Category: Jordan

Sweatshops: The ‘fruit’ of Arab-Israeli peace ‘processing’

There are many different ways of using economic integration to tie countries together after recent wars. The “European Coal and Steel Community” pioneered between France and Germany after 1945 was one of the most successful…
The ECSC– which laid the basis for today’s thriving European Union– was built on a strong basis of equality between its two founding countries, and on a notable spirit of generosity by the French who decided, after 1945, not to repeat the mistakes made by the victorious Allies after the First World War, when they decided that, as “victors”, they would rub the German people’s noses into the ground for as long as they could. (We know what that led to.)
And then, a very different example from the ECSC, there is this: “Human Trafficking, Abuse, Forced Overtime, Primitive Dorm Conditions, Imprisonment and Forcible Deportations of Foreign Guest Workers At the Musa Factory in Jordan”– as described in great and painful detail in that report from the Pittsburgh, US-based National Labor Committee.
But what nobody who has written about this horrendous sweatshop has yet drawn attention to, is that “Musa Textiles”, located in Al Hassan Industrial City in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid is one of the important economic “fruits” of the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty.
Al-Hassan Industrial City is one of three “Qualified Industrial Zones” in Jordan. QIZ’s are given that designation by the US government. That website from the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour tells us that,

    In 1996, U.S Congress authorized designation of qualifying industrial zones (QIZ’s) between Israel and Jordan, and Israel and Egypt. The QIZ’s allow Egypt and Jordan to export products to the United States duty-free if the products contain inputs from Israel (8% in the Israeli-Jordanians QIZ agreement, 11.7% in the Israeli-Egyptian QIZ agreement). The purpose of this trade initiative has been to support the prosperity and stability in the Middle East by encouraging regional economic integration…

“Integration” of a certain sort, that is. “Integration” that keeps the businesses that operate out of the QIZ’s in the Arab countries firmly under Israel’s economic heel.
The website tells us this:

    On March 6th, 1998, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) designated Jordan’s Al-Hassan Industrial Estate in the northern city of Irbid as the world’s first QIZ.

It also tells us that the Al-Hassan Industrial Estate is “owned and operated by the Jordan Industrial Estate Corporation.”
So here’s how this “integration” works– as revealed in the NLC report, and these recent articles in Haaretz (1, 2):
The NLC report says that “Mr. Musa”, the owner, is an Israeli. But Haaretz’s Dana Weiler-Polak tells us,

    the real owners are Jack Braun and Moshe Cohen from Tel Aviv… The two employ 132 people from Bangladesh, 49 from India and 27 Jordanians. Chinese, Sri Lankans and Nepalese have also worked there in the past.

Jordan has a chronic unemployment problem, and fwiw, a large proportion of its population is made up of Palestinian refugees (who generally have Jordanian citizenship.) Estimates of the country’s unemployment rate range from 13.5% through 30%.
Can somebody tell me how employing just 27 Jordanians out of Musa Garments’ workforce of 208 “support[s] prosperity and stability in the Middle East by encouraging regional economic integration”?
Oh, I don’t doubt there are a few Jordanians who manage the “Al-Hassan Industrial Park” or who do some jobs around the factories in it, and who get a little bit of benefit from the enterprise.
But at the heart of “Musa Garments” are two Israeli clothing manufacturers who ruthlessly exploit very vulnerable migrant workers from very low-income third countries to make clothes for leading Israeli “labels.”
The NLC report contains very serious allegations against not only the line managers in the factory– who threatened to “cut off the penises” of some balky workers– but also against the Jordanian authorities. After an apparent riot by the migrant workers inside the factory in June, the managers locked them out of the factory. Of course, most of these men and women in these jobs are deeply dependent on them, having often gone into great debt in their home communities to be able to “afford” the airfare that brought them to Jordan. (The managers, not surprisingly, kept– and apparently still to this day keep– their passports.)
Then, this:

    On Sunday, June 21, a delegation of Musa workers walked 3 ½ hours to appeal to the Labor Court. There was not much of a discussion, but the workers were told that if they did not return to work within 48 hours, they would be fined 50 JD ($70.52 U.S.)—about two weeks’ wages—for the first day and 5 JD ($7.05 U.S., more than they earned in a day) for each day after that.
    On June 24, the workers met with an official from the Bangladeshi Embassy, Mr. Shakil, and a local representative of the Ministry of Labor office at Al Hassan. According to the workers, the Ministry of Labor official behaved very rudely, shouting at the workers that “if you don’t listen to us, we will call the police and have you all arrested.” He also threatened that food would be cut off if they did not return to work. (If fact, it appears that all food was cut off on Saturday, June 20.) The Bangladesh Embassy official essentially explained that he had no power to help.
    On July 2, the general manager, Mr. Riad, met very briefly with the workers, telling them they must either return to work or “I’ll call the police and stop the food.” (Though the food had already been stopped.) Mr. Shakil, the Bangladesh Embassy official, was again present. The workers wanted to return to the factory but asked the Embassy official for help. They would return to the factory, but they wanted their passports back and a guarantee that they would not be beaten by the police. The desperate workers kept pleading with the Embassy official, begging : “You are a Bangladeshi official. Please, you must help us. We have nowhere else to turn to.” Mr. Shakil responded as he had in the past, saying, “I have no power and there is nothing I can do here.” The workers begged him again to arrange an agreement so they could enter the factory to work. When the workers, who had gathered around the Embassy official’s car, continued to plead for help, Mr. Shakil called the police. The workers had peacefully blocked his car for 30 to 40 minutes.
    The police arrived and beat five workers, including women, who were visibly bruised and bleeding. At that point, to protect their co-workers, some workers did throw stones at the police, who were beating the women.
    On July 5, as the workers put it, “We surrendered to the boss.” They knew they would never receive justice. So, in desperation, they agreed to whatever the owner said. They would pay the fine of over 200 JD ($282) if they had to.
    On July 6, Musa supervisors came to the dorm and picked out about half the workers, asking that they return to the factory immediately. The other half were told they would return to work the following day, July 7.
    Instead, around 2:00 p.m. on July 6, about 50 police charged the dormitory and took 24 workers—10 men and 14 women, to prison. The men were taken out in handcuffs. Several of the women were not allowed to fully clothe themselves before being dragged out, which for them was a great humiliation.
    Of the 24 workers taken to the police station, 18 were freed. But six workers were imprisoned from July 6 to July 15, when they were forcibly deported without any of their personal belongings.
    Two of the six workers, both women, were beaten in prison. One was slapped, and the other kicked when they asked why they were being arrested. Conditions in the prison were very poor. The workers had no mattresses, no pillows, little food, and unsafe drinking water. They only got by because the husband of one of the imprisoned women brought her food every day, which she shared with the other workers.
    In another bizarre police action, the imprisoned workers were told to give the names of their closest friends to the police, supposedly so they could retrieve their personal belongings. But when the six workers, including one supervisor, showed up at the police station at 5:00 p.m., they too were arrested. To date, no one knows where these six workers are being held.
    According to the Ministry of Labor report, “…the six workers in question were detained for repatriation by order of the Ministry of Interior on request of the governor by letter of June 30. The reasons for the detention relate to their involvement in activities contravening public security and are not related to their possible involvement in the strike.”
    The six imprisoned and forcibly deported workers—three men and three women—had all worked in Jordan for up to five years without a single incident or complaint against them…

The NLC report also tells us that the very bad conditions in the factory have led most Jordanians to avoid taking jobs there, leaving the jobs to be filled only by the very vulnerable South Asians.
In today’s Haaretz, Avirama Golan tells us that yesterday, in Tel Aviv,

    many decent people… demonstrated in front of chain stores Jump, Irit, Bonita and Pashut at Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Mall. The demonstrators protested the horrifying exploitation of factory workers by the company Musa Garments, as detailed in the NLC report. They promised a consumer boycott.
    Unfortunately, their boycott will not sting the owners’ profits. Nonetheless, these people represent the spearhead of the few Israelis fighting for human rights. Most of them are certain to have demonstrated against the expulsion of migrant workers’ children [from Israel itself].

Golan asks rhetorically,

    What is the connection between [the mgrant workers inside Israel] and the Bangladeshis, Indians, Chinese and Nepalese who sleep on dilapidated beds, eat barely cooked chicken still dripping with blood and work themselves to the point of exhaustion after having their passports confiscated and their self-respect and civil rights trampled in the Musa Garments factory in Irbid, whose real operators are Israeli? There is an obvious link that could be called “the backyard.”
    The people exposed in Irbid are not some of globalization’s bad seeds. Rather, they provide a peek into the Israeli economy’s backyard. Unlike other economies, the Israeli economy does not need to look far to manufacture its consumer goods and brand names. Until recently, it had no need to import slaves. For nearly 40 years, the glorious Israeli economy relied on the very near backyard – the occupied territories.
    When cheap labor is so readily available, when it arrives in the morning and disappears in the evening, it’s very easy to deny the human existence of those who build homes, clean streets and apartments, wash dishes in restaurants and tend gardens. This ease was made even easier thanks to the settler-like hierarchical mind-set that views the Palestinians as the lowest level of human existence. This attitude trickled down quickly and conveniently into people’s consciousness within the Green Line. Thus, it is so easy for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sell his false vision of “economic peace” in Ramallah. The removal of migrant workers from the center of the country under the so-called Gedera-Hadera plan is the other side of the coin.
    The moment things no longer went as planned in the backyard and Israeli entrepreneurs, contractors and farmers lost out to the cheaper global market, people here began searching for a new backyard, and they found it in two places.
    The entrepreneurs found Jordan, and the farmers and contractors found the “legal” migrant workers who are rendered slaves in hiding. But now it seems that Jordan is not cheap enough, so a new arrangement has been conceived, one seen in Musa Garments – a backyard within a backyard.
    Yes, it is important to demonstrate against them. It is also important to boycott their products. But it is more important to understand the real hidden danger in their activities. With the same ease with which settler-like values have trickled across the Green Line, values of slave exploitation are now trickling in…

Golan is right to note all these connections. But I wish that s/he had also pointed out that the whole basis on which “Musa Garments” and the “Al-Hassan Industrial Park” were built was on the completely mendacious promise of mutually fruitful economic “cooperation” between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
And now, of course, we have Netanyahu claiming that what he aims at is an “economic peace” with the Palestinians…

“We Want Peace” on YouTube

Hagit Tarnari, one of the dedicated pro-peace Israeli participants in our recent U.N. University conference on nonviolence in Amman, Jordan, made a little video at the end of the conference and has posted it on YouTube: here.
I’ve watched it three times, and find it incredibly moving… It brings all those people’s faces and strong, dedicated personalities so vividly back for me.
Among the people in the video you can pick out:

    * Vasu Gounden, the Executive Director of Accord in Durban, South Africa,
    * (me, looking very tired toward the end of the fourth day of the conference,)
    * Jan Benvie from Scotland– a leader in Christian Peacemaker Teams who co-led the whole afternoon’s proceedings with me on the second day of the conference. (She was on her way to northern Iraq, where she and two other CPTers have been investigating the possibility of re-establishing some of CPTs Iraq programs from Suleimaniyeh.)
    * Rabbi Moshe Yehudai, a lifelong pacifist and wonderful brave soul who also describes himself as a Zionist,
    * Nasser Sheikh Ali, a member of the Liberal Forum from Jenin, Palestine,
    * Murad Tangiev, from Chechnya, Russia, who has been working at the UNU and helped with the administration of this conference,
    * Neven Bondokji from Jordan, a talented and brave young woman who’s been working with CARE, trying to establish basic humanitarian/relief services for some of the hundreds of thousands Iraqi refugees in Jordan,
    * Dr. Koteswara Prasad, the Director of the Mahatma Gandhi Center for Peace and Conflict resolution in Madras, India,
    * Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Bukhari from Jerusalem, a Sufism teacher who is also the head of Jerusalem’s 400-year-old community of Uzbek Muslims, and
    * Hagit herself, at the very end.

You may or may not notice that not many of the two dozen or so Arab state citizens who took part in the conference appear in the video. Everyone was, obviously, given a choice whether to appear or not. All the people from Palestine and the other Arab countries who came to the conference participated fully, and in a respectful and friendly way, with all the other participants in all the conference’s formally scheduled activities. But these are people who want to continue to make a difference for good in their own societies, and I imagine it was with that in mind that some of them chose not to appear in a video that we hope will be widely available to a global public. But some of them did, and their participation makes the video particularly powerful and effective.
What a great way this video is, to share some of the energy from our conference! It was shot by a Jordanian cameraman who was at the UNU building working on another project, and came over and donated his time and expertise to Hagit’s project. I’m not sure who did the final editing and production work– I think, Hagit.
Great work!
JWN readers: please share the news about this video as widely as you can!

Jordan drops Abu Audeh case

The official Jordanian news agency, Petra, anounced today that,

    A decision was taken on Sunday not to try Adnan Abu Odeh.
    According to the decision issued by the State Security Prosecutor General the law case against Abu Odeh will be shelved.

Al Jazeera has a few more details.
This is excellent news. For more details about the prominent Jordanian citizen Adnan Abu Audeh (also transliterated as Abu-Odeh) and this now dead accusation, see this recent JWN post.
Al Jazeera notes that after he was first informed, Thursday, of the possibility of charges being brought against him Abu Audeh, “told reporters that he believed in ‘the fairness of Jordanian justice’.” Many others acused and detained under the kingdom’s draconian state security laws now also need to see this fairness in action.
I hope, too, that Jordan’s rulers will not be taking any other actions to squelch or deter cordial and non-confrontational open discussion of the serious questions Abu Audeh has raised about discrimination against certain whole groups of Jordanian citizens and the need to build a more inclusive national community there.

Jordan: Court considers charging former minister Abu Audeh

    Note: This is an updated version of the post that I put up on this topic at 12:40 p.m. today.

I got home to Virginia, from Jordan, late last night. This morning I learned that my longtime friend Adnan Abu Audeh (also transliterated as Abu-Odeh) was this morning threatened with being prosecuted by Jordan’s fairly infamous “state security court” on the basis of two charges: One was “threatening national unity” and the other was, in Arabic, “Italat al-Lisan”, literally, having too long of a tongue (toward the status of the king), that is, lèse majesté.
Abu Audeh’s daughter Lama Abu Audeh, who teaches at Georgetown University Law School in Washington DC, tells me that the “threatening national unity” charge carries a sentence of up to three years imprisonment.
Adnan Abu Audeh is a very accomplished and prominent Jordan citizen. He was Minister of Information in the 1970s, later going on to become Head of the Royal Court for several years under the late King Hussein. After King Abdullah II succeeded Hussein in 1999, he appointed Abu Audeh as a political advisor. But he removed him from that position after Abu Audeh published a book (with the U.S. Institute of Peace Press in Washington DC) that analyzed the relationship inside Jordan between citizens whose families were originally from east of the River Jordan– that is, from within the present-day territory of the Kingdom– and those whose families were originally from west of the river, in the “West Bank” area that is claimed by the Palestinians.
Jordan had annexed the West Bank to itself after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, though no other governments except Britain and Pakistan ever recognized that act of annexation. At that point, West Bankers were given Jordanian citizenship. In 1988, however, King Hussein laid down Jordan’s claim to exercizing any form of sovereignty in the West Bank.
Abu Audeh is of West Bank origin, having been born and brought up in Nablus.
In recent years, he has made a great contribution to international understanding and global political life through his service on the board of the International Crisis Group, a very respected research organization whose board also includes many other high-level political personalities from around the world.
Lama Abu Audeh told me that today, after being interrogated, and told that the judge would now try to establish a case for his indictment, her father was allowed to return home. (I wonder what the evidence might be. Will there be an anthropometric measuring of the length of his tongue, I wonder?) I sincerely hope that if he is taken into custody at any point he will not be subjected to the kinds of torture that are reliably reported by Amnesty International and other bodies to occur within the prisons run by the state security apparatus. (See some of the reports available through this Amnesty portal.)
The fact that the Jordanian regime is even considering charging a West-Bank-origin citizen of such distinction and prominence as Adnan Abu Audeh on such flimsy charges indicates to me that the political situation in the country must be much more fragile than I had already, on the basis of my recent trip there, judged it to be. I confess that while I was there, I spent just about all my time cocooned in the conference environment and had almost no time to talk with local friends… (If I had, Abu Audeh would certainly have been one whom I contacted. Now I deeply regret not having done so.) However, just from a few things I noticed while in the country, the situation did already seem to be quite fragile.
I can quite understand that Jordanians, whose country is sandwiched between Palestine and Iraq and contains large bodies of refugees from both areas– including a well-established community of West-Bank-origin people who now make up more than 60% of Jordan’s citizenry– must be feeling very concerned indeed about the fallout inside their country from the oppression, hopelessness, and political violence that continue to mark the situations in both those weighty neighbors. But surely, to threaten to indict a person like Adnan Abu Audeh on the basis merely of secretly compiled charges of speech crimes does nothing to build trust within the country and ensure the longterm wellbeing of its people?
The matters Mr. Abu Audeh has raised in public about the nature of the relationship between East Bankers and West Bankers are surely a legitimate subject for public discussion, particularly if that discussion is held in the measured, non-confrontational way in which he discusses them.
If this investigation continues and charges are indeed brought against him, the effect on civil discourse in Jordan will be a chilling one, and citizens who have legitimate grievances against the regime may well feel more inclined to pursue them through violence. Charging Adnan Abu Audeh with speech crimes seems like a recipe only for increased tension and violence.