JEDDAH: For Sri Lankan Consul General Abdul Latiff Mohamed Lafeer, the Jeddah assignment has been a challenging one.
“Challenging, because of the large work force we have and their mounting labor problems, in addition to streamlining the procedure for our Haj and Umrah pilgrims,” Lafeer told Arab News in an interview on the eve of his return to Colombo on Friday at the end of his term spanning two-and-a-half years.
The country has 150,000 workers employed in the western region of the Kingdom. Some 200,000 others reside elsewhere in the Kingdom, especially Riyadh and the Eastern Province. About 70 percent of the workers are housemaids most of whom are happy with their working conditions. However, there are a few hundred of them who are encountering problems with their sponsors and that explains growing number of runaway cases.
“In Jeddah, some such runaway housemaids and visa overstayers pose a constant challenge to the consulate,” Lafeer said.
One of the measures they adopt is to squat under the Sharafiyah Bridge for days together expecting the police to round them up for deportation.
“We have been urging them to come to the consulate and get their grievances redressed procedurally but, barring a few, many choose to remain under the bridge. There were 250 Sri Lankans among the squatters under the bridge a month ago. They say they don’t want to move from under the bridge as they don’t wish to miss the chance of getting arrested for deportation,” he said, adding that the consulate in cooperation with Sri Lanka’s Foreign Employment Bureau has been providing them with food.
The consulate’s labor wing handles the cases of workers having problems with their sponsors. Their grievances include non-payment of salaries, under payment of salaries stipulated in the contracts (a process known as contract substitution where the promised wage is reduced after the worker arrives), harassment in the form of unlimited working hours and sexual abuse.
“In a majority of cases, we have succeeded in settling the issues with the sponsors and our workers have gone back to them,” said Lafeer who served his country’s foreign missions in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Lebanon in his 16-year diplomatic career.
Lafeer said he was instrumental in organizing the visit of a high-level Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) delegation to Colombo in April and that of a Sri Lankan trade mission to the Kingdom in June. A catalog show introducing Sri Lankan companies and a job fair focusing on the island’s skilled and unskilled manpower were also organized in cooperation with the JCCI.
“The bilateral trade has since been expanding, although the balance remains very much in favor of the Kingdom due to our huge oil imports,” he said.
On the tourism front, there has been an increasing number of Saudi tourists visiting the island state this year, especially since the end of the ethnic war, Lafeer said and thanked the Kingdom for hosting 5,500 Haj pilgrims this year, around the same number as last year. He said the island had received funds from the Saudi Development Fund for some projects including the 396-meter bridge linking Kinnya and Trincomalee, which opened in mid-2009.
