Porque em Moçambique já há quem recrute para os países árabes, aqui fica o alerta:
The New York Times - June 22, 2004
By JANE PERLEZ
JAKARTA, Indonesia, June 17 - For Nirmala Bonat, whose home was a dirt-floor shack lit by kerosene lamp, the offer to work abroad was irresistible. As a live-in maid, she would earn far more than the $15 a month she got as a waitress. She would be able to send money to help her family.
The dream quickly evaporated. Like many poor women who are dispatched by government-licensed agencies as household help for the growing middle class in the Middle East and the rest of Asia, Ms. Bonat, 19, was severely abused.
The case illuminated the dark side of a profitable international industry, supposedly government-regulated, that involves the export of women from poor countries - chiefly Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India - for these household jobs.
An annual State Department report, "Trafficking in Persons," recently released by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, details many kinds of abuses, from sex tourism to conscription of children to serve as soldiers.
Maids are an often-forgotten aspect of the vast problem. Some were found to have been kept in bondage in the apartments where they worked, the report said, and were forced to keep work routines tantamount to slavery.
Some people involved in the business here do not disagree.
Agustina Endang, the director of the Agesa Asa Jay recruitment agency, which sends Indonesian women to Kuwait, said, "Some employers think they are buying the housemaid so they have the right to work the housemaid as a slave." If the maid, usually an ill-educated village woman, is unable to meet the employer's expectations, then the employer beats her, Ms. Endang said.
The export of women for domestic service has grown dramatically since the Asian financial crisis in 1997 severely affected some countries in the region like Indonesia.
As the supply of labor has increased, demand has grown in Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Asian countries that were less affected by the crisis, like Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, where middle class families can afford to have cheap domestic help to iron clothes, do laundry, cook and clean, as well as wash the several cars that might be sitting in the garage.
The Philippine government, which increasingly depends on the $7 billion in remittances that come from overseas workers, has negotiated agreements with foreign governments that require that maids be given a day off per week.
Hong Kong has also sought to regulate the treatment of women who are recruited to work abroad, but most other governments have done little in this regard.
Saudi Arabia has the largest number of Indonesian maids - about 200,000, according to the Indonesian government - even though terrible abuses are reported there every year.
The connection between maid and employer is made by commercial recruitment agencies, which often operate out of the public eye.
About 400 agencies, ranging from businesses with training facilities to single people with cellphones, are registered with the Indonesian government's Agency of Manpower and Transmigration.
The agencies often maintain close connections to local government officials in Indonesia, who share in the money the agencies receive from the overseas buyers of labor, according to the Southeast Asia Research Center at City University of Hong Kong.
Recruitment agencies rarely advertise. Instead, they send recruiters into villages where many of the women, like Ms. Bonat, are barely literate. Ms. Bonat said a man named Henry enticed her to work abroad, saying she could earn $100 a month. Experts agree that the agencies sometimes force the women
into debt by charging high fees to obtain passports and to administer government-mandated medical, psychological and work tests.
The agencies often fail to tell their recruits that they will not be paid for their first months on the job, as part of an arrangement that is supposed to allow recruitment agencies to cover costs like air fare.
Once they are inside the foreign home, the maids are often not paid at all.
"The interests of the recruitment agencies and the government take priority over the workers," said Ruth Rothenberg, a former director of the International Catholic Migration Commission, who investigated the
trafficking of women and children in Indonesia. "It's as if it is O.K. for the women to make a pittance while everyone else makes a fortune off them."
Some recruits never become maids but are sent to brothels instead. Those who become maids are vulnerable to sexual harassment or worse. In Saudi Arabia, scores of rapes of Indonesian maids have been reported since the mid-1990's.
Maids who are employed by couples are often forced by the wives to crop their hair and to not wear makeup so they will be less attractive to the husbands, said Ivy N. Josiah, the executive director of the Women's Aid Organization in Malaysia.
Makhrivatun Yusrodi, 19, a pretty woman from Java in Indonesia, who is being sheltered by Ms. Josiah's group since she reported that she was nearly strangled by her employer, showed a photograph of herself during her time as a maid. She had a bowl haircut, and wore baggy shorts and a T-shirt that
disguised her figure.
Some abused women become desperate. Six Indonesian maids have committed suicide in Saudi Arabia this year, including a young woman who drank a glass of detergent on June 14, according to the Indonesian Embassy in Riyadh.
Indonesian maids have committed suicide in Singapore by jumping out of high-rise apartments.
Some maids manage to flee abusive employers but, bereft of funds and without documents or social networks, they have trouble seeking help or getting home.
In Indonesia, reform appears to be slower. With unemployment high there, the export of women for domestic service abroad helps alleviate problems at home.
But Faiza Mardzoeki, a leader of Solidaritas Perempuan, an Indonesian women's rights group, said the government had to start making changes.
"Domestic workers must have the same legal protections as other workers," she said.
