JEDDAH, 26 April 2006 — Due to a lack of support from the King Abdul Aziz University (KAAU) authorities, the university’s male medical interns, have protested in the court of grievances for the second time about decrease in their monthly allowances. The case has now been postponed until May 21 in line with a request from the lawyer for KAAU.
The trouble goes back to a decision by Ministry of Higher Education which decided to reduce the interns’ allowances by 44 percent and to implement the reduction in September 2006. For unexplained reasons, however, the decision was implemented much earlier at KAAU than at other institutions around the country.
This caused understandable dissatisfaction and discontent among the KAAU interns. As one asked, “How do you think it feels when I work the same long hours, morning and night, as interns from Riyadh or Dammam who are here in Jeddah and they receive SR 10,700 while I get only SR 6,500?”
The medical interns feel that they have been forced into filing a lawsuit because of the lackadaisical attitude of the KAAU authorities. They contacted the dean but he refused to help them. They have also sent a letter to Prince Abdul Majeed, governor of Makkah. The governor contacted the medical dean, Osamah Taib. His answer was that the students were troublemakers and that he would deal with the problem. And so the case was closed at the Makkah Governorate.
The matter came to a head when the time came for the interns to graduate in a ceremony after which they would at last be doctors.
“We never thought of rebelling,” said one of the interns who added that despite their dissatisfaction, they had continued to do their jobs as expected of them. When the time came for graduation, he explained, they felt that they would lose all their self-respect if they had gone through with the ceremony.
Another asked: “How could we stand there and have the dean act as if he were proud of us in front of the media and a number of high officials when he had done nothing to help us and had in effect abandoned us for the entire year?”
A source told Arab News that only about 50 students out of 185 attended the graduation. Many who were there were there only to watch. Only three of the medical interns participated in the ceremony and took the oath.
When the authorities realized the number of students was very small, changes were made and students from other specialties were put on the list. Dean Osamah Taib commented: “The news about the number of students who did not attend is false; most of them were at the ceremony.”
One of the interns responded to the dean’s comment: “Will people believe one man or the whole university? The small number at the graduation was the talk of KAAU for days.”
One of the medical technology interns whose allowance was cut from SR6,000 to SR2,500 worked part time in Subway. He said he worked a few hours every day and had weekends off and received SR2,400 at the end of the month, a difference of only SR100 from what he received as an intern.
The money deducted from the 400 interns of both sexes amounted to more than SR10 million. Some of the students thought that the money might be used for something they could benefit from. They noted, however, that they had seen nothing beyond a SR90 million stadium and a SR20 million dormitory.
Women interns who are equally unhappy with the situation have handed in their complaints to Princess Seitah bint Abdullah, daughter of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
