SOME reports in electronic and print media last week exposed the abyss of shame and degradation to which the Arab world has fallen.
I am particularly referring to the footage in Alarabia.net of the humiliating manner and the mortifying circumstances under which several Palestinian youths were sent back by Israeli soldiers to Gaza on Aug.3.
The pictures showed the soldiers delivering 30 Al-Fatah activists at a crossing point in Gaza and being arrested by Hamas police at the Nahil Awaz crossing. The activists were in chains, blindfolded and stripped except for scanty clothes. They had fled the fire of their supposed enemies, Hamas, to the relative safety granted by their real enemies in Israel. Israeli soldiers stripped them of their clothes, an act for which nobody would blame them because they feared that the Palestinians might be carrying explosives under their clothes. However, after a thorough search the soldiers permitted them to put on their clothes.
Why mention Palestine when such things are happening closer home? Last week Saudi newspapers flashed pictures and reports that should shame all of us. They showed the apathy and cruelty with which some government officials in the Kingdom treated the aged, women and the poor.
The shocking images that would haunt our memories forever reflect the low level of our civic sense. I refer to the media reports on the way the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) in Madinah and Jizan treated the beneficiaries of its pension schemes who had gone to its offices to collect their ATM cards.
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HE beneficiaries, most of them old men and women, had to wait in overcrowded and disorderly halls at GOSI offices and were treated with scant respect or consideration.
The reports, in fact, highlighted the way we have been treating the aged, weak and poor citizens. One report drew the attention of the readers to a hall packed with about 1,000 aged women. The hall had the capacity to accommodate only 100 people. The stuffy room left three people short of breath. Another report said a 75-year-old man has been shuttling between the social insurance office in Jizan and his village 100km away at the foot of the Ayban Mountain for two weeks without getting his card. Another old man in the hall was forced to walk five times up to the counter to find out if his name was called or not because he could not hear what the clerk was uttering. It was a shame that no public address system was arranged to help a crowd of more than 1,000 people.
One wonders why these wretched men are left to stand in overcrowded rooms or under the blistering sun until some of them fall unconscious. While in advanced countries, people queue up in an orderly manner at public places, in our country the disorderliness and chaos reign supreme at such places. Nobody behaves in a disciplined or polite manner.
Senior citizens are not treated with respect nor are they given priority in buses and hospitals. It is high time we learned to be civil to others. We should take steps to deliver pensioners their dues at their homes or at least at their nearest post offices or transfer to their bank accounts. If that cannot be done, we should be considerate enough to send their ATM cards to them through messengers. If GOSI does not have sufficient workers to carry out such duties it can hire temporary workers. According to the director of GOSI office in Madinah, the delay in the distribution of ATM cards was caused by a particular bank, which was responsible for delivering the secret code numbers. But, one may ask, why steps are not taken to distribute code numbers at all bank branches? I also wonder if the bank official who made thousands of senior citizens suffer indefinitely would be punished. It is also a mystery why the pension benefits are not distributed through different banks instead of depending on a single bank. All these problems would be tackled only when each one of us begins to respect our own brothers and be considerate to the unfortunate citizens whose poor circumstances force them to suffer indignities at our hands. Be kind to the suffering and toiling on the earth so that the Lord of the Worlds be kind to you.
