Anil Kumar, a 40-year-old Indian, was the 32nd migrant worker who committed suicide this year in Bahrain.His death was reported on 25 August by the Ministry of Interior and was confirmed by the Indian Embassy.
Most of the expatriates hanged themselves in the dingy dormitories of the labour camps, outside the capital Manama.
Many were left without pay for months, they couldn’t send money home nor pay off the debt of the work visa. And they couldn’t leave the country because of a travel ban imposed by the local sponsorship system, kafala.
“Imagine that you are responsible for the living of two families, one here and the other in your home country and you are not paid for more than 3 or 6 months”, says Marietta Dias, chairwoman of the Migrant Workers Protection Society (MWPS).
Workers are often promised a wage when they are hired in their home country, which turns out to be different from what they actually get when they arrive in Bahrain.
Dias argues that sending and receiving countries should provide more protections, they should increase monthly wages, now around 200 USD, and offer some psychological support.
Instead, the current system allows companies to deduct massive sums from the salaries with the pretext of sponsoring work visas, and when the workers try to leave and look for another job, employers threaten to take them to court claiming contract violations.
“These expats also fear libel suit from their employers, if they were to issue a complaint to the security authorities or to the Ministry of Labour”, adds Narimal Chawdhary, first secretary for consular and labour affairs at the Embassy.
According to Chawdhary, there seems to be “a kind of complicity between the employers and the authorities”.
26 of the suicide workers were Indian, so the Embassy decided to set up two help hotlines and trained 18 volunteer from the Indian community to provide assistance and psychological support. However, there are more than 350,000 Indian expatriates in Bahrain, and this makes it even more difficult to follow each case individually.
Like in other Gulf countries, the majority of migrants come from South-East Asia and work in harsh conditions, even though they represent the vast majority of the labour force, up to the 77% in Bahrain.
The Bahrain Labour Market Regulatory Authority (LMRA) estimated that there were 477,870 expatriate workers in Bahrain at the end of 2011, over 80% employed in the private sector, mainly in the building industry.
Last year, in December, over 1,000 Asian construction workers demonstrated against a company that had not paid them for four months. They tried to march from their camps to the office of the Ministry of Labour, but the police stopped and dispersed them.
