💭 Last August, Human Rights Watch released a report stating that Saudi border guards had killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross the border illegally between March 2022 and June 2023. Faced with these documented accusations, Ethiopia announced a joint investigation with Saudi authorities and asserted that they maintained excellent relations with Saudi Arabia. Since then, no results have been made public. 38 survivors had testified. FRANCE 24’s Clothilde Hazard met two of them a few months after their return home.
👶 HAIR OF THE SPROG ‘World’s hairiest baby’ born with one-in-a-BILLION ‘werewolf syndrome’ – and his mum fears it’s down to what she ate
His ultra-hairy body sees the boy complaining about itchy rashes when it’s hot
MEET the extraordinary boy who looks a real-life werewolf with hair enveloping his face and body – all due to a one-in-a-billion medical anomaly.
Dubbed potentially as the world’s hairiest baby, his mother’s peculiar theory blames her “cursed” pregnancy craving for a wild animal.
Jaren Gamongan from Apayao, the Philippines, was born with a full head of hair, black sideburns, and patches that filled his face, neck, back, and arms.
His superstitious mum, Alma, believed the boy’s appearance was due to a curse wrought upon her when she ate a wild cat while pregnant with the child.
Despite Alma’s beliefs there’s no medical evidence the cat consumption sparked the condition.
She said that during her pregnancy, she had uncontrollable cravings for wild cats, an exotic dish that is found in the remote mountain region where she lives.
Alma sought out a black feline from village friends and had it sauteed with herbs – a decision she later regretted when Jaren was born.
Her neighbours kept feeding her ideas about a curse, but when she finally took Jaren to qualified doctors this month, they found out he had a medical condition called hypertrichosis.
The incredibly rare syndrome only affects an estimated “one in every one billion people” as only 50 to 100 cases were reported worldwide since the Middle Ages.
Footage shows the two-year-old playing around a building and their home, but Alma worries his unique looks will be a challenge in school.
But then recently the doctors told me it was not related.”
Out of Alma’s three kids, middle child Jaren was the only one looking different.
She said Jaren was a happy and playful boy but he complains about having itchy rashes when the weather becomes hot.
“I will give him a bath when it’s hot. We even tried to cut the hair, but it would just grow back even longer and thicker, so we stopped doing it,” she explained.
After seeing baby Jaren this month, dermatologist Dr Ravelinda Soriano Perez said: “We believe this was an inherited condition, but it is very rare. One in only one billion people could have it.”
The doctor added that while hypertrichosis did not have a cure, treatments such as laser hair removal could help the condition.
She said: “We will try to do ten sessions in four to six weeks and then observe.”
Mum Alma now pleads with good Samaritans for help since each session would cost the family 2,500 PHP (£34.97).
She said: “I am very thankful to those who already helped us. I hope my son could have a better chance in life with your help.”
“Reports of torture, deaths in custody, and a lack of medical attention have raised concerns among human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.”
Saudi Arabia currently detains over 450,000 Ethiopian migrants, highlighting the dire situation undocumented migrants face in the country.
Saudi Arabia hosts about 750,000 Ethiopian migrants, with about 60% (450,000) likely to have travelled to the country through irregular means.
The official process to repatriate approximately 70,000 nationals is expected to commence in the coming weeks, following Saudi Arabia’s commitment to supporting the return of thousands of Ethiopians detained there this month.
Among the detainees, hundreds are held at the Al-Shumaisi Detention Centre, a facility established to detain individuals who violate residency and labour regulations. Despite its capacity to accommodate 32,000 inmates, the centre currently holds a significant number of Ethiopian migrants.
Saudi Arabia hosts around 750,000 Ethiopian migrants, with the majority estimated to have entered irregularly. Despite efforts to deport undocumented migrants, thousands remain detained after serving sentences, pleading for assistance, and enduring dire conditions within the detention centres.
Reports of torture, deaths in custody, and a lack of medical attention have raised concerns among human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).
In December 2020, the human rights body released a report revealing that deplorable conditions are holding hundreds of migrants in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The detainees, primarily from Ethiopia but also from other African and Asian countries, are being held pending deportation due to their lack of valid residency permits.
According to HRW’s investigation, guards using rubber-coated metal rods are torturing and beating the migrants in severely overcrowded rooms.
The organisation documented at least three allegations of deaths in custody between October and November. HRW conducted interviews with seven Ethiopians under custody and two Indians facing deportation, all of whom recounted their confinement in cramped rooms alongside up to 350 others.
The report highlights the dire conditions faced by migrants in Saudi Arabia and calls for improved treatment and protections for detainees.
Saudi authorities have not taken any concrete action, despite repeated calls for investigations.
Former slaves and their descendants in North Africa and the Middle East might be formally free, but the racial legacies of slavery continue to affect intimate, social and political forms of life.
This forum deepens ongoing work recognizing, naming, and undoing white supremacy, colorism, and anti-Black racism in the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA).
The Black Lives Matter protests have triggered discussions on racism toward Blacks in the Arab and Muslim world. Activists are looking to change attitudes around skin color in their societies.
Cultural Survival advocates for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and supports Indigenous communities’ self-determination, cultures and political resilience since 1972.
Discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and religion also remains common both in law and in practice, heightening risks of statelessness among minorities from the Middle East & north Africa.
Ninety years since the establishment of the Republic, in an ever more complex society, the limitations and contradictions of Turkish national identity are coming to the fore more and more.
✈️ The U.S. Air Force Central Command completed its first airdrop of 66 food pallets into Gaza which contains around 38,000 meals
👉 Unlike in Tigray, and with the tragic fate of Ethiopian Christians:
☆We See US military airdrops emergency humanitarian aid into Gaza
☆We saw WFP Humanitarian airdrops in Syria
☆We saw millions of Palestinian & Syrian refugees welcomed in Europe
☪ The Union of Ishmael and Esau that is shaking the world continues!
❖ People of the flesh are united in persecuting those of the spirit!
Neither the United States nor the United Nations attempted/wanted to airdrop any aid into Tigray, Ethiopia which is kept under genocidal siege and shelling since late 2020.
👉 From November 2020 till today:
❖ 1.5 Million Orthodox Christians were Brutally Massacred
❖ 200.000 Orthodox Christian children, Women, even nuns were raped and abused
❖ Over a Million female Ethiopian slaves were sold to Arab countries
❖ up to 20 Million Ethiopians are Starved
by the fascist Muslim-Protestant Oromo army of PM Abiy Ahmed Ali and his Arab, Israeli, Turkish, Iranian, European, American, Russian, Ukrainian, African allies.
👉 As Congressman Brad Sherman, in the video, rightfully put it, much of the world barely noticed the war that tore Ethiopia apart between 2020 and 2022, causing innumerable atrocities and millions of deaths of ancient Orthodox Christians (The guardians of The Ark of The covenant). It featured rampages of murder and rape against civilians even deadlier than those Hamas perpetrated on October 7. It saw the bombing of cities, churches, monasteries, schools, hospitals, water infrastructure, flour mills, and the deliberate starving of civilians.
The death toll of Ethiopia’s war far exceeded that of the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict going back to 1948, combined with all of the Arab-Israeli wars since the foundation of the Jewish state. But the war in Ethiopia did not send foreign politicians into Twitter frenzies, divide campuses, or provoke outrage around the world. The communities decimated by that war struggled to get outsiders to notice what was happening.
👉 They only care about Palestine. In this world unfortunately only liers and terrorists get empathy.
❖[Galatians 4:28-29]❖
Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. 29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now.
👉 According to Study, White People are incapable of Feeling Empathy for Black people
White People are incapable of Feeling Empathy for Black people – According to a scientific study, white people have no empathy for brown people. Find out in details what the study said that the mainstream media will never tell you. If you benefit from my videos donations are greatly appreciated.
💭 At London’s Speakers Corner, Muslims usually reach with violence when Mohammad’s marriage to Ayesha at age 9 is brought up.
Now, thanks to the degenerate Edomite West, the Ishamelites don’t hide it anymore. This is pure evil.
Muslims use to cover up their tarnished actions” they hurl their lies and irrational reasons to others by confusing and convincing, especially non-Muslims. Muslims thought that they will hide the real facts forever and their made up history will be played out on the world stage” they think others are stupid and would not be able to get the facts. Muslim historians had no clue to the fact that the history they left behind itself is not good enough to fool others. Muslim historians and hadith compilers themselves made problems for their own selves.
Treatise on Islam by many Muslim scholars raises too many problematic questions in the mind of rational readers to which Muslims have few answers. The list of such problematic questions keeps growing larger as Islamic historical and theological texts are being investigated by meticulous researchers.
At the end of the video, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel has the appropriate answer.
❖❖❖[Mark 9:42]❖❖❖
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.”
❖❖❖[2 Thessalonians 1:9]❖❖❖ “These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power,”
☪ Islamic Fascism 6.66: Muslims Call For The Creation of a Caliphate in Germany
😈 Citizens of Sodom (Muslims, Gays, Pedophiles, Trans… are intensifying their attacks against women (the backbone of the family and children (our future)
😈 The devil loves to imitate, steal and deceive. He is using many things from our Lord Jesus Christ to mislead many people. One of these is the number 33, which the Luciferian Freemasons like to use.
😈 Of the spirit of the ANTICHRIST are:
🛑 Gnosticism
🛑 Sodomism (Transgenderism)
🛑 Satanism
🛑 Paganism
🛑 Islamism
🛑 Freemasonry
🛑 Protestantism
🛑 Budhism
🛑 Hinduism
🛑 Fascism
🛑 Nazism
🛑 Mormonism
🛑 Kommunism
🛑 Kapitalism
🛑 Liberalism
🛑 Feminism
🛑 Transhumanism
🛑 Extropianism
🛑 Singularitarianism
🛑 Cosmism
🛑 Rationalism
🛑 Effective Altruism
🛑 Longtermism
❖ [Psalms 33:12 ] ❖ Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord…
“Women and children were mainly used as servants and concubines. Most male slaves were castrated“”Women and children were mainly used as servants and concubines. Most male slaves were castrated“
😢😢😢 Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! 😠😠😠
Knowing this horrible, sad and disturbing history, how can an African or “black” person decide to become a slave of Islam? Aren’t we seeing that this should never even be thought of?!
Every African/Ethiopian must learn this horrible, sad and disturbing history. All the mercenary politicians like the evil Oromo PM Abiy Ahmed and Education Minister Berhanu Nega who do not want to include this in the curriculum and educate the next generation should be wiped out by fire.
Our forefathers knew that Arab Muslims had committed many cruelties and injustices against our people, that’s wy they were singing with and pride. “Hunt down the Arab and break his back!”. But the Arab-Muslim mercenaries, the Gala-Oromos and their traitor leader Abiy Ahmed Ali all sing; “Bring in the Arab Muslim!” and are handing over our country to the servants of Waqeyo-Allah-Baphomet-Lucifer. Now the responsibility and duty of every Ethiopian, Christian and African is to wipe out these traitors one by one.
💭 While official figures on the exact number of slaves captured from Africa in the Trans Sahara trade are contested, most scholars put the estimate at about nine million.
The Eastern slave trade in Africa was predominantly concentrated in the East and West African regions. In East Africa the coastal region was the preferred route and Tanzania’s archipelago of Zanzibar became a hub for this trade.
“The Arabs raided sub-Saharan Africa for thirteen centuries without interruption. Most of the millions of men they deported have disappeared as a result of inhumane treatment. This painful page in the history of black people has apparently not been completely turned,” read a loosely translated excerpt from The Veiled Genocide a book by Tidiane N’Diaye, a Franco-Senegalese author and anthropologist.
Enterprising Arab merchants and middlemen would gather in Zanzibar for raw materials including cloves and ivory. They would then buy black slaves who they would use to carry the raw materials and also work in their plantations abroad. Slaves from as far as Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia would be availed at the Zanzibar market and shipped through the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf or Arabic Peninsula where they worked in Oman, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. African Muslims were however never captured as slaves due to the Islamic legal views.
On the other hand the Trans Saharan Caravan concentrated on the West African region straddling the Niger Valley to the Gulf of Guinea along the Trans-Saharan roads to slave markets in Maghreb and the Nile Basin. The voyage that could take up to three months involved inhumane conditions that saw slaves die along the way due to diseases, hunger and thirst. An estimated 50 percent of all slaves in this trade would die in transit.
While European merchants were interested in strongly built young men as labourers in their farms, the Arab merchants were more focused on concubinage, capturing women and girls who were turned into sex slaves while living in harems. So high was the demand that the merchants would double the price of female slaves with, the ratio of captured women to men being three to one.
“THE Practice Of Castration On Black Male Slaves In The Most Inhumane Manner Altered An Entire Generation As These Men Could Not Reproduce.”
Male slaves would work as field workers or guards at the harems. To ensure that they never reproduced in case they got intimate with their fellow female slaves, the men and boys were castrated and made eunuchs in a brutal operation by which the majority would lose their lives in the process.
“The practice of castration on black male slaves in the most inhumane manner altered an entire generation as these men could not reproduce. The Arab masters sired children with the black female slaves. This devastation by the men saw those who survived committing suicide. This development explains the modern black Arabs who are still trapped by history,” said Liberty Mukomo, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies.
And even as Europe, one of the key players in the African slave trade, abolished the practice hundreds of years ago and the United States officially ended it in 1865, Arab countries continued the trade with majority ending it late in the 20th century. In Malawi, slavery was officially criminalized in 2007 with mentions of some Arab countries currently being involved albeit clandestinely.
“Even as the rest of the world realized the harm slavery did to an entire continent and made a declaration to abolish it, the Arabs protested it and it took a lot of international trade and revolt by the slaves for them to end it. But it is the degree and intensity with which it altered the entire social, reproductive and economic life of black people that made it more brutal and painful than the trans-Atlantic one,” said Liberty.
😈 The Number of People Enslaved
The number of people enslaved by Muslims has been a hotly debated topic, especially when the millions of Africans forced from their homelands are considered.
Some historians estimate that between A.D. 650 and 1900, 10 million to 20 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders. Others believe over 20 million enslaved Africans alone had been delivered through the trans-Saharan route alone to the Islamic world. Dr. John Alembellah Azumah estimates in his 2001 book “The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa” that over 80 million more Black people died over that route.
😈 Arab Enslavers Practiced Genetic Warfare
The Arab slave trade typically dealt in the sale of castrated male slaves. Black boys between the age of 8 and 12 had their scrotums and penises completely amputated to prevent them from reproducing. About six of every 10 boys bled to death during the procedure, according to some sources, but the high price brought by eunuchs on the market made the practice profitable.
Some men were castrated to be eunuchs in domestic service, and the practice of neutering male slaves was not limited to only Black males. “The calipha in Baghdad at the beginning of the 10th Century had 7,000 black eunuchs and 4,000 white eunuchs in his palace,” writes author Ronald Segal in his 2002 book “Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora.”
😈 Arab Slave Trade Inspired Arab Racism Toward Blacks
Its important to note that Arab is not a racial classification; an Arab is almost like an American in that people classified as Arab today could be Caucasian (white people), Asiatic or even Arabized Africans. In the beginning there was some level of mutual respect between the Blacks and the more lighter-skinned Arabs. However, as Islam and the demand for enslaved Blacks grew, so did racism toward Africans.
As casual association with Black skin and slave began to be established, racist attitudes towards Blacks began to manifest in Arabic language and literature. The word for slave —abid — became a colloquialism for African. Other words, such as haratin, express social inferiority of Africans.
😈 Arab Enslavers Targeted Women For Rape
The eastern Arab slave trade dealt primarily with African women, maintaining a ratio of two women for each man. These women and young girls were used by Arabs and other Asians as concubines and menials.
A Muslim slaveholder was entitled by law to the sexual enjoyment of his slave women. Filling the harems of wealthy Arabs, African women bore them a host of children.
This abuse of African women would continue for nearly 1,200 years.
😈 Arab Slave Trade Ushered in The European Slave Trade
The Arab slave trade in the 19th century was economically tied to the European trade of Africans. New opportunities of exploitation were provided by the transatlantic slave trade and this sent Arab slavers into overdrive.
The Portuguese (on the Swahili coast) profited directly and were responsible for a boom in the Arab trade. Meanwhile on the West African coast, the Portuguese found Muslim merchants entrenched along the African coast as far as the Bight of Benin. These European enslavers found they could make considerable amounts of gold transporting enslaved Africans from one trading post to another, along the Atlantic coast.
😈 The Arab Slave Trade Sparked One of The Largest Slave Rebellions in History
The Zanj Rebellion took place near the city of Basra, located in present-day southern Iraq, over a period of fifteen years (A.D. 869–883). The insurrection is believed to have involved enslaved Africans (Zanj) who had originally been captured from the African Great Lakes region and areas further south in East Africa.
Basran landowners had brought several thousand East African Zanj people into southern Iraq to drain the salt marshes in the east. The landowners forced the Zanj, who generally spoke no Arabic, into heavy slave labor and provided them with only minimal subsistence. The harsh treatment sparked an uprising that grew to involve over 500,000 enslaved and free men who were imported from across the Muslim empire.
😈 The Time Period
The Arab slave trade was the longest yet least discussed of the two major slave trades. It began in seventh century as Arabs and other Asians poured into northern and eastern Africa under the banner of Islam. The Arab trade of Blacks in Southeast Africa predates the European transatlantic slave trade by 700 years. Some scholars say the Arab slave trade continued in one form or another up until the 1960s, however, slavery in Mauritania was criminalized as recently as August 2007.
😈 Saudi border guards accused of mass killings of Ethiopian migrants
A Human Rights Watch report analyses the mass killings perpetrated by Saudi border guards of migrants and asylum seekers fleeing the armed conflict in the northern part of the African country.
“They fired on us like rain.” One of the many testimonies of the horrors committed on the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border upon Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers has become the title of a new report issued by Human Rights Watch investigating the tragic situation in the Middle East between March 2022 and June 2023.
Saudi border guards are reported to “have used explosive weapons to kill many migrants and shot other migrants at close range, including many women and children, in a widespread and systematic pattern of attacks.”
And Europeans, Americans and Australians are hugely investing in these evil nations, while indirectly supporting all forms of SLAVERY; human trafficking, bonded labor, domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, or forced marriage, forced and harmful child labor etc.
In the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), Qatar and Kuwait European and American citizens are treated like kings and queens, even the salaries are racial. A European, American or Australian whites are paid better and more than an African or Asian with similar degrees, age, gender, seniority in the same firm and job. Even South African whites are in a lot better situation than blacks from the very same country.
Most of the companies in the UAE don’t hire professional and experienced Africans in their office jobs. They instead go for Europeans and Asians without any experience and who never even went to school. They instead send Africans to casual jobs.
That probably has to do with discrimination and racial/ethnic contempt. Arabs rank whites highest in their Islamic ethno-racial hierarchies, then they rank themselves second, Asians third and Africans are at the bottom. So they send African for casual labor, their education notwithstanding.
👉 For example:
A Filipino musician in a band who works in a bar in a 3-star hotel is paid between US$600 and US$800 a month. He works until 2:30 a.m., seven days a week, and has accommodation in a sleazy building.
A musician from the U.K. or Europe in a band works in a 5-star hotel until 11 p.m., six days a week, and is paid US$4,500 a month, with a luxurious room in the same hotel.
That’s why Europeans and Americans are assisting these Arab nations and sharing and protecting ‘a strategic partnership’ with them for over 80 years.
Arab Muslim Racism and inequality are rooted in the Islamic faith, which is based on the hadiths of Muhammad—the founder of Islam—and, more significantly, on the Qur’ān.
But I blame African leaders more. They should take note of that Arab Islamic hatred and try to make their country more comfortable for their people. Unfortunately, most do not. In fact, people like your barbaric Gala-Oromo, Abiy Ahmed Ali, along with Arab Muslims, massacre their ‘own’ people with drones, exterminate them, and send them to the Arab desert for slavery. But they only focus on stealing from their people and fattening their wallets. Barbarians!
Ethiopia in particular has a great opportunity not to bow to these barbaric Arab Muslims. The Nile River alone is a powerful tool to bring the Arabs to their knees.
But especially for the past five hundred / one hundred and thirty years since the Mohammedan Arabs, Turks and European Protestants brought the destructive Gala-Oromos to East Africa, Ethiopia is on the path of decline and humiliation.
Even today, if we don’t overthrow, once and for all, the fascist-Gala regime which is bringing great misery and humiliation to Ethiopia and Ethiopians before our eyes, it is inevitable that the persecution, slavery, misery and suffering will continue.
Now our main objective/ target is to wipe out evil Ahmed Ali by fire. We need to develop the practice and culture of eliminating the traitors of the country and people, just like the Israelis.
🔥 (Remember this; Lebanon will soon become a war zone.) 🔥
💭 The deportation of a beloved Ethiopian community leader refocuses attention on the difficult conditions endured by many African and Asian migrants working in the country.
[Beirut] Chanting “Sami! Sami!,” dozens of people gathered at the entrance to the departures area of Beirut International Airport earlier this month, to bid farewell to Ethiopian activist Samuel “Sami” Tesfaye. After 13 years in Lebanon, the community leader was deported on February 18, with local authorities issuing a 1-5 year ban on returning to the country.
“While Sami committed no crime, the Lebanese state is actively criminalizing and punishing him,” said Lebanon’s Anti-Racism Movement in a statement the night before his deportation.
Sami was one of thousands of migrant workers in Lebanon affected by the discriminatory “kafala” system.
“The kafala system, which means sponsorship, is a set of practices, administrative regulations and policies that bind the residence and employment of these migrants to the will of their employer.”
“The kafala system, which means sponsorship, is a set of practices, administrative regulations and policies that bind the residence and employment of these migrants to the will of their employer,” explains Samaya Mattouk, who works at the Lebanese Kafa NGO, which fights to end violence against women.
How does the kafala system impact migrant domestic workers in Lebanon?
Lebanon is home to over 250,000 migrant domestic workers (MDW), who come from African and Asian countries and work in private households.
The vast majority of these workers are women. Since the system that regulates their residency and work permit in the country is not based on any centralized law, most of these migrant domestic workers depend on traditions and informal decisions that function against their well-being.
“Once they arrive at their new houses, their bosses confiscate their passports, stop paying their salaries, prohibit them from contacting their families and lock them up when they leave the house,” Mattouk tells The Media Line.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), around 50% of female employees in Lebanon used to work more than 85 hours a week; most of them do not have free hours and are imprisoned far from home. And while this situation has changed in recent years, it is not for the better.
For the past three and a half years, the country has been going through one of the worst economic crises in the world since 1850, according to the World Bank. Almost three-quarters of the population are living below the poverty line, the United Nations says.
The Lebanese lira has lost 95% of its value, and the migrant domestic workers have seen their salaries disappear along with it. Before the crisis, they used to earn just between $150 or $250 per month, most of which they would send back to their families back home.
“Many families are choosing to abandon these women in front of their embassies, and when the pandemic hit, most migrants gave up their hopes of recovering their unpaid wages and asked to return to their countries,” an anti-racism activist who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Media Line.
Created by a group of Lebanon anti-racism activists, this movement fights against what she calls “modern day slavery.”
Fighting “modern day slavery” in Lebanon
Sarktelu Teshome from Ethiopia experienced the traumatizing kafala system when she was 16 years old, following the dream of working in a household and sending money to her family.
During her first eight months of living with the Lebanese family she worked for, Sarktelu was not allowed to leave the house or even eat. She would feed herself with the leftovers from the young child she cared for.
When she turned 17, her “monsieur,” the man in charge of her residency permits, asked her to have sexual relations, but she refused.
“It was only eight months but it was enough for a lifetime,” Teshome tells The Media Line. “I don’t understand how some women can stay two or three years locked up,” she says.
After nine years in the country, Teshome has managed to leave behind the distress of working in a domestic household. Now she has a good position with Médecins Sans Frontières, from which she helps women who are suffering through similar experiences to her own. She wishes to return to Ethiopia, but she has a son with a Lebanese man and he won’t give his permission to her to take their child out of the country.
“I am still trapped,” she laments.
Being ignored and even criminalized by the Lebanese authorities, these women had no other choice but to organize themselves. Many organizations, representing every different community present in the country, have been the first responders for these social groups.
Initiatives such as Egna Legna Besidet, a collective of Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon, or the Alliance of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon have been providing food, medication, health assistance and many other services to thousands of MDW. They have funded most of these women’s return trips back to their respective home countries.
“What we have to do is fight as a community, as one people,” Tsigereda Brihanu, former domestic worker and current coordinator of Egna Legna Besidet, tells The Media Line.
“There is no hope from the Lebanese side, the few good people that have helped us aren’t enough,” she says.
As the ones suffering the most, they know how to find solutions, how to help their own people.
“We are the victims and we come from our own life experiences,” Brihanu says.
“We created this organization to fight for ourselves, we are not waiting for someone to come and help us,” she says. “The struggle that we came from, the life that we are living… Only we know what it is like.”
The economic crisis has forced these women to put a stop to their long-term fight.
“Our main demand is to abolish the kafala system, but it is a long process,” says Brihanu.
Most of the organizations established by the migrant workers want to end this system, which, before the economic crisis, saw two MDWs killed every week, either by suicide or under strange circumstances. Most of these deaths were never investigated.
But the current dire situation in the country means their fight comes at the end of Lebanese society’s list of priorities. Yet their presence in the country, despite the racism and ostracism they experience, is vital for Lebanese society, which is very much based on bragging and keeping up appearances.
“I would die to see how Lebanon would stand up if all the migrant domestic workers left,” Teshome tells The Media Line.
“There is a culture of supremacy among the Lebanese when it comes to refugees or migrant domestic workers,” says the anonymous anti-racism activist. “It’s very difficult to engage people in this conversation when they are convinced of their superiority.”
MDWs are leading their own fight in a country that simultaneously marginalizes them and depends upon them.
“We are living in the 21st century; are Lebanese really okay with slavery?” asks Brihanu. “Do they really think that domestic workers are not human beings?”
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 