The Hindu : National : Middlemen behind woes of Indian workers

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 24, 2004

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Middlemen behind woes of Indian workers

By Atul Aneja

MANAMA, JULY 23. The kidnapping of three Indian truck drivers in Iraq who face the threat of execution has raised questions about the conditions and circumstances under which a large number of Indians find themselves caught up in the crossfire between Iraqi resistance and the American occupation forces.

According to some estimates about 5,000 Indians are at present located in Iraq. The New York Times in a recent report, quoted "government officials" as saying that "there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Indians already there [in Iraq]."

Many tricked

Reports say that a chain a middlemen, including recruiting agents in India, "sponsors" employees in some Persian Gulf countries and foreign "security contractors" may have tricked many Indians to work in Iraq. Many of the Indian workers have reportedly been taken to U.S. military camps, located in hazardous areas, to work as cooks, barbers, butchers and, quite frequently, in inhuman conditions. Kuwait and Jordan have been the staging posts for smuggling many of them into Iraq.

Faced with a regular barrage of bombings by Iraqi guerrillas on one of the camps in northern Iraq, 16 desperate Indians who had been inadequately fed and subjected to occasional beatings recently made a daring escape. A report in The Hindu on May 1 said that four members of the group had been promised employment in Kuwait after they had made a hefty payment of Rs. 80,000 each to a recruiting agent in Mumbai. But on reaching Kuwait, they were, without their consent, first ferried by bus to Baghdad before being disembarked at the camp near Mosul.

Maze of recruiters

The Washington Post in its July 1 edition described in horrific detail the experiences of Dharmapalan Ajayakumar, a resident of Kollam in Kerala, who landed up as a kitchen helper at a military base in Iraq. Like several others, Mr. Ajaykumar was recruited for a job in Kuwait, paid Subhash Vijay Associates, a Mumbai-based employment agency around Rs.80,000, but found himself working against his will in Iraq. The paper said that those civilian recruitments for Iraq had been made through " a maze of recruiters and subcontractors on several continents."

In the case of Mr. Ajaykumar and some of his associates, the Indian workers passed through five different levels of subcontractors and employment agents before being employed by Kellog Brown and Root (KBR) in Iraq. "Subhash Vijay had hired them to work for Gulf Catering Co. of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which was subcontracted to Alargan Group of Kuwait City, which was subcontracted to the Event Source of Salt Lake City, which in turn was subcontracted to KBR of Houston," the report said.

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