer of 2014, in the middle of the night after a long day’s work, she snuck out into the driveway, scaled the front gate and escaped.
Jahanara ran along the road in the dark. She did not know where she was going. Eventually, a Pakistani taxi driver pulled over, and asked her if she had run away from her employer, and whether she needed help. She admitted she had no money, and no clue where she wanted to go. The driver gave her a ride, dropping her off in the neighboring emirate of Dubai, in the Deira neighborhood. There, he introduced her to Vijaya, an Indian woman in her late fifties who had been working in the Gulf for more than two decades.
“It’s like I found family here in this strange land.”
Vijaya gave the nervous young woman a meal of rice, dal and, as Jahanara still recalls, “a beautiful fish fry.” She arranged for Jahanara to rent half a room in her apartment and, within a week, had found her part-time housekeeping work in the homes of two expat families.
Jahanara is a 31-year-old single woman from north Bangladesh, and Vijaya, 60, is a grandmother of eight from Mumbai, India. Jahanara speaks Bengali, while Vijaya speaks Telugu. Despite the differences in age and background, the two women have become close friends. They communicate in gestures and broken Urdu.
“It’s like I found family here in this strange land,” Jahanara says.
The younger woman now cleans four houses a day, and cooks dinner for a fifth, while the older woman works as a masseuse, giving traditional oil massages to mothers and babies.
Jahanara’s experience in #Abu_Dhabi was not the first time she had been exploited as a domestic worker in the Gulf. She originally left Bangladesh six years ago, and has been home only once since then, when she ran away from abusive employers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the police deported her. She had no choice – under the much-criticized kafala system for legally employing migrant workers, a domestic worker is attached to a particular household that sponsors their visa. Employers often keep the worker’s passport to prevent their leaving, although this is illegal in most Gulf countries today.
Under kafala, quitting a bad boss means losing your passport and vital work visa, and potentially being arrested or deported. This is why, the second time, Jahanara escaped in the dead of night. Now, she works outside official channels.
“You earn at least three times more if you’re ‘khalli walli,’” Vijaya says, using a colloquial Arabic term for undocumented or freelance migrant workers. The name loosely translates as “take it or leave it.”
“You get to sleep in your own house, you get paid on time and if your employer misbehaves, you can find a new one,” she says.
“The Gulf needs us, but like a bad husband, it also exploits us.”
Ever year, driven by poverty, family pressure, conflict or natural disasters back home, millions of women, mainly from developing countries, get on flights to the Gulf with their fingers crossed that they won’t be abused when they get there.
It’s a dangerous trade-off, but one that can work out for some. When Jahanara and Vijaya describe their lives, the two women repeatedly weigh the possibility of financial empowerment against inadequate wages, routine abuse and vulnerability.
By working for 23 years in Dubai and Muscat in Oman, Vijaya has funded the education of her three children, the construction of a house for her son in a Mumbai slum and the weddings of two daughters. She is overworked and underpaid, but she says that’s “normal.” As she sees it, it’s all part of working on the margins of one of the world’s most successful economies.
“The Gulf needs us,” Vijaya says. “But like a bad husband, it also exploits us.”
The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that there are 11.5 million migrant domestic workers around the world – 73 percent of them are women. In 2016, there were 3.77 million domestic workers in Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
In a single household in these states, it’s common to find several domestic workers employed to do everything from cleaning and cooking, to guarding the home and tutoring the children.
Unlike other sectors, the demand for domestic workers has been resilient to economic downturns. Estimated to be one of the world’s largest employers of domestic workers, Saudi Arabia hosts around 2.42 million. The majority of these workers (733,000) entered the country between 2016 and 2017, during its fiscal deficit. In 2017, domestic workers comprised a full 22 percent of Kuwait’s working age population. Oman has seen a threefold explosion in its domestic work sector since 2008. Overall, the GCC’s migrant domestic work sector has been growing at an annual average of 8.7 percent for the past decade.
That growth is partly fueled by the increasing numbers of women entering the workforce. The percentage of Saudi Arabia’s adult female population in the formal labor force has risen from 18 percent to 22 percent over the past decade. In Qatar, the figure has jumped from 49 percent to 58 percent. And as more women go to work, there’s a growing need for others to take over the child and elderly care in their households. Experts call this transfer of care work from unpaid family members to paid workers from other countries the “global care chain.”
A 2017 report, which examined the effect of changing demographics in the Gulf, found that dramatically decreased fertility – thanks to improved female education and later marriages – and greater numbers of the dependent elderly have resulted in an “increased trend for labour participation of ‘traditional’ informal care givers (usually women).”
The enduring use of migrant domestic workers in the region is also a result of local traditions. For example, while Saudi Arabia was still the only country in the world that banned women from driving, there was a consistent need for male personal drivers, many coming from abroad. The ban was lifted in June 2018, but the demand for drivers is still high because many women don’t yet have licenses.
“Without domestic workers, societies could not function here,” says Mohammed Abu Baker, a lawyer in Abu Dhabi and a UAE national. “I was brought up by many Indian nannies, at a time when Indians were our primary migrants. Now, I have a Pakistani driver, an Indonesian cook, an Indian cleaner, a Filipino home nurse and a Sri Lankan nanny. None of them speak Arabic, and they can hardly speak to each other, but they run my household like a well-oiled machine.”
There is also demand from expatriate families, with dual wage earners looking for professional cleaning services, part-time cooks and full-time childcare workers.
“When I came from Seattle with my husband, we were determined not to hire servants,” says Laura, a 35-year-old teacher in an American primary school in Abu Dhabi. “But after we got pregnant, and I got my teaching job, we had to get full-time help.”
“My American guilt about hiring house help disappeared in months!” she says, as her Sri Lankan cook Frida quietly passes around home-baked cookies. “It is impossible to imagine these conveniences back home, at this price.”
Laura says she pays minimum wage, and funds Frida’s medical insurance – “all as per law.” But she also knows that conveniences for women like her often come at a cost paid by women like Frida. As part of her local church’s “good Samaritan group” – as social workers must call themselves to avoid government scrutiny – Laura has helped fundraise medical and legal expenses for at least 40 abused migrant workers over the past two years.
Living isolated in a house with limited mobility and no community, many domestic workers, especially women, are vulnerable to abuse. Afraid to lose their right to work, employees can endure a lot before running away, including serious sexual assault. Legal provisions do exist – in many countries, workers can file a criminal complaint against their employers, or approach labor courts for help. But often they are unaware of, or unable to access, the existing labor protections and resources.
“I never believed the horror stories before, but when you meet woman after woman with bruises or unpaid wages, you start understanding that the same system that makes my life easier is actually broken,” Laura says.
In 2007, Jayatri* made one of the hardest decisions of her life. She left her two young children at home in Sri Lanka, while the country was at war, to be with another family in Saudi Arabia.
It was near the end of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war and 22-year-old Jayatri had been struggling to support her family since her husband’s death in the war two years earlier. The 26-year conflict claimed the lives of tens of thousands of fathers, husbands, sons and brothers, forcing many Tamil women to take on the role of sole breadwinner for their families. But there are few job opportunities for women in a culture that still largely believes their place is in the home. Women who are single or widowed already face stigma, which only gets worse if they also try to find paying work in Sri Lanka.
S. Senthurajah, executive director of SOND, an organization that raises awareness about safe migration, says that as a result, an increasing number of women are migrating from Sri Lanka to the Gulf. More than 160,000 Sri Lankan women leave home annually to work in other countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Malaysia, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Senthurajah says recruitment agencies specifically target vulnerable female heads of households: widows, single and divorced women and women whose husbands are disabled or otherwise unable to work to support the family. Women like Jayatri.
When a local recruitment agency approached her and offered her a job as a domestic worker in the Gulf, it was an opportunity she felt she couldn’t turn down. She traveled from Vavuniya, a town in the island’s north – which was then under the control of Tamil Tiger rebels – to Colombo, to undergo a few weeks of housekeeping training.
She left her young children, a boy and a girl, with her mother. When she eventually arrived in Saudi Arabia, her passport was taken by the local recruitment agency and she was driven to her new home where there were 15 children to look after. From the start, she was abused.
“I spent five months in that house being tortured, hit and with no proper food and no salary. I worked from 5 a.m. to midnight every day,” she says, not wanting to divulge any more details about how she was treated.
“I just wanted to go home.”
Jayatri complained repeatedly to the recruitment agency, who insisted that she’d signed a contract for two years and that there was no way out. She was eventually transferred to another home, but the situation there was just as bad: She worked 18 hours a day and was abused, again.
“It was like jail,” she says.
“I spent five months in that house being tortured, hit and with no proper food and no salary. I worked from 5 a.m. to midnight every day.”
In 2009, Jayatri arrived back in northern Sri Lanka with nothing to show for what she had endured in Saudi Arabia. She was never paid for either job. She now works as a housemaid in Vavuniya earning $60 per month. It’s not enough.
“This is the only opportunity I have,” she says. “There’s no support. There are so many difficulties here.”
Jayatri’s traumatic time in Saudi Arabia is one of many stories of abuse that have come out of the country in recent years. While there are no reliable statistics on the number of migrant domestic workers who suffer abuse at the hands of their employers, Human Rights Watch says that each year the Saudi Ministry of Social Affairs and the embassies of source countries shelter thousands of domestic workers with complaints against their employers or recruiters.
Excessive workload and unpaid wages are the most common complaints. But employers largely act with impunity, Senthurajah says.
“It’s like a human slave sale,” Ravindra De Silva, cofounder of AFRIEL, an organization that works with returnee migrant workers in northern Sri Lanka, tells News Deeply.
“Recruitment agencies have agents in different regions of the country and through those agents, they collect women as a group and send them. The agents know which families [to] pick easily – widows and those with financial difficulties,” he says.
In 2016, a man turned up at Meera’s* mud-brick home on the outskirts of Jaffna, the capital of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, offering her a job in the Gulf.
“They told me I could earn well if I went abroad and that they could help me to look after my family,” she says.
Within a few months of arriving in Saudi Arabia, Meera, 42, couldn’t keep up with the long hours and strenuous housework. She cooked and cleaned for 12 family members and rarely got a break.
Her employer then became abusive.
“He started beating me and put acid in my eyes,” she says. He also sexually assaulted her.
But she endured the attacks and mistreatment, holding on to the hope of making enough money to secure her family’s future. After eight months, she went back home. She was never paid.
Now Meera makes ends meet by working as a day laborer. “The agency keeps coming back, telling me how poor we are and that I should go back [to Saudi Arabia] for my children,” she says.
“I’ll never go back again. I got nothing from it, [except] now I can’t see properly because of the acid in my eyes.”
While thousands of women travel to a foreign country for work and end up exploited and abused, there are also those who make the journey and find what they were looking for: opportunity and self-reliance. Every day, more than 1,500 Nepalis leave the country for employment abroad, primarily in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, India and Malaysia. Of the estimated 2.5 million Nepalis working overseas, about 11 percent are female.
Many women from South Asian countries who work in the Gulf send remittances home that are used to improve their family’s socio-economic status, covering the cost of education, health care, food and housing. In addition to financial remittances, the social remittances of female migrants in terms of skills, attitudes, ideas and knowledge can also have wide-ranging benefits, including contributing to economic development and gender equality back home.
Kunan Gurung, project coordinator at Pourakhi Nepal, an organization focused on supporting female returnee migrants, says those who have “successful” migration journeys are often able to use their experiences abroad to challenge gender norms.
“Our society is patriarchal and male-dominated, but the boundaries expand for women who return from the Gulf successfully because they have money and thus some power,” he says.
“The women have left their village, taken a plane and have lived in the developed world. Such experiences leave them feeling empowered.”
Gurung says many returning migrant workers invest their savings in their own businesses, from tailoring to chicken farms. But it can be difficult, because women often find that the skills they earned while working abroad can’t help them make money back home. To counter this, Pourakhi trains women in entrepreneurship to not only try to limit re-migration and keep families together but also to ensure women are equipped with tangible skills in the context of life in Nepal.
But for the women in Nepal who, like Jayatri in Sri Lanka, return without having earned any money, deep-rooted stigma can block their chances to work and separate them from their families. Women who come home with nothing are looked at with suspicion and accused of being sexually active, Gurung says.
“The reality is that women are not looked after in the Gulf, in most cases,” he says.
In Kathmandu, Pourakhi runs an emergency shelter for returning female migrants. Every evening, staff wait at Kathmandu airport for flights landing from the Gulf. They approach returning migrants – women who stand out because of their conservative clothes and “the look on their faces” – and offer shelter, food and support.
Of the 2,000 women they have housed over the last nine years, 42 have returned pregnant and 21 with children.
“There are so many problems returnee migrants face. Most women don’t have contact with their families because their employer didn’t pay, or they have health issues or they’re pregnant,” says Krishna Gurung (no relation to Kunan), Pourakhi’s shelter manager.
“They don’t reintegrate with their families. Their families don’t accept them.” Which could be the biggest tragedy of all. Because the chance to make life better for their families is what drives so many women to leave home in the first place.
Realizing how crucial their workers are to the Gulf economies, major labor-sending countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, India and the Philippines have been using both pressure and dialogue to improve conditions for their citizens.
Over recent years, they have instituted a wide array of bans and restrictions, often linked to particularly horrifying cases of abuse. Nepal has banned women from working in the Gulf in 2016; the same year, India disallowed women under 30 from migrating to the Gulf. In 2013, Sri Lanka temporarily banned women from leaving the country for domestic work, citing abuse abroad and neglected families at home, and now requires a family background report before women can travel.
The most high-profile diplomatic dispute over domestic workers unfolded between the Philippines and Kuwait this year. In January, the Philippines banned workers from going to Kuwait, and made the ban “permanent” in February after a 29-year-old Filipino maid, Joanna Demafelis, was found dead in a freezer in her employers’ abandoned apartment in Kuwait City.
“Bans provide some political leverage for the sending country.”
At the time, the Philippines’ firebrand president, Rodrigo Duterte, said he would “sell my soul to the devil” to get his citizens home from Kuwait to live comfortably back home. Thousands of Filipino citizens were repatriated through a voluntary return scheme in the first half of 2018, while Kuwait made overtures to Ethiopia to recruit more maids to replace the lost labor force. Duterte’s ban was eventually lifted in May, after Kuwait agreed to reform its migrant work sector, ending the seizure of passports and phones, and instituting a 24-hour hotline for abused workers.
It’s well established that bans do not stop women from traveling to the Gulf to become domestic workers. Bandana Pattanaik, the international coordinator of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, has criticized bans as being “patriarchal, limiting to female agency and also ending up encouraging illegal human smuggling.”
But others point out that the international pressure generated by travel bans has had some effect, as in the case with the Philippines and Kuwait. “Bans provide some political leverage for the sending country,” says Kathmandu-based researcher Upasana Khadka. “But bans do not work as permanent solutions.”
ATTEMPTS AT REFORM
Today, after decades of criticism and campaigning around labor rights violations, the Gulf is seeing a slow shift toward building better policies for domestic workers.
“In the past five years, five of the six GCC countries have started to adopt laws for the protection of migrant domestic workers for the very first time,” says Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch.
“The GCC countries have long cultivated the image of being luxurious economies meant for the good life,” Begum says. “This image is hard to maintain as labor exploitation comes to light. So, while they try to shut the reporting down, they have also been forced to address some of the issues raised by their critics.”
Legal and institutional reforms have been announced in the domestic work sector in all GCC countries except Oman. These regulate and standardize contracts, mandate better living conditions, formalize recruitment, and plan rehabilitation and legal redress for abused workers.
This gradual reform is due to international pressure and monitoring by human rights groups and international worker unions. After the 2014 crash in the oil economy, the sudden need for foreign investment exposed the GCC and the multinational companies doing business there to more global scrutiny.
Countries in the Gulf are also hoping that the new national policies will attract more professional and skilled home workers. “Domestic work is a corrupt, messy sector. The host countries are trying to make it more professional,” says M. Bheem Reddy, vice president of the Hyderabad-based Migrant Rights Council, which engages with women workers from the southern districts of India.
Many of the Gulf states are moving toward nationalization – creating more space for their own citizens in the private sector – this means they also want to regulate one of the fastest growing job sectors in the region. “This starts with dignity and proper pay for the existing migrant workers,” Reddy says.
There have been attempts to develop a regional standard for domestic labor rights, with little success. In 2011, the ILO set standards on decent work and minimum protection through the landmark Domestic Workers Convention. All the GCC countries adopted the Convention, but none have ratified it, which means the rules are not binding.
Instead, each Gulf country has taken its own steps to try to protect household workers who come from abroad.
After reports of forced labor in the lead-up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar faced a formal inquiry by the ILO if it didn’t put in place migrant labor protections. Under that pressure, in 2017, the country passed a law on domestic work. The law stipulates free health care, a regular monthly salary, maximum 10-hour work days, and three weeks’ severance pay. Later, it set a temporary minimum wage for migrant workers, at $200 a month.
The UAE’s new reforms are motivated by the Gulf crisis – which has seen Qatar blockaded by its neighbors – as well as a desire to be seen as one of the more progressive GCC countries. The UAE had a draft law on domestic work since 2012, but only passed it in 2017, after Kuwait published its own law. The royal decree gives household workers a regular weekly day off, daily rest of at least 12 hours, access to a mobile phone, 30 days paid annual leave and the right to retain personal documents like passports. Most importantly, it has moved domestic work from the purview of the interior ministry to the labor ministry – a long-standing demand from rights advocates.
The UAE has also become the first Gulf country to allow inspectors access to a household after securing a warrant from the prosecutor. This process would be triggered by a worker’s distress call or complaint, but it’s unclear if regular state inspections will also occur. Before this law, says Begum, the biggest obstacle to enforcing labor protection in domestic work was the inability for authorities to monitor the workspace of a cleaner or cook, because it is a private home, unlike a hotel or a construction site.
The UAE has not followed Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in stipulating a minimum wage for domestic workers. But it has issued licenses for 40 Tadbeer Service Centers, which will replace recruitment agencies by the end of the year. Employers in the UAE will have to submit their requests for workers through these centers, which are run by private licensed agents but supervised by the Ministry of Human Resources. Each of the centers has accommodation for workers and can also sponsor their visas, freeing them up to take on part-time jobs while also catering to growing demand from UAE nationals and expats for legal part-timers.
“You focus on the success stories you hear, and hope you’ll have that luck.”
B. L. Surendranath, general secretary of the Immigration Protection Center in Hyderabad, India, visited some of these centers in Dubai earlier this year, on the invitation of the UAE human resources ministry. “I was pleasantly surprised at the well-thought-out ideas at the model Tadbeer Center,” he says. “Half the conflicts [between employer and worker] are because of miscommunication, which the center will sort out through conflict resolution counselors.”
Saudi Arabia passed a labor law in 2015, but it didn’t extend to domestic work. Now, as unemployment among its nationals touches a high of 12.8 percent, its efforts to create more jobs include regulating the migrant workforce. The Saudi government has launched an electronic platform called Musaned to directly hire migrant domestic workers, cutting out recruitment agencies altogether. Women migrant workers will soon live in dormitories and hostels run by labor supply agencies, not the homes of their employers. The labor ministry has also launched a multi-language hotline for domestic workers to lodge complaints.
Dhaka-based migrant rights activist Shakirul Islam, from Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Programme, welcomes these changes, but remains circumspect. “Most women who return to Bangladesh from Saudi [Arabia] say that the revised laws have no impact on their lives,” he says. “My understanding is that the employers are not aware of the law on the one hand, and on the other, do not care about it.”
Migrant rights activists, ILO officials, the governments of source countries and workers themselves are cautiously optimistic about the progressive direction of reforms in the Gulf. “But it is clear that none of the laws penalize employers of domestic workers for labor rights violations,” says Islam.
Rights activists and reports from the ILO, U.N. and migrants’ rights forums have for decades repeated that full protection of domestic workers is impossible as long as GCC countries continue to have some form of the kafala sponsorship system.
Saudi Arabia continues to require workers to secure an exit permit from their employers if they want to leave the country, while Qatar’s 2015 law to replace the kafala sponsorship system does not extend to domestic workers. Reddy of the Migrant Rights Council says the UAE’s attempt to tackle kafala by allowing Tadbeer Center agents to sponsor visas does not make agents accountable if they repeatedly send different workers to the same abusive employer.
For now, it seems the women working on the margins of some of the richest economies in the world will remain vulnerable to abuse and exploitation from their employers. And as long as opportunities exist for them in the Gulf that they can’t find at home, thousands will come to fulfil the demand for domestic and care work, knowing they could be risking everything for little or no return.
Jahanara says the only thing for women in her position to do is to take the chance and hope for the best.
“You focus on the success stories you hear, and hope you’ll have that luck.”
Saudi, Kuwait to shut neutral zone oilfield - Yahoo News
▻http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-kuwait-shut-neutral-zone-oilfield-135808844.html?soc_src=mediacont
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait decided to shut the second oilfield in the neutral zone, effectively halting output in the area which produced 500,000 barrels of oil, an official said Monday.
“A decision has been taken today to shut operations at Wafra oilfield... for two weeks for periodical maintenance,” head of the trade union of Kuwait Gulf Oil Co. (KGOC) Fadghoush al-Ajmi told AFP.
KGOC and Saudi Arabian Chevron jointly run the Wafra field which produced 184,000 barrels on Sunday, Ajmi said.
At one stage, the oilfield produced around 220,000 barrels per day (bpd), he said.
In October, Saudi Arabia halted production in the offshore Khafji oilfield, also in the neutral one, which produced more than 300,000 bpd.
An oil industry source told AFP that the closure in Wafra is due to a row between the two Gulf neighbours, and that periodical maintenance is a “diplomatic term” used as a cover.
“The production may not resume soon unless the two nations find a solution to their row” which began in 2009, the source told AFP, requesting anonymity.
According to industry sources, Kuwaiti authorities were unhappy with Saudi Arabia renewing an agreement with Saudi Arabian Chevron in 2009 for 30 years without consulting them.
As a result, Kuwait stopped issuing or renewing visas for Chevron employees.
The Wafra field is the largest onshore field and is in the 5,000-square-kilometre neutral zone which the Gulf neighbours exploit jointly under a nearly 50-year-old treaty.
The crude is exported through Al-Zour port, just inside Kuwait, meaning that both companies’ staff need papers from the emirate.
The production cuts come amid a worldwide supply glut that has driven down crude prices.
OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia has spare production capacity of more than 2.0 million bpd, but Kuwait has little spare capacity to make up for lost neutral zone output.
The 500,000 bpd production from Wafra and Khafji was shared equally between the two sides.
Kuwait Shiite MP wants minister grilled over Yemen war | News , Middle East | THE DAILY STAR
▻https://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2015/May-11/297539-kuwait-shiite-mp-wants-minister-grilled-over-yemen-war.ashx
A Shiite parliamentarian in Kuwait on Monday demanded to grill the foreign minister over the Gulf state’s participation in Saudi-led air strikes against Yemen’s Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies.
“Kuwait’s air force has taken part in the military operations without parliament being informed,” Abdulhameed Dashti said.
He said this was a breach of the constitution which bans launching an offensive war or the government declaring a defensive war without informing parliament.
Dashti accused Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled al-Sabah, a senior member of the ruling family, of responsiblity for the emirate’s involvement in the Yemen conflict.
Les accidents de chantier au Koweit
Rampant Corruption puts Kuwait’s 186,000 Construction Workers at risk | Migrant-Rights.org
▻http://www.migrant-rights.org/2015/05/rampant-corruption-puts-kuwaits-186000-construction-workers-at-risk
University City
In addition to the deathly substandard working conditions in the Sabah al-Ahmed construction camps, several deaths also occurred at the construction site of Kuwait’s “University City” in the Shaddadiya area. The Kuwaiti government has spent 3.5 billion USD on the over-extended project. In June 2013, the construction site witnessed two extensive fires within days of each other. A third fire occurred in December 2014, damaging a four-story building. In 2012, one worker was killed and buried at the construction site “in a personal dispute” with another man. The year after, another murder occurred at Shaddadiya when a construction worker was found murdered with a wound in the head.
Koweït : Des Africaines vendues et traitées « comme des esclaves » - Guardian
►http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/02/women-sierra-leone-sold-like-slaves-domestic-work-kuwait
In Kuwait the domestic workers business is booming, with nearly 90% of Kuwaiti households employing at least one foreign maid.
Yet while dozens of recruitment agencies are pulling out the stops to attract potential employers – including parading women in front of potential employers who can take them home on the spot – they are also being accused of selling women and duping them into a life of domestic servitude.
Women from Sierra Leone formerly employed as domestic workers in private Kuwaiti households said they had been “sold like slaves” by recruitment agents to families in the Kuwaiti capital and then resold multiple times.
Each said that they had paid about £1,000 ($1,480) to recruitment agents in Sierra Leone on the promise of jobs as nurses in hospitals or in the hotel industry, only to find on arrival that they were to be offered to families as housemaids and expected to work for up to 22 hours a day.
(...)
Adama, 24, said that after being selected by a Kuwaiti family she was taken to their house and treated “like a slave”.
“You have to work 24 hours [with] no day off. You can never leave the house … You are not allowed to use mobile phones. These people are not good.”
Adama, 24, a domestic worker from Sierra Leone, shows the scars on her leg. She says they were caused when her Kuwaiti employer deliberately spilled hot oil on her. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Adama, 24, a domestic worker from Sierra Leone, shows the scars on her leg, which she claims were caused when her Kuwaiti employer deliberately spilled hot oil on her.
Employers are given a 100-day guarantee by agents, which allows them to return domestic workers they are not happy with and get a refund. As well as keeping employers happy, this also creates a booming “second-hand” market where returned domestic workers can be resold to other families for up to two years.
Thousands of women travel to Kuwait every year to work. Workers come from across Asia but also, increasingly, from Africa, with women being recruited by agents in countries such as Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Kenya and Ethiopia.
Once employed as domestic workers in Kuwait, women find it difficult to leave if they suffer abuse. Under Kuwait’s kafala sponsorship system, domestic workers are not allowed to leave or change jobs without their employer’s permission. With their residency status also tied to their employer, if they run away they become “illegal”.
Last year, stories of abuse suffered by Sierra Leonean women in Kuwait prompted the country’s authorities to follow other governments, including those of Indonesia and Nepal, in banning its citizens from being employed as domestic workers in the country. Yet they continue to come through informal channels.
Despite the official ban, when staff from the Sierra Leonean embassy visited recruitment agents recently they found about 100 women from Sierra Leone on their books.
Sectarianism and authoritarianism in Kuwait - The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/04/13/sectarianism-and-authoritarianism-in-kuwait
Kuwait appoints new electricity minister - Politics & Economics - ArabianBusiness.com
▻http://www.arabianbusiness.com/kuwait-appoints-new-electricity-minister-586415.html
Ahmad Khaled Ahmad Al Jassar has been appointed as Kuwait’s electricity minister days after the former minister stepped down over a black-out.
The former Kuwait Petroleum Corporation board member was sworn in at the Bayan Palace in front of Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah, Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah and Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Al Mubarak Al Hamad Al Sabah.
Abdulaziz Al Ibrahim resigned from the post last week, a month after a widespread power cut hit the Gulf state, although that was not formally given as the reason for his stepping down.
Kuwait experienced a widespread power outage on February 11. At the time, Ibrahim had attributed the outage to a technical failure at a power station.
KUNA : Kuwait commended for alleviating Palestinians’ suffering - Human - 05/04/2015
▻http://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2434284&language=en
GAZA, April 5 (KUNA) — Palestinian Minister of Public Works and Housing Mufid Al-Hasaina commended here Sunday the Kuwaiti role, under the directions of His Highness the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, in alleviating the suffering of Palestinians harmed by the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip last year.
Al-Hasaina said at a press conference that the USD-200-million donation agreement offered by Kuwait for reconstruction in southern governorates in the Strip will contribute to building about 1,500 housing units and executing several vital projects.
He added that his ministry will coordinate with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to assess homes affected by the aggression for the reconstruction process, adding the units will be built through several stages.
According to latest statistics, about 100,000 homes and institutions were destroyed by the Israeli aggression.
On March 12, the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development (KFAED) and the Palestinian government signed the agreement in Amman for the reconstruction of southern provinces in the Strip.
The donation, which is part of Kuwait’s pledge made during the Cairo International Conference on Palestine and Reconstructing Gaza held in the Egyptian capital in October, will finance also projects of infrastructure, education and health. (end) wab.hm
7 april 2015
Kuwait to Pledge $200M to Gaza Reconstruction: The Palestinian government said, in a statement Tuesday, it had signed an agreement with its Kuwaiti counterpart regarding the latter’s contribution of $200 million to support the reconstruction process of the Gaza Strip. The agreement was signed by Abdal-Wahab al-Bader, Director General of the Kuwait Development Fund and Jawad Naji, Palestinian Prime Minister’s adviser for Arab and Islamic funds, on the sideline of the Arab financial institutions’ meeting held in Kuwait. Of this $200 million, $75 million will be allocated to the construction of 1,500 housing units in the war-weary enclave, while another $60 million will be devoted to the construction of a water pipeline stretching from northern to southern Gaza Strip. Some $35 million will also be allocated to infrastructural projects, while another $15 million will be earmarked to rehabilitation of partially damaged agricultural and industrial structures. An amount of $7 million will be dedicated to supporting projects in the education and health sectors. (WAFA)
Government: upon Al-Hamdallah’s visit to Kuwait, a final agreement signed on the reconstruction of Gaza worth $ 200 million
The Government of national reconciliation said yesterday that on the sidelines of the annual meetings of Arab financial institutions held in the State of Kuwait, a final agreement for the contribution of the State of Kuwait in the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, amounting to $ 200 million was signed. The agreement was signed by Director General of the Kuwait Fund for Arab economic development, Mr. Abdulwahab Ahmad Badr, and the Palestinian Prime Minister’s Advisor for Arab and Islamic funds, Dr. Jawad Naji.
The Government stated that the signing of the agreement came after the successful visit of Prime Minister Dr. Ramy Al-Hamdallah to the State of Kuwait, and the meetings he held with officials in Kuwait, mainly the Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti Prime Minister, State Minister and Deputy Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs, Director General of the Kuwait Fund for economic development, where Al-Hamdallah discussed urgent priority projects in the framework of the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. (▻http://pnn.ps/index.php/policy/122430-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D9%83%D9%88%D9%85%D8%A9-%D8%A8%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%A1%D9%8B)
Kuwait’s rank in ‘Doing Business’ has dropped by 7 points in 2015 - Kuwait Times | Kuwait Times
▻http://news.kuwaittimes.net/kuwaits-rank-in-doing-business-has-dropped-by-7-points-in-2015
Kuwait’s DTF score has improved marginally during the last five years. Among the GCC peers, Kuwait is the lowest ranked in both Doing Business and Starting a Business. The country has the highest number of procedures (12), compared to Oman (5) and UAE (6), and the longest time duration to complete the procedures (31), compared to Oman (7) and UAE (8). In terms of costs required, Kuwait (1.9 percent) fares reasonably well compared to UAE (6.3 percent) and Qatar (5.2 percent), and is worse off in the paid-in-minimum-capital parameter compared to UAE and Saudi Arabia, which require no minimum paid-in capital requirement.
Comparing the ease of starting a business DTF, we see that Kuwait is the farthest among the GCC peers from the requisite benchmark. Using the rank simulator tool provided by the World Bank, it can be seen that Kuwait’s Ease of Starting a Business ranking drops to 84 (compared to 150), if the number of procedures is halved and if the time taken to complete all the procedures is similar to that of Oman’s. It further drops to 51 (placed higher than UAE), if the minimum paid-in-capital requirement from a regulatory perspective becomes 0 percent.
Women from Sierra Leone ’sold like slaves’ into domestic work in Kuwait | Pete Pattisson | Global development | The Guardian
►http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/02/women-sierra-leone-sold-like-slaves-domestic-work-kuwait
In the basement of an old tower block near Kuwait City, recruitment agents brandish files full of healthy, work-ready domestic workers. “Choose the one you want,” says one agent with a smile. “I will give you a hundred days’ guarantee. If you don’t like her you can send her back.”
In Kuwait the domestic workers business is booming, with nearly 90% of Kuwaiti households employing at least one foreign maid.
Yet while dozens of recruitment agencies are pulling out the stops to attract potential employers – including parading women in front of potential employers who can take them home on the spot – they are also being accused of selling women and duping them into a life of domestic servitude.
Women from Sierra Leone formerly employed as domestic workers in private Kuwaiti households said they had been “sold like slaves” by recruitment agents to families in the Kuwaiti capital and then resold multiple times.
Each said that they had paid about £1,000 ($1,480) to recruitment agents in Sierra Leone on the promise of jobs as nurses in hospitals or in the hotel industry, only to find on arrival that they were to be offered to families as housemaids and expected to work for up to 22 hours a day.
The destructive legacy of Arab liberals | Joseph Massad ▻http://electronicintifada.net/content/destructive-legacy-arab-liberals/14385
Ironies abound. Terrified by the popular Arab schadenfreude expressed in massive demonstrations across the Arab world in solidarity with Iraq, demonstrations that did not sympathize with Kuwait and other oil-producing Gulf countries, the illiberal Saudis launched pan-Arab newspapers and satellite channels that bombarded the Arab world with pro-Saudi and pro-US liberal propaganda to reverse this Arab anti-imperial nationalist tide that also opposed the Arab regimes allied with US imperialism.
Intellectuals from across the Arab world joined the effort, abandoning old leftist, communist, Nasserist and Islamist positions and adopted the much, much more profitable pro-US and pro-Israel liberal line politically, and the neoliberal economic order being globalized. By the dawn of the new century, the Saudis and the Americans issued new orders to their media and agents to spread an unprecedented sectarian campaign against Shiites inside and outside the Arab world.
The campaign would be first articulated in 2004 by the new and neoliberal King Abdullah of Jordan, a self-styled “liberal” monarch who possesses absolute and unchecked power. The king expressed his and others’ fear of the rise of a “Shiite crescent” in the region.
It is in this regional context that Syrian liberals joined the fray. Upon the long-awaited death of President Hafez al-Assad in 2000, they launched what they called a “Damascus Spring” from intellectual salons and from the halls of the US embassy in Damascus, whose cultural attaché was a main sponsor of their “Spring.”
While they would soon be suppressed by the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syrian liberals would re-emerge in 2011 claiming to speak for “revolutionary” forces that have, with the full participation of the repressive Assad regime, caused the death of hundreds of thousands and destroyed the country.
The US ambassador would also aid in their efforts by making appointments and assigning roles within the Syrian exile opposition. Not unlike their Iraqi counterparts, the Syrian liberals — secularists and Islamists alike — called for imperial intervention in the name of democracy and to end the Syrian dictatorship. They got what they wished for in the form of the draconian Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS — also known as ISIL or just “Islamic State”).
Not to be outdone, Lebanese liberals and former Lebanese leftists, communists and Arab nationalists would also have their own “Spring” following the assassination of the corrupt and corrupting neoliberal billionaire, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005. They would help launch a local sectarian anti-Shiite campaign in the country and would call for more imperial intervention to save them from their powerful Syrian, but not their more dangerous Israeli, neighbor. They would also relaunch anti-Palestinian campaigns by cheering the Lebanese army’s destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in 2007. While their country was under heavy Israeli bombardment in 2006, many of these liberals cheered on the Israelis privately and publicly and prayed for the destruction of Hizballah fighters to restore a “liberal” Lebanese order that they longed for.
Traduit en français par @gonzo :
►http://cpa.hypotheses.org/5492
Sorry @nidal j’avais oublié que c’était grâce à toi que j’étais tombé dessus ! Il est bien ce texte !
Al Barrak gets two years for insulting Kuwait emir | GulfNews.com
▻http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/kuwait/al-barrak-gets-two-years-for-insulting-kuwait-emir-1.1460746
Kuwait’s Court of Appeals on Sunday sentenced former lawmaker Musallam Al Barrak to two years in jail for insulting the country’s emir.
“I have great trust in God,” Al Barrak, a former union leader, said immediately after the sentencing. “This is the fate we have chosen and I will turn myself in once they show me the necessary papers,” he reportedly said as he was sitting in his own majlis.
Al Barrak’s lawyer said he would challenge the ruling on Monday at the court of cassation.
The trial of Kuwait’s top dissident had galvanised the country’s attention.
Poles apart - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition
▻http://mondediplo.com/2003/03/01polesapart
FUNDAMENTAL global issues are clearly at stake in Iraq. Alarm bells ring as international relations disintegrate. The United Nations is sidelined, the European Union divided and Nato fractured. In February 10 million people took to the streets around the world: anti-war protesters, convinced that tragic events had been set in motion, renounced the return of brutality to the political stage and the rise in violence, passion and hatred.
Collective fears produce anxious questions. Why should we wage war on Iraq? Why now? What are the real intentions of the United States? Why are France and Germany so adamant in their opposition? Does this conflict point to a new geopolitical arrangement? Will it change worldwide balances of power?
Many observers believe that the real reasons for this war are secret. People of good will who have paid close attention to US arguments remain sceptical. Having failed to make its case for war, Washington has forcefully presented feeble justifications while causing doubt around the world.
What is the official rationale? In September President George Bush addressed the Security Council, outlining seven charges against Iraq in a document, A Decade of Defiance and Deception. This made three main accusations: Iraq has flouted 16 UN resolutions; it possesses or is seeking ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), nuclear, biological and chemical; it is guilty of human rights violations, including torture, rape and summary executions.
There are four more charges. The US blames Baghdad for abetting terrorism by harbouring Palestinian organisations and sending $25,000 to families of those who carry out suicide attacks on Israel (1). It accuses Iraq of holding prisoners of war, including a US pilot; of confiscating property, including artworks and military material, during its invasion of Kuwait; and of diverting revenues from the UN oil-for-food programme.
These accusations led to a unanimous Security Council vote in November. Resolution 1441 mandated “an enhanced inspection regime with the aim of bringing to full and verified completion the disarmament process”. Considering these disturbing charges, should all countries see Iraq as the world’s number one enemy? Is it the biggest threat to humanity? Do US accusations justify all-out war?
The US and some allies - the United Kingdom, Australia and Spain - say yes. Without the approval of any recognised international body, the US and UK have dispatched some 250,000 troops to the Gulf. This a formidable fighting force with massive powers of destruction. But, backed by substantial international public opinion, Western countries such as France, Germany and Belgium say no. Although they acknowledge the seriousness of the charges, they contend that accusations of flouting UN resolutions, violating human rights and possessing WMD could be levelled against other countries, especially Pakistan and Israel. But since both are close US allies, no one will declare war on them. There is no shortage of dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Equatorial Guinea) that trample on human rights (2). Because they are allies, Washington is silent.
In the eyes of France, Germany and Belgium, the Iraqi regime does not immediately threaten its neighbours because of 12 years of non-stop surveillance, restrictions on its airspace and that devastating embargo. About the endless search for impossible-to-find weapons, many agree with Confucius:"You can’t catch a cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat." They believe that the inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), headed by Egyptian disarmament expert Mohammed al-Baradei, are making steady progress, as their reports to the Security Council, in particular at the 7 March meeting, indicate. The goal of disarming Iraq could be achieved without war.
The French president, Jacques Chirac, through his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, has used this sensible reasoning at the UN. In the minds of those opposed to war, Chirac person ifies resistance to overwhelming US firepower. Although we may be overstating the case, Chirac has now achieved a level of international popularity enjoyed by few French leaders before him. Like “General Della Rovere” in Roberto Rossellini’s celebrated film, fate may have thrust him into the role of resistance fighter, but Chirac has taken up the challenge (3). The US has failed to make its case for war. It is vulnerable to France’s potential veto and has already suffered two setbacks in the Security Council. The first was on 4 February, when US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation of evidence against Baghdad flopped; and the second was on 14 February, when Hans Blix delivered a fairly positive report, in which he implied that some of Powell’s evidence was barely cred ible. The same day the French foreign minister made a similar statement: “Ten days ago the US Secretary of State reported the alleged links between al-Qaida and the regime in Baghdad. Given the present state of our research and intelligence, in liaison with our allies, nothing allows us to establish such links.” Establishing links between Osama bin Laden’s network and Saddam Hussein’s regime is a crucial factor that could justify war, particularly to the US public, still in shock after 11 September 2001.
Because there appears to be no demonstrable case for war, many are rallying in opposition. So we must question the real motives of the US, which are threefold. The first stems from a US preoccupation, which became a total obsession
Europe and America: poles apart
After 11 September, with preventing links between rogue states and international terrorists. In 1997 President Bill Clinton’s defence secretary, William Cohen, voiced US fears: “The US faces a heightened prospect that regional aggressors, third-rate armies, terrorist cells and even religious cults will wield disproportionate power by using, or even threatening to use, nuclear, biological or chemical weapons” (4). In a statement in January 1999 Bin Laden indicated that the threat was real: “I do not consider it a crime to try to obtain nuclear, chemical and biological weapons” (5). Last September President Bush acknowledged that such dangers haunted him: “Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.” (6)
For Bush this outlaw regime is Iraq. Hence the unprecedented US national security directive of preventive war, issued last September. Former CIA director James Woolsey summed up the Bush doctrine, saying that it was born of the asymmetric battle against terror, and about advanced dissuasion or preventive war. Since terrorists always had the advantage of attacking in secret, he said, the only defence was to find them wherever they were, before they got into a position to mount an attack (7). The US will hardly be seeking UN authorisation for this new mode of warfare. The second, albeit unspoken, motive, is to control the Gulf and its oil resources. More than two thirds of the world’s known reserves are in Gulf states: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. For the developed countries, particularly the US with its vast appetite for oil, the Gulf is critical to assure economic growth and maintain a way of life. The US would immediately interpret any attack on the Gulf states as a threat to its vital interests. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter (later winner of the 2002 Nobel peace prize), outlined in his State of the Union address the US policy in the Gulf: “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the US, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force” (8).
Placed under British control after the first world war and the dismantling of the Ottoman empire, the Gulf came under growing US influence after the second world war. But two countries resisted US domination: Iran after its Islamic revolution in 1979, and Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Since 11 September 2001, there have been suspicions about Saudi Arabia and its links with militant Islamists and alleged financial support for al-Qaida. The US takes the position that it cannot afford to lose a third pawn on the Gulf chessboard, especially one as important as Saudi Arabia. Hence the temptation to use false pretences to occupy Iraq and regain control of the region.
Aside from military difficulties, it will not be easy for US occupation forces to run Iraq in the post-Saddam era. When he was still lucid, Colin Powell described the intricacies of such an undertaking (9). He said in his autobiography that although the US had condemned Saddam for invading Kuwait, the US had no desire to destroy Iraq. According to Powell, the US’s major rival in the Gulf in the 1980s was Iran, not Iraq; in those years the US needed Iraq to counterbalance Iran. Powell also insisted that Saudi Arabia opposed a Shi’ite rise to power in southern Iraq; Turkey did not want the Kurds in northern Iraq to secede; and the Arab states did not want Iraq to be invaded and then divided into Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish factions; that would have dashed US hopes for stability in the Middle East. Powell concluded that to prevent such scenarios, the US would have had to conquer and occupy a faraway nation of 20 million people, which would have run counter to the wishes of the American people. Yet that is what Bush wants today.
The third, also unspoken, US motive is world supremacy. For years Bush’s rightwing advisers - including the vice-president, Dick Cheney, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board - have hypothesised that the US would become a global imperial power (see United States: inventing demons, page 6). These men held similar positions from 1989 to 1993 in the administration of President George Bush Senior. The cold war was ending: although most strategists favoured a reduced role for US armed forces, they gave preference to restructuring the military, relying on new technologies to re-establish war as a foreign policy tool.
One observer explained: “The Vietnam syndrome was still alive. The military didn’t want to use force unless everyone was in agreement. The stated conditions required virtually a national referendum before force could be used. No declaration of war would have been possible without a catalysing event such as Pearl Harbor” (10). In December 1989 White House hawks, with General Colin Powell’s agreement and without congressional or UN approval, instigated the invasion of Panama, ousting General Manuel Noriega and causing 1,000 deaths. The same men prosecuted the Gulf war, in which US military might left the world thunderstruck.
After returning to the White House in January 2001, Bush’s hawks recognised that 11 September was their long-awaited “catalysing event”. Now nothing restrains them. They used the USA Patriot Act to give the government alarming powers against civil liberties; they promised to exterminate terrorists; they put forward their theory of global war against international terrorism; they conquered Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban; they sent troops to Colombia, Georgia and the Philippines. They then developed the preventive war doctrine and used their propaganda to justify war on Iraq.
The hawks ostensibly agreed that the US should focus its efforts on globalisation’s power centres: the G7, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank. But they have sought incrementally to end US involvement in multilateral organisations. That is why they urged Bush to condemn the Kyoto protocol on global warming; the anti-ballistic missile treaty; the International Criminal Court; the treaty on anti-personnel mines; the biological weapons protocol; the convention on small arms; the treaty banning nuclear weapons; and the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war relevant to the Guantanamo detainees. Their next step could be to reject the authority of the Secur ity Council, jeopardising the UN’s existence. Under the guise of lofty ideals - freedom, democracy, free trade - these rightwing ideologues seek to transform the US into a new military state. They have embraced the ambitions of all empires: reshaping the globe, redrawing frontiers and policing the world’s peoples.
These were the intentions of previous colonialists. They believed, as historians Douglas Porch and John Keegan have argued, that the spread of trade, Christianity, science and efficient Western-style administration would push forward the frontiers of civilisation and reduce zones of conflict. Thanks to imperialism, poverty would turn into prosperity, savages find salvation, superstition become enlightenment, and order arrive in places of confusion and barbarism (11).
Thanks to their distinctive conception of the EU, France and Germany seek to forestall growing US hegemony, and choose to act as a non- belligerent counterweight to the US within the UN (12). As Dominique de Villepin said: “We believe that a multipolar world is needed, that no one power can ensure order throughout the world” (13). The shape of a bipolar world is becoming evident. The second pole could either be the EU (if its member states can overcome their differences), a new Paris-Berlin-Moscow alliance or other formations (Brazil, South Africa, India, Mexico). France and Germany have taken a bold and historic step that could enable Europe to overcome its fears of the past 60 years and reaffirm its political will. They have exposed the pusillanimity of European countries (including the UK, Spain, Italy and Poland) that have been vassal states for far too long.
The US had been making itself comfortable in a unipolar world dominated by its military forces; the war on Iraq was meant to display new US imperial power. But France and Germany have joined together to remind the US that political, ideological, economic and military considerations are crucial to the exercise of power. Globalisation led some to believe that economics and neoliberal ideology were the only essential factors; political and military considerations were relegated to the back burner. That was a mistake. As the world is being formed anew, the US focuses on the military and the media. France and Germany have opted for a political strategy. In their attempt to address global problems, France and Germany bet on perpetual peace. Bush and his entourage of hawks seek perpetual war.
]]
La version française en ligne : ▻http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2003/03/RAMONET/9870
#Kuwait Arrests Opposition MP for Criticizing Government Two Years Ago
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/kuwait-arrests-opposition-mp-criticizing-government-two-years-ago
Kuwait authorities arrested a former liberal cabinet minister as he attempted to leave the country Saturday, after being sentenced to a week in jail over an article criticizing the government, his lawyer said. Saad al-Ajmi, information minister between 1999-2000, was detained at the airport as he was leaving for a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia with his wife and daughter, his lawyer al-Humaidi al-Subaie said on Twitter. read more
#freedom_of_speech #Human_Rights #Kuwait_Emir #Kuwaiti_opposition
Kuwait jails former information minister Saad Bin Teflah | GulfNews.com
▻http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/kuwait/kuwait-jails-former-information-minister-saad-bin-teflah-1.1439233
Airport police in Kuwait on Saturday arrested former information minister Saad Bin Teflah as he was about to fly to Makkah with his wife and daughter to perform Umrah, his lawyer has said.
The arrest was based on a one-week jail sentence pronounced by the court on Thursday in a case brought by Finance Minister Anas Al Saleh against the former minister, the lawyer added.
“The court case was not publicised even though the address of my client is well known,” Al Hamidi Al Sabii, the lawyer, said. “The case was over an article published on Al Aan news site, and the judges sentenced him and Al Aan editor Zayed Al Zaid to one week in prison. My client was not notified about the trial date even though his home address and his work location at the University of Kuwait are well known, especially that he is a prominent Kuwaiti, Gulf and Arab figure. My client was detained at the airport,” he said, quoted by local media.
The lawyer added that he would appeal against the sentence on Sunday, when courts re-open following the two-day weekend.
Kuwait News Agency - 28 December, 2014
Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc denied on Saturday that he demanded Kuwait to support his country in accommodating the large numbers of Syrian refugees during his recent visit to Kuwait.
During his meeting today with visiting Kuwaiti journalists, Arinc lauded the contributions of His Highness the Amir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah and the Kuwaiti people and government to the humanitarian action.
Turkey, a rich and powerful country, has provided aid to many countries, reaching USD 3.5 billion annually, Anadolu Agency (AA) quoted him as saying.
“Turkey alone has spent more than USD 5 billion on more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees and aid actually received from the UN agencies and foreign doners represent only a tenth of the stated aid pledges,” the senior official added.
Regarding his country’s relations with Egypt, Arinc expressed desire to improve them, saying that Egypt must take measures in this direction.
He dismissed the calls by his country for Kuwait to intervene to settle the dispute with Egypt.
On another front, Arinc stressed the importance of joint efforts to combat the terrorist groups such as ISIL, noting that the Turkish security services arrested dozens of foreign fighters who tried to cross Turkey into neighboring countries to join ISIL ranks.
Bahrain, Kuwait sign cooperation accord | GulfNews.com
▻http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/bahrain/bahrain-kuwait-sign-cooperation-accord-1.1431949
The two-day meeting on December 22 and 23 addressed several issues of interest to both countries and focused on ways to reinforce economic cooperation, improve commercial trade and consolidate Gulf citizenship, the two countries said in their communiqué.
The two sides also reviewed financial, economic and investment cooperation and expressed their satisfaction with the steps taken towards economic integration between them in line with the GCC agreement.
Both Bahrain and Kuwait agreed on deepening cooperation between the ministries of foreign affairs and intensifying the exchange of expertise and official visits.
They also agreed on broadening cooperation in the economic, financial, investment, expert, commerce, industry, civil service, administrative development, information, justice, women, parliament, electricity, water, health, social insurance, culture, municipalities, urban planning, defence, oil, national guard, education youth, sports, social environment and national security areas.
The meeting was the eighth held by the Bahrain - Kuwait high joint commission.
#Piketty on the Middle East
▻http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/22/we-need-a-wealth-tax-thomas-piketty-2014s-most-influential-thinker
Cracking bits from this interesting interview with Owen Jones:
The other influence is perhaps more surprising: the first #Gulf war that followed Ba’athist #Iraq’s invasion of #Kuwait in 1990, which shocked him and his colleagues at the école. “It was a very strong event, because sometimes we say that governments cannot do much against tax havens, they’re too powerful. And suddenly we’re able to send 1 million troops 1,000km away from home to give back the oil to the emir of Kuwait. I was not sure this was the right redistribution of wealth.”
The west’s general relationship with the #Middle_East – “the most unequal region in the world”, he says – is one that troubles him, not least because it exposes grotesque inequalities. “Take #Egypt: the total budget for education for 100 million people is 100 times less than the oil revenue for a few dozen people in #Qatar. And then in London and in Paris we are happy to have these people buying football clubs and buying apartments, and then we are surprised that the youths in the Middle East don’t take very seriously our democracy and social justice.”
Kuwait threatens to expel Indians over diplomatic spat - ArabianBusiness.com
▻http://m.arabianbusiness.com/kuwait-threatens-expel-indians-over-diplomatic-spat-574796.html
Kuwait has threatened to impose an immediate ban on Indian expatriates moving to the country as the Asian nation refuses to back down on a plan to enforce a bank guarantee on foreign employers.
India has said it will require a $2500 bank guarantee to recruit an Indian domestic worker overseas.
Kuwait has disputed the move and on Wednesday it held high level diplomatic talks with the Indian ambassador to Kuwait.
However, Kuwait Times reported the ongoing discussions had failed to resolve the issue, leading Kuwait to threaten a ban on new Indian workers in the country, which could become effective as early as Thursday.
There are about 800,000 Indians in Kuwait, making them the highest non-citizen community in the Gulf state, according to government figures quoted by Kuwait Times.
About one-quarter are domestic workers.
The Indian embassy has said the bank guarantee was initiated in 2007 already has been applied in several countries, including all other Gulf states.
It emphasised that the money would be returned to the employer as soon as the employment contract ended, pending any financial disagreements.
Kuwait set to allow expats to moonlight - ArabianBusiness.com
▻http://m.arabianbusiness.com/kuwait-set-allow-expats-moonlight-574436.html
Expats working in Kuwait’s private sector will soon be allowed to take up additional part-time work in a move designed to boost the labour force without increasing the population, the Manpower Public Authority has announced.
The practice, known as moonlighting, also would allow low-paid workers to earn additional income.
Scores of foreign workers already have informal second jobs, according to Kuwait Times, and the new rule will make it legal.
Expatriates working in the public sector already can seek additional part-time jobs in the private sector or nongovernmental organisations.
The decision is among several expected to be implemented in January under the country’s overhaul of labour laws.
Private companies have been suspended from directly recruiting foreign labour for several years, with exceptions, while a new Manpower Public Authority was created, moving the labour department from the Ministry of Social Affairs to a separate body.
The country has been attempting to rebalance it demography, with foreigners making up two-thirds of the country’s population of 4 million, and reduce pressure on ailing services and a housing shortage.
However, efforts to encourage citizens into the private sector have had minimal success.
Last year, the former social affairs minister declared Kuwait would cut the number of foreigners in the country by 1 million 2023.
Parliament is presently debating a proposal to limit expatriate visas to 10 years and cap the proportion of the total population that comes from one country to 15 percent.
Kuwaiti union official accuses ministry of ’human trafficking’ - ArabianBusiness.com
▻http://m.arabianbusiness.com/kuwaiti-union-official-accuses-ministry-of-human-trafficking--567
A top official representing expatriates in Kuwait has quit his position in protest over what he says is the government’s involvement in the exploitation of expat labourers.
Abdul Rahman Al Ghanim, the head of Kuwait Labor Union’s expat division, said more than 500 foreign labourers had complained of not receiving their salaries for months but government organisations were doing little to respond, Kuwait Times reported.
He claimed the Ministry of Health had employed numerous expats who did not have the required work residency visas, “which [is] human trafficking”.
The government department in charge of expatriates, the Manpower Authority, also had convinced some labourers to forfeit their overdue salaries in return for allowing them to transfer their visas to other sponsors – a promise that was not fulfilled once the labourers had signed papers to forfeit their money, Al Ghanim said.
He claimed he had unsuccessfully raised the issues with the relevant authorities on numerous occasions.
There are an estimated almost 2 million expatriates living in Kuwait, equal to about two-thirds of the population.
Last week, a survey of 14,000 expats in 160 countries by InterNations found Kuwait was the worst state to be an expat. The survey measured quality of life, ease of settling in, working abroad, family life, personal finance, and overall satisfaction living abroad.
KUNA : Sheikh Talal Al-Fahad no longer holding two sports posts in Kuwait - Min. - Parliamentary - 02/12/2014
▻http://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2411927&language=en
KUWAIT, Dec 2 (KUNA) — Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah affirmed Tuesday that the legal status of Sheikh Talal Al-Fahad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah was adjusted.
In statements during the regular National Assembly session, Sheikh Mohammad said that Sheikh Talal is no longer holding two posts concurrently at sports clubs boards, sports associations, and the Public Authority for Youth and Sports (PAYS).
The law bans being a board member at any of the abovementioned bodies and concurrently a leader in another.
“Sheikh Talal is no longer holding concurrently the two posts of a deputy chairman of PAYS and the President of Kuwait Football Association,” Sheikh Mohammad said.
He added that the government has taken many measures in the past years to improve performance and address problems facing the sports bodies
Egypte : Sissi annonce « la défaite des islamistes » aux élections législatives de 2015 - Egypt independant
▻http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/sisi-islamists-won-t-win-parliament-elections
President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has ruled out an Islamist win during the anticipated parliament elections which he promised to run before the end of March 2015.
“My bit is on the awareness of Egyptians during the next elections”, he was quoted by former Kuwaiti information minister Sami al-Nisf, who spoke to Al-Masry Al-Youm following Sisi’s meeting with a delegation of Kuwaiti media figures and businessmen.
“Nobody can buy Egyptians’ votes,” Sisi was quoted as replying to his guests, who voiced fears that “dishonest” tactics would be used to lure voters during the polls.
Islamists dominated a majority of the People’s Assembly under the formerly-ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in 2012 before the Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved it in June of the same year.
Parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held before the end of 2014 based on the roadmap that was declared following the ouster of Mohamed Morsy. But the delay in adopting the law on constituencies disabled the government from setting a timetable for the vote.
The delay has provoked government opponents who see it as a violation of the roadmap.
Sur @OrientXXI Une stratégie d’élimination des Frères musulmans ►http://orientxxi.info/magazine/egypte-une-strategie-d-elimination,0362