An ambulance is weaving through the chaos of the cargo depot at Dhaka’s international airport, navigating a careful route through trolleys stacked high with boxes, men hauling rolls of cloth and trucks reversing into loading bays.
It stops and, shortly afterwards, from between the towering piles of goods, a coffin is wheeled out. Then another. And another. On this one day, the bodies of 10 migrant workers are being returned from Saudi Arabia back home to their families in Bangladesh.
Among those present to meet the coffins is Khadija Begum, whose 35-year-old husband, Abdul Jalil Shaikh, had gone to work in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of 2023. He left with his family’s dreams on his shoulders and now is coming back in a wooden box, most of his 500,000 taka (£3,750) debt – the price he paid a recruitment agent for his job – returning with him.
The only official information his family have about how he died is a death certificate, and a piece of paper from the Bangladeshi embassy in Saudi Arabia taped to the lid of his coffin: “Cause of death: natural. Postmortem: not desired. Compensation: no.”
Most of the other nine coffins have an identical piece of paper taped to their lids.
Begum doesn’t understand what could have happened. She has managed to talk to some of his co-workers who said he died of a stroke, but without a postmortem, the family will never know what really caused him to die so suddenly. Or get any compensation from Saudi Arabia.
Begum has been left as the sole provider for their two children, with her deceased husband’s debt now her responsibility. “I’ve no idea what the future holds. I’m in big trouble and I don’t know what to do,” she says.
Jalil is among half a million Bangladeshis, many of them young, healthy men, who left their families to find work in Saudi Arabia in 2023. According to Shariful Hasan, the associate director of the migration programme at Brac, a Bangladeshi development agency, the pipeline of workers from Bangladesh to the Gulf kingdom will increase dramatically if Saudi Arabia is, as expected, awarded the right to host the 2034 World Cup by Fifa later this year.
Yet for thousands, the trip is a one-way ticket. Between 2008 and 2022, at least 13,685 Bangladeshis died in Saudi Arabia, according to Bangladeshi government records. In 2022 alone, 1,502 died, a rate of more than four a day.
It is unclear whether the death rate is within the expected range given the large numbers of Bangladeshis who migrate to Saudi Arabia.
Yet a Guardian investigation has found that most of the deaths appear to be unexplained, attributed on death certificates issued by the Saudi authorities to “natural causes”, or ascribed terms such as “cardiac arrest” or “respiratory arrest”, suggesting that no attempt has been made to investigate the underlying causes.
According to official records, between January and October 2022, 76% of deaths of Bangladeshis in Saudi Arabia were recorded as “natural” by the Bangladeshi authorities, based on documents provided by the Saudi authorities.
The long list of the dead includes men in their late-50s and 60s, but in many cases the deceased were, like Jalil, young men: the average age of those whose deaths were classified as natural in 2022 was 44. Life expectancy for men in Bangladesh is 71.
“[Terms such as] ‘cardiac arrest’ provide no information on the underlying cause of death and should not appear on a death certificate,” says a report on migrant worker deaths in the Gulf by the human rights group FairSquare, which estimated that more than 50% of migrant worker deaths in the Gulf are unexplained.
Instead, human rights groups say that other factors such as harsh working and living conditions, exploitation, stress and heatstroke could be contributing to the mortality rate.
The overall picture is of one of the wealthiest states in the world treating its migrant labourers in the “worst possible way”, says Hasan. He points out that Bangladeshi migrant workers can depart for Saudi Arabia only if they have passed a medical at a centre approved by the Saudi authorities and says that the number of Bangladeshi deaths on Saudi soil being attributed to natural causes is already alarming. He predicts the death toll will rise if Saudi Arabia is awarded the World Cup.
“They are fit when they leave, so why should they be dying?” Hasan says. “If it were European or US citizens, questions would be asked. Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia must investigate the causes of these deaths.”
The findings of the investigation and the sight of coffins being wheeled out of airports echo the Guardian’s reporting of the conditions faced by migrant workers in Qatar before the 2022 World Cup. This should raise serious concerns over whether a future tournament will once again be marred by widespread labour abuses and unexplained deaths, say human rights groups.
They say that Fifa, which faced severe pressure to explain the deaths and mistreatment of migrant workers involved in preparations for the World Cup in Qatar, must urgently demand that Saudi Arabia comply with internationally recognised human rights standards before anointing the Gulf kingdom as the host of the 2034 tournament.
“If Fifa has learned anything from Qatar it should be that it must pay close attention to human rights risks in potential host countries before awarding them the World Cup,” says Ella Knight, Amnesty International’s migrant labour rights researcher.
Source: The Guardian
BDST: 1259 HRS, MAR 21, 2024
MN/SMS
