Lebanon's Shame: Part II: Immigration Jail Visiting Day

It’s hot, humid and the guy in front of me is chain smoking. I’m trying to remember not to put my bags of food down on the concrete floor because there are cockroaches running between the overflowing dumpsters we’re standing next to. The strange part about this is that I’m inside. I’m standing in line with about 90 other people, at 9:30am on a Tuesday morning, waiting to get into Beirut’s immigration jail on visiting day. Dipendra, the Nepali social worker who I’ve been helping out lately (see last blog) was unable to make it this week, so I asked him to give me the names of the Nepali prisoners he usually brings our food to so that I could get in to the jail and deliver the food myself. Dipendra gave me the name of one prisoner, who I’ll call Nisha, and told me to just give her all the food because she would distribute it to the handful of other Nepali women who were being held in there.
From the outside, this jail does not appear to exist. There is a busy round-a-bout traffic circle in this part of the city that has a large concrete overpass spanning it. On the side of one of the overpass’s abutments is a set of two large metal roll up doors. These doors are built right into the side of the abutment. Through these doors is the immigration jail. Well, actually, through these doors and down. The jail itself is under ground, under this busy intersection. There are no signs indicating that the jail is in there.
Just inside the roll up metal doors, which are big enough to fit a truck through, is a narrow ramp with a metal railing. There are overflowing garbage dumpsters lined up at the bottom of the ramp and people lined up on the ramp itself. At the top of the ramp is a door. Behind that door is the jail and in front of that door is a police officer, sitting at a desk, determining who will get in to visit that day. Along the ramp are a couple of guards who every so often yell at the people in line in Arabic. I don’t know what they are saying but it appears that they are trying to keep everyone in a straight line, since every time one of the guards yells, everyone in line straightens out. It could also be that none of the other people who are waiting in line know what the guard is saying either, but figure if they get into a straight line they are less likely to get in trouble. Either way, when I hear the guard yell, I get into a straight line with the rest of the people in line. Once in a while, someone tries to cut to the front of the line and the guards make them turn around and go back down.
The people I’m waiting in line with appear to be from a wide variety of countries throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East. All with bags of groceries and bottles of water in hand, they are waiting to see friends or loved ones who have been sent to jail for some immigration violation. I’m not sure how many people are currently held in this jail but I do know that 600 of them are women who were migrant domestic workers. Most of these women were arrested for running away from abusive employers. More times than not, when a worker runs away, the employer will call up the police and falsely accuse the worker of stealing. Most times, the worker’s side of the story is never heard.
The line moves slowly. One hour into my wait and I’m about one third of the way up the ramp to the mysterious door. There’s nothing to do but lean on the rail and watch the people. I hear at least four different languages being spoken within earshot. Many of the women are dressed in traditional Indian saris and I guess that they are from Sri Lanka, since half of all of Lebanon’s migrant domestic workers are Sri Lankan.
Every so often a young Lebanese woman in super tight designer jeans, high heel shoes and badly dyed hair will walk up the ramp to the guards and the guards will let them go to the front of the line. This happens about 8 different times. All appear to flirt with the guards and go immediately to the front of the line. I try to convince myself that all of these women have a good reason why they deserve to go to the front of the line and that it’s just a coincidence that they all look the way they do.
These shenanigans, of course, make the wait feel that much longer. I watch the roaches run around as the two hour mark passes.
Before coming to the jail this morning, I asked Dipendra what Nisha, the woman I’m going into the prison to see, was arrested for. Dipendra tells me that Nisha, while working and living in her employer’s home, was grabbed and sexually abused by the son of her employer. On several occasions the son tried to rape her. The employer would not believe Nisha when she complained about the son, so Nisha felt it was better to run away rather than hang around waiting to get raped. Nisha was picked up by the police who really didn’t care to hear Nisha’s story, so here she sits in Beirut’s immigration jail, probably for a few months, then if the agency who set up her employment agrees to pay for a flight, Nisha will be deported back to Nepal. If the agent or the employer does not pay for the flight, then Nisha will sit in jail.
Finally, after about two hours and fifteen minutes, I make it to the officer who is sitting at the desk in front of the long coveted door to the prison. In front of the officer is a stack of printed off pages full of names of prisoners in both English and Arabic. I give the officer Nisha’s name and he starts looking through the stack of papers trying to find her. No wonder this takes so long. After a couple of minutes, I notice Nisha’s name on the list and point it out. The officer then pulls out a form that has about twenty spaces on it. The first three spaces are filled in with the names of the three people who were ahead of me in line and have already gone through the door. He writes down Nisha’s name and mine on the fourth line and tells me to wait just inside the door. Once inside the door, which is just a door to a really nasty, urine soaked stairwell, I wait with the other three people. One of the three people waiting tells me that we have to wait until all the lines on the form are filled with names, then the officer will go down and round those prisoners up and we can go to the visiting room and see them. OK, fair enough.
After about 30 minutes of standing in the urine stinking stairwell, the form fills up and down the stairs we go. At the bottom of the stairs is a guard who is looking through everyone’s grocery bags to see what they have brought, so now we wait a little bit longer. Why this wasn’t done during the two hour and fifteen minute wait is beyond me. When I finally get up to the guard he asks me what I have in the bag. I say, “Food and water.” He asks me what type of food and I tell him it’s “Manaeesh” which is basically a small cheese and vegetable pizza, of which I have eight. I also have four bottles of water and a heavy plastic travel bag for Nisha so when she gets deported she’ll have something to put her stuff in. He asks me if there is any cheese on the Manaeesh, to which I bewilderedly answer “yes”. He tells me that there is no cheese allowed today. I say, “What!?” and the guard repeats that there is no cheese allowed. I immediately tell him that I misspoke and that there is no cheese on the food that I have brought. He reaches into the bag, pulls out one of the little pizzas, opens it up and says, “Yes, cheese”. He then takes my bag of eight pizzas that were meant for women who they don’t feed in this prison and throws them into the corner. I then notice that there is a big pile of other people’s rejected grocery bags lying there too. All tossed aside because of the whim of this one guard. I look at him and say, “What the fuck?” He ignores it and tells me that I can now enter the room. I quickly regain my composure, realizing that not only will it be a waste of 2 ½ hours for me but that Nisha and her friends will get nothing out of it. At least I can still give her the water and the travel bag.
When I walk into the visiting room, I’m confused. The room is about 5 feet wide by 25 feet long. It’s more like a small hallway that is dimly lit by two fluorescent lights which have plastic covers on them that are yellowed with age. It’s stifling in this room. The far end of this small hallway is just plain dark. There doesn’t seem to be any windows to talk to anyone through except for a small, one foot by two foot hatch at the end of the wall that is cluttered with people passing what little groceries the guards let them in with through to the friends they came to see. Other than that, it appears to be just a wall that is made up of standard prison bars with a sheet of metal welded to it. It appears to just be a solid metal wall. Then I realize that the other visitors are walking up to the wall and talking. I can now see that the metal wall has a pattern of small, dot like holes drilled in it that you can just barely see through. The holes are about the size of the holes on a peg board you would use in your garage to hold up tools. You can just make out the shape of the person on the other side. Since I’ve never met Nisha before, I was hoping that her Nepali features would give her away so that I would know who she was, but now that I can barely see through the perforated wall, that won’t help me. I can see prisoners filing in and walking along the other side of the perforated metal wall, trying as hard as I am to see who’s on the other side. I decide the best thing to do is to call out her name. After I do, I see a tiny figure of a woman through the holes. She leans in close to the wall and I say her name again, quieter this time. She says something to me in Nepali and nods her head yes. I gesture to her to go to the hatch and then fight my way through the crowd to get to it. When I finally get to the hatch I can look through and see Nisha. She’s about 5 feet tall and at best weighs 90 pounds. I hand the bottles of water through the hatch to her, she takes them and then shakes my hand and says, “Namaskar” which I remember being a respectful greeting from traveling India the year before. I say Namaskar back to her and with a smile she turns and goes back into the prison. I leave the visiting room and head back up the nasty stairway to the entrance ramp where the line of people waiting is just as long as it had been when I arrived nearly three hours ago.
After leaving the prison, I meet with Dipendra and ask him why the guard would throw out my food because of it containing cheese. Dipendra shakes his head and tells me there is no rhyme or reason to it. He says that some days they will tell you that you can’t bring chicken in and on others it’s cheese. He says it’s all up to the guards. It makes me wonder if it wasn’t to deter people from visiting.
Dipendra and I walk along the busy, dusty streets near the prison and he tells me that he has to go to the police station to investigate the murder of a Nepali migrant domestic worker. The worker, who was found dead in the kitchen of her employer, had been shot in the abdomen. The police are saying that they had no suspects. Amazing, isn’t it. Shot dead in the kitchen of your employer, who doesn’t allow you to leave the house, and there are no suspects.
Every week I meet with Dipendra and every week there’s another horrible story. A female worker runs away because she’s overworked, under fed, beaten by her employer and hasn’t been paid in over 4 months. She runs because she knows it will never get any better, but once on the street she has nowhere to go. The police see her on the street and know that if she’s from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal or Ethiopia, she’s a migrant worker and chances are she’s running away. So off to jail she goes. Dipendra tells me of another worker, found dead in her employer’s house and the employer claims that she committed suicide because she was “homesick”. Dipendra speaks to the dead woman’s sister, who is also a migrant domestic worker in Lebanon. The sister tells Dipendra that her sister was being maltreated and beaten by the employer. Now she has to figure out how to take care of her sister’s children back in Nepal. The sister who “committed suicide because she was home sick” was 26 years old.
Dipendra tells me that there have been at least 10 Nepali migrant domestic women workers who have committed suicide in the last five years because of being “homesick”. Dipendra tells me that he doesn’t believe it. “Maybe one or two, but all ten? Why wouldn’t they just go home?” All of the official police reports state that the reason for death was suicide due to being homesick. Now, Dipendra tells me, four Nepali women have committed suicide in 2009 alone. And it’s only May.
A week or so later I met with Dipendra, a second man from the Non Resident Nepali Association and a third man from Dubai. The third man, who I will call Raji, is a wealthy businessman who works throughout the Middle East and has for years been using his financial and business influence to better the plight of the migrant domestic workers throughout the region. He has been offered the position of Consulate General for the United Arab Emirates by his home country but has turned it down because it would mean giving up his lucrative business. He tells me and Dipendra that, “if you have money, you have power. If you have power you can help people. If you don’t have any money, you’re not going to be able to help anyone.” Raji tells me that things are bad all over the Middle East for migrant domestic workers but that Lebanon is one of the worst, along with Qatar, where some 2,000 migrant domestic women workers are in prison. Raji tells me of a mafia ring he discovered in Qatar where agents will charge migrant workers large fees to come to the country promising visas and a good job. When the migrant worker arrives they find out that the visas did not come through, though they do have a job. The worker is usually at the job no more than a couple of days before the agent calls the police and tells them where they can arrest the worker. The worker ends up in jail and the police pay the agent a commission.
“That’s what I don’t understand.” I tell Raji. “Why would the governments of Qatar and Lebanon want to keep all of these migrant workers in jail? I would think it would cost them too much money to house all those prisoners. Wouldn’t it be cheaper for them to just deport these workers or let them go back to work?”
Raji leaned forward in his seat. “The governments of Lebanon and Qatar receive funding from the United Nations for every migrant domestic worker they imprison. The more women they arrest and hold, the more prisoners they have, the more money they make.”
Suddenly it was all clear.