Alem Dechasa-Desisa left Ethiopia the day after Christmas last year. She headed for Lebanon, where she planned to make enough money to support her two children.
Within three months, she was dead, the victim of an apparent suicide. Even before her death, Alem had become something of a cause célèbre in some parts of Lebanese society and her case drew international attention.
Abused outside her own consulate in a videotaped incident, Alem was forced by a man later identified as Ali Mahfouz into a car as she lay screaming on the ground outside a place that was supposed to keep her safe.
At 33, Alem was one of 200,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. That her case has garnered notice makes it an anomaly, but what happened to her is not.
Nearly every step of her journey from Burayu, her home outside Addis Ababa, to her eventual death in a psychiatric hospital in the Lebanese mountains is indicative of a failure in the haphazard Lebanese system that deals with the women who come to work in the homes and care for the children of many in this country.
Alem’s husband, Lamesa, told The Daily Star that he and his wife borrowed more than 4,500 Ethiopian Birr, around $260, to facilitate her travel. That’s about three months salary of the country’s average national income, and most of it went to a local broker.
He also said she was expected to pay the first two months of her salary to agents in Ethiopia.
Three years ago, Ethiopia imposed a ban on its citizens going to Lebanon to work as domestics. So Alem went through Yemen. Ethiopia’s consul general in Lebanon, Asaminew Debelie Bonssa, has estimated that there are between 60,000 and 80,000 Ethiopians in Lebanon, only 43,000 legally, having come before the ban.
That makes women like her especially vulnerable to human trafficking. Ghada Jabbour, head of KAFA’s Trafficking and Exploitation Unit, said that Alem was “seemingly a victim of trafficking. Not only had she incurred debts to come to Lebanon, but also she was smuggled outside Ethiopia because of the current ban. In addition, the sponsorship system in Lebanon tied her to a specific employer and did not grant her the freedom to decide her future.”
Trafficking is a tough crime to prove, and despite an anti-trafficking law passed in Lebanon last summer, not much has been done in the way of implementation. And women continue to come, trafficked or otherwise. In large part, this is due to financial imbalances. Even paltry salaries – several workers told The Daily Star of wages around $200 a month for fulltime work – can amount to a great deal in struggling home countries.
Lebanese authorities still grant visas to people from countries with deployment bans, and so Alem arrived, technically “undocumented” but very much part of the Lebanese “kafala” (sponsorship) system where work and residency is tied to a specific employer, even before she made it to the airport.
Because she was in the country illegally, Bonssa said she and others like her are hard to keep track of. Activists say even documented women are often afraid or unable to contact their embassies if they need help.
According to Hicham Borji, president of the union of workers’ recruitment agencies, there are around 450 licensed agencies in Lebanon. An optimistic estimate, he says, is that 100 of these agencies – that act as go-betweens between workers and employers – actually conform to the terms of their licenses. These include a stable location, a land line and a so-called “safe room” for domestic workers who may need to stay at the agency.
Alem’s agency – which was supposed to care for her when she was not with an employer, sent her to two homes. Both sent her back. Chadi Mahfouz, the agency’s director, delegated his brother Ali Mahfouz to deal with Alem after she returned from the second house.
Chadi Mahfouz told The Daily Star that his brother, now charged with contributing to and causing Alem’s death, is not an employee of the agency he directs. This means the agency was acting illegally – but it has not lost its license, in fact it has since become a member of the union.
After what he said were two suicide attempts – both after her removal from the second house – Ali Mahfouz brought Alem to the consulate, where he told staff she was mentally ill. Bonssa, who has since expressed regret at trusting Mahfouz, told him to take her to a hospital. It was outside the consulate, a place that ought to have been a refuge, that the beating took place.
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