Suicide among expats in Kuwait on the rise: Media report

KUWAIT: One migrant worker commits or attempts suicide every 2.5 days in Kuwait, a local rights group has claimed.

Migrant Rights, a Middle East advocacy organization for migrant workers, insists that reports of 23 cases of migrant workers in Kuwait committing or attempting suicide in June and July “an alarming trend.” 

The most recent numbers follow 17 cases of suicide or attempted suicide by domestic workers in Kuwait during May alone, and 25 more in February and March of this year.

Female Asian domestic workers make up the vast majority of the suicides, most of which are committed by swallowing chemicals or jumping out of a window.

Migrant Rights says workers are driven to suicide by harsh working conditions and employer abuse, all of which are ignored by local officials and media. “To this day we’ve heard of zero cases where the sponsors of the workers faced consequences for driving their worker to suicide,” the rights group wrote in the report. “Reports about these miserable workers are pushed to the back pages of newspapers in Kuwait. The workers are nameless in their death as they are in their lives, with the papers not bothering to learn the name of the workers and sometimes even their age and nationality.

Reports suggest that the reason for suicides are psychological problems of the victims, without trying to understand what about the treatment of the sponsor leads these migrant workers to suicide en masse.” 

Kuwaiti labor laws largely do not protect expatriate domestic workers, many of whom are defrauded or coerced into coming to Kuwait only to end up in exploitative work or, in some cases, slavery.

Physical and sexual abuse, the withholding of passports and the non-payment of wages are all common occurrences for migrant workers in the region.

Speaking to The Media Line, Tariq A. Haq, a research economist in the International Labor Organization’s Employment Analysis and Research Unit, argued that the phenomenon was a product of the sponsorship system, in which migrant workers enter Kuwait, have their passports taken from them and end up tied to their specific sponsoring employer.

“If a worker’s employer has absconded and left them with ten months of unpaid wages, they are just left there to fend for themselves,” he told The Media Line. “If they turn to the courts it can take a long time, and that doesn’t help a worker in a very precarious situation.” 

“So the workers find themselves stuck; unable to return home without a passport; having debts back in their home countries; and living in a terrible situation without income and unable to go to seek alternative employment under the sponsorship system,” Haq said.

“It puts phenomenal pressure on the worker and leads to desperation.” 

“Now it’s the summer time as well so we’re talking about construction workers working in extreme heat and living in labor camps without air conditioning,” he continued.

“The authorities try to clamp down on this as much as possible, and some of the countries in the region have been trying to improve their social protection systems and labor inspection capacities, but you need to have a critical mass of inspectors to make sure that these types of violations are not taking place.” 

Haq said that the global economic slowdown has negatively affected Kuwait’s migrant workers.

“Kuwait was relatively harder hit by the crises, so this has not helped and there have been a lot of cases of employers unable to pay their workers wages,” he added. “So the story would fit that with a stronger overall economic impact on the country, the plight of migrant workers may be slightly worse.” 

Shafeeq Ghabra, professor of political science at Kuwait University and the founding president of the American University of Kuwait, said domestic workers were particularly vulnerable.

“It could be conditions among migrant workers, not being happy, abuse, all kinds of things could play into it,” he told The Media Line. “The entire setup for migrant workers has to be looked at.”

“If they are domestic workers in homes, you can’t know what is happening or detect what’s going through the mind of the other,” Ghabra said. “They are often trapped in a bad situation - psychologically, socially, sexually, contractually vis-a-vis their employers.”

As the standard of living increased in Kuwait over the last decade, hundreds of thousands flocked to the country, drastically transforming its demographic makeup.

With just over three million residents today, Kuwait is believed to host more than 2.35 million foreign workers, or around three-in-every-four people in the country.

The vast majority of these immigrants are of East and South Asian descent: Bangladeshi, Filipino, Indian, Pakistani or Sri Lankan nationals.

An estimated 100,000 stateless people have also immigrated to the country. Many of the stateless immigrants are Arab and have obtained Kuwaiti citizenship through marriage.

Last summer Kuwait threatened to deport 100,000 foreign workers after bogus companies brought them into the country under the false pretense of jobs which do not exist.

Such companies are accused of seeking profits by charging foreign workers large sums for the right to come and work in Kuwait, but then failing to arrange employment, food or shelter for them. The workers then have to work in menial jobs and do not have sufficient funds to return home. – (The Media Line)