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Foreign domestic workers demonstrate in Beirut on May 1, 2016. ANWAR AMRO v AFP
Eventually, Hannah managed to leave Lebanon. “It’s a miracle, I didn’t believe in it anymore,” says the 28-year-old Ghanaian, who testified on the phone under a false first name for security reasons. On Thursday, September 15, she flew to Accra while living in hiding with a compatriot in a suburb of Beirut for four months. his wrong? He had fled the family, who employed him as a servant and subjected him to harassment and humiliation.
The ordeal began as soon as he arrived in Lebanon. On December 15, 2019, an agent picked her up at Beirut Airport and then drove her to Tyr in the south of the country. There she discovers a different reality than that of the “super job” sold to her by a friend who is herself employed in Lebanon. She was the one who put her in touch with a Ghanaian recruiter.
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“She lied to me. It was exhausting. I worked every day from sunrise to sunset in a big house with five people. I did all the housework, the garden,” she recalls. After a few months, his body gives Hannah asks to see a doctor, but her employer, she says, refuses. “So I begged him to let me go back to Ghana. I didn’t want to die here.”
Like Hannah, countless women are exploited as craftswomen in Lebanon, but also in the countries of the Persian Gulf. It is in this region of the world that most cases of “forced labour” – particularly domestic work – are concentrated in relation to the population, according to the Global Slavery Index published on Monday. The majority of domestic workers hail from Asian countries, but sub-Saharan Africa offers a growing – and vulnerable – workforce.
“A system of total control”
Abuses result in Lebanon, as in most countries in the Arabian Peninsula, from the “kafala” (“guarantor”) sponsorship system to which low-skilled foreign workers are exposed. According to this practice, derived from common law and institutionalized during British colonization, it is the employer who signs the work permit, authorizes leaving the territory and extends the contract, with or without the consent of the worker, who is obliged to reside at home.
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