Slavery in Saudi Arabia
[1] The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880 formally banned the Red Sea slave trade, but it was not enforced in the Ottoman Provinces in the Arabian Peninsula.
While in pre-Islamic Arabia, Arab war captives were common targets of slavery, it appears that slaves were also imported from Ethiopia across the Red Sea.
[9] The southwest and southern parts of Ethiopia supplied most of the girls being exported by Ethiopian slave traders to India and Arabia.
[6] When the open trans-Saharan slave trade died out, Muslim-African Hajj pilgrims across the Sahara were duped or given low-cost travel expenses by tribal leaders.
[6] Slave traders trafficked primarily women and children in the guise of wives, servants and pilgrims to Hejaz, where they were sold after arrival.
[8]: 304–307 The Buraimi Oasis was a staging post in a neutral border zone, mutually administered by Britain and Saudi Arabia and manned by Trucial Scouts, an Arab force with British officers.
[29] In the 20th century, women and girls for the harem market were kidnapped not only from Africa and Baluchistan, but also from the Trucial States, the Nusayriyah Mountains in Syria, and the Aden Protectorate.
[6] Syrian girls were trafficked from Syria to Saudi Arabia right before World War II and married to legally bring them across the border but then divorced and given to other men.
[4] During the Middle Ages, the first aghawat, eunuchs of Indian, Byzantine (Greek) and African heritage are noted as the guards of the grave of Prophet Muhammed in Medina.
[8]: 88–90 Many slaves were used as domestic servants and harem eunuchs, but they could also be used as craftsmen, seamen, pearl divers, fishermen, agricultural laborers, herdsmen, camel drivers, water carriers, porters, washer women, cooks, shop assistants, business managers, retainers and officials of Emirs.
[48] Upper-class Arab children, such as the royal princes, were gifted their own personal child slaves who grew up with them and became their bodyguards or servants as adults.
In 1963, Said el Feisal was interviewed by the British journalist John Osman and related about his first execution: "I cut through the man's torso by mistake and went mad when I saw the blood, and I could not get the sword out", and that after having severed 150 heads, he was consumed by "bad dreams.
The right for manumission by seeking asylum could be used by any slave who managed to reach the consul office or a ship belonging to a foreign power.
They could not remember exactly where they had come from or where their family lived, could no longer speak any language other than Arabic, and thus had difficulty supporting themselves after repatriation, all of which in the 1930s had caused a reluctance from the authorities to receive them.
[60] The Red Sea slave trade to Saudi Arabia were still very much active in the 1950s; the French consul in Ethiopia reported of a shipment of ninety Africans exported from French Somaliland (Djibouti) to Mecca in 1952, an investigation of the French Assembly performed by Pastor La Graviere issued a report to that effect in 1955, and the British agent in Jeddah confirmed the report and noted that the prices of humans where high in the Saudi slave market and that a young pregnant woman could be sold for five hundred gold sovereigns or twenty thousand riyals.
[63] During the 1957 US state visit of King Saud, Eisenhower conditioned the construction of an American military base in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia in exchange for an alliance against communism; abolition of slavery was never part of the discussion.
During the Saudi King's US state visit in the winter of 1957 as "gigantic Nubian slaves toting jeweled daggers and machine guns" protected Saud.
[62] The open display of slavery during the state visit caused a highwater mark for domestic protests against the US–Saudi partnership, including condemnations from both the African-American press and the American Jewish Congress.
Louis Lautier, described King Saud as "the world's foremost patron of slavery", and the Chicago Defender denounced the US-Saudi partnership: We deplore sorrowfully the circumstances that made it necessary to coddle in our bosom a heartless, unsympathetic, unjust [sic], the immoral monarch who is the antithesis of every single ideal for which American blood has been copiously spilled.
[63] The Kennedy administration also experienced international pressure from influential secular Middle East regional leaders like Gamal Abdul Nasser, as well as from the newly decolonized African states, whose own citizens were the most common victims of the slave trade to the Arabian Peninsula,[63] and whose good will was necessary for Kennedy's anti Soviet New Frontier agenda in the Global South.
[66] The Kennedy administration therefore put pressure on Saudi Arabia to introduce "modernization reforms", a request which was heavily directed against slavery.
[67] In January 1961 the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram covered the case of an African chief who fled to Libya from Mali in 1960 after having been wanted by the colonial French police for selling a large number of men, women and children on the Hajj to Saudi Arabia.
[71] The NGOs, concerned over the threat, expressed their appreciation over the emancipation edict of 1962, but did ask if any countries would be helped to find their own nationals in Saudi harems who might want to return home; this was a very sensitive issue, since there was an awareness that many women were enslaved as concubines (sex slaves) in the harems and that there were no information as to whether the abolition of slavery had affected them.
Hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers from India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Kenya migrate voluntarily to Saudi Arabia; some fall into conditions of involuntary servitude, suffering from physical and sexual abuse, non-payment or delayed payment of wages, the withholding of travel documents, restrictions on their freedom of movement and non-consensual contract alterations.
[79] In early November 2019, protests took place in Dhaka in response to the case of Sumi Akter, who claimed "merciless sexual assaults", being locked up for 15 days, and having her hands burnt by hot oil by her Saudi employers.
"[81] HRW stated that "some abusive employers exploit the kafala system and force domestic workers to continue working against their will and forbid them from returning to their countries of origin" and that this is "incompatible with Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights".
Effective on 14 March 2021, the new measures are meant to curb the kafala system through:[83] The changes are to be implemented in the Absher and Qiwa portals, both being part of the e-government in Saudi Arabia.
[83] In March 2021, Saudi Arabia introduced new labour reforms, allowing some migrant workers to change jobs without their employer's consent.
A 22-year-old woman migrant worker from Madagascar was murdered by the underground prostitution mafia she used to work for after running away from her employer's home and buried without a coffin in al-Jubail.
Due to the practice of some sponsors who confiscate the passports of migrant workers, young women from East Africa find it difficult to return home after perceived mistreatment by their employers.
