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Los Angeles Times
October 9, 2005
POOR MIGRANTS WORK IN IRAQI NETHERWORLD
U.S.-hired contractors rely on laborers from
impoverished countries, but no one looks out for
the rights -- or lives -- of the foreigners.
By T. Christian Miller
Times Staff Writer
Ramesh Khadka began the journey to his slaughter
in this valley of rivers, where green rice
terraces march up the mountains like stairs
toward the heavens.
After passing among a series of shadowy,
indifferent middlemen, he finished it a month
later in a dusty ditch in western Iraq.
There, bound and helpless, the teenager was shot
three times in the back of the head by
insurgents, his execution and that of 11 of his
countrymen captured on videotape.
The 19-year-old and his colleagues were on their
way to jobs at a U.S. military base in Al Anbar
province when they were kidnapped. The killings
last year remain the worst case of violence
against private contractors in the Iraq war.
The incident and its aftermath raise troubling
questions about America's reliance on the world's
poorest people to do the dirtiest jobs in one of
the most dangerous places on Earth.
Contractors working for the United States,
including KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of
Halliburton Corp., have brought tens of thousands
of workers into Iraq from impoverished countries
such as Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh to
do menial jobs, from cooking and serving food to
cleaning toilets.
In relying on a workforce of third-country
nationals, however, the U.S. has embraced a
system of labor migration rife with abuse,
corruption and exploitation, according to dozens
of contractors, migrant workers, labor officials
and advocates interviewed in four countries.
The system revolves around so-called labor
brokers, whose numbers have exploded during the
last decade in the Middle East and Asia. Such
agencies take advantage of porous borders and
rising global demand for cheap labor to move poor
workers from one country to low-paying jobs in
another.
Although millions of Iraqis are desperate for
jobs, the U.S. military requires that contractors
such as KBR hire foreigners to work at bases to
avoid the possibility of insurgent infiltration.
Willing to work anywhere, the laborers often take
out usurious loans to pay the agencies a finder's
fee for the overseas jobs. Once abroad, the
workers find themselves with few protections and
uncertain legal status.
In Iraq, the vulnerability of such workers is
heightened. Neither the U.S. nor Iraq has an
adequate system for protecting their rights,
labor advocates say.
Violence is the greatest risk. At least a third
of the 255 contractors reported killed in Iraq
since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 came from
Second or Third World countries, according to a
Times analysis of data maintained by a website
that tracks contractor deaths.
The enforcement of labor rights appears virtually
nonexistent. In the case involving Khadka, for
example, it appears that the Nepalese were headed
to work for a Jordanian-based subcontractor to
KBR, family members and labor agency officials
say.
If true, all 12 men should have been covered by
generous death benefits required by federal law
for anyone working for a U.S. contractor, even
indirectly, say insurance and legal experts. But
their families have received no such payments.
After questions from The Times, KBR said it would
investigate whether benefits were owed. KBR is
the largest employer in Iraq of third-country
nationals, with about 25,000 workers, typically
through Middle Eastern subcontractors.
Because of the danger of exploitation, some
labor-exporting countries, such as the
Philippines and Nepal, have forbidden their
nationals to work in Iraq. But labor brokers
bring in such workers using loopholes in a system
with almost no regulation. An estimated 5,000
Nepalese work in Iraq.
Labor advocates say the practice amounts to
modern-day indentured servitude, funded by U.S.
taxpayers.
"This is 2005. This is a sort of slave trade,"
said Majed Habashneh, undersecretary for Jordan's
Labor Ministry, which has struggled to contain a
wave of people passing into Iraq. "No one is
taking care of the human rights of these people.
Who will take responsibility?"
Lack of Opportunity
Khadka, a dark-haired young man with
almond-shaped eyes, grew up in a mud and brick
home on the outskirts of Lele, one of seven
children in a poor farming family.
The village is a place of astonishing beauty an
hour south of Katmandu, on a potholed road
surrounded by low mountains and rice fields so
green they seem to be lighted from within. Water
buffalo wander the streets. Fat golden
dragonflies buzz through the air. Moss-covered
shrines to Hindu deities dot the roadside.
There is not much work in a village like this in
Nepal, one of the world's most impoverished
countries. Unemployment is compounded by a Maoist
insurgency that has killed more than 12,500
people since 1996. Rebels frequently kidnap young
men as recruits, providing impetus to flee to
cities and abroad for work.
Khadka was working at a hotel in Katmandu for $38
a month when he learned of job opportunities
overseas from Bala Gam Piri, the owner of the
employment agency Moonlight Manpower, said family
members and officials with the Nepal Assn. of
Foreign Employment Agencies, a trade group. Piri
is believed to have fled Nepal after the
killings, which set off riots in the capital. He
could not be located for comment.
The agencies are a booming business in Nepal.
There were fewer than a dozen a decade ago; more
than 530 now exist, according to statistics
maintained by the association. Although most are
described as legitimate businesses, scores have
been closed for labor law violations.
Nepalese workers are prized by overseas employers
for two reasons. First, Nepalese trained as
soldiers by the British military, who are known
as Gurkas, have the experience sought by private
security contractors. In Iraq, Nepalese protect
the Baghdad airport and parts of the city's
fortified Green Zone, which houses the U.S.
Embassy and the Iraqi government. Second,
Nepalese have a reputation as hard workers who
are less likely to complain than laborers from
other poor countries.
"Nepalese don't make too many demands. There's no
'I want this, I want that, I want water.' None of
this," said Bigyan Pradhan, an agency owner and
the spokesman for the association.
Piri promised Khadka $200 a month as a cook with
the U.S. Army, although it was unclear where the
job would be, the family said. In return, Khadka
had to pay $3,000, plus hand over his passport to
Piri to make sure he couldn't run away.
The family went to wealthy neighbors to borrow
the money, paying annual interest of 24%. His
father told him not to go. But Khadka was an
independent teenager who dreamed of making enough
to build a concrete house next to his family's
crumbling mud-daubed home.
One recent cloudy day, Jit Bahadur Khadka, the
young man's father, sat cross-legged in front of
his home and explained his son's insistence on
leaving Nepal. Despite his tattered gray vest and
pants stained with dirt from the fields, he had
an air of solemn dignity.
For Nepalese, working abroad has become part of
the fabric of life. The money they send home
accounts for more than one-fifth of the country's
tiny economy. Even folk songs have adopted the
language of loss, with one popular tune a lament
about a lover who cannot be contacted at his job
in faraway Japan.
Khadka joined the diaspora on June 29, 2004,
boarding a plane for the first time in his life.
"His last words were: 'I'm flying now. Don't
worry about me. I'll be back in a few years,' "
his father said, dabbing at his eyes with a
handkerchief. "I told him, 'Wait. I'll send you
anywhere.' But he didn't want to wait. He wanted
to make something of himself."
Stopover in Jordan
As Piri was gathering the workers in Nepal,
Hayder Aliam was in Jordan helping arrange their
transport to Amman.
Aliam is the office manager for Morning Star, a
Jordanian employment agency that imports laborers
by working with recruiting agencies in poor
countries.
Inside Aliam's office in a busy commercial
district, women from Indonesia and the
Philippines stand in corners while wealthy
Jordanians sit in overstuffed leather chairs,
sorting stacks of files with job candidate
applications.
In class-conscious Amman, the nationality of your
domestic help carries a certain status. Filipinas
are the most desirable, and thus most expensive,
followed by Indonesians and Sri Lankans.
The Nepalese have one advantage, however: Unlike
other nationalities, Nepalese do not need a visa
before their arrival in Jordan. Thus, when a KBR
subcontractor approached Morning Star with an
urgent need for workers, the company immediately
thought of Nepal, Aliam said.
Morning Star and Moonlight worked together to
fill the order. Although Morning Star normally
only imports domestic servants for Jordan, the
lure of a $200 fee for each Nepalese for Iraq
proved too much to resist.
"Iraq was an exception," Aliam said. "It became a
matter of money. It was a time to profit."
The identity of the subcontractor remains
unclear. Aliam said the men were working for a
company called Daoud & Partners, which holds a
catering and laundry subcontract with KBR. In
early news accounts, however, another Morning
Star employee identified the subcontractor as
Besharat & Partners, a construction firm. In an
interview, a Daoud official who did not want his
name used because of the sensitivity of the issue
denied any connection to the workers. Besharat &
Partners could not be located.
The subcontractor collected the workers at the
Amman airport for transport directly into Iraq,
Aliam said. From there, he said, the Nepalese
were taken to a convoy of vans bound for the
long, dangerous road from Jordan into western
Iraq.
What happened next is unknown. The men simply vanished.
Then, on Aug. 20, 2004, Radhika Khadka was at
home when a neighbor told her about a grainy
Internet video being broadcast repeatedly on
Nepalese television.
There, Radhika, 55, could see her son crammed
into a room with the 11 other men holding their
passports in front of them. One of the men, with
an American flag draped across his chest, read
from a statement in halting English.
He said the group had been kidnapped by Iraqi
insurgents who called themselves the Ansar al
Sunna Army.
"They said that the situation is not dangerous in
Iraq, but we saw the opposite when we entered,"
the man said. "We ask anyone coming to Iraq not
to be cheated by the high salary because they are
false and America is lying."
When the camera panned over her son, she saw the
look on his face, and her heart broke.
"I felt like I had been hit by a rock," she recalled.
The family contacted Piri, the labor broker, who
said he would do everything he could to get their
son back. Then he disappeared.
The Nepalese government did little. The country
is so poor that it has only one embassy in the
region, in Qatar, with four employees.
In desperation, the ambassador turned to Prakash
Gurung, a Nepalese businessman who lives in Qatar
and runs his own labor agency there. Gurung heads
a committee established by the embassy to
troubleshoot international labor issues.
Lacking contacts in Iraq, Gurung sent an e-mail
to a Sunni Muslim group whose address he got from
Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite television
channel. The group promised to try to help
negotiate, but Gurung is not sure whether it did
anything at all.
"Not anybody else cared about this," Gurung said. "No other country cared."
Eleven days after the first Internet video, a second surfaced.
This time, none of the Nepalese workers spoke, except to scream.
The first worker was laid on the ground, his
throat to the sky. A hand can be seen in the
video grasping a knife, slowly sawing through the
man's neck as he sputters and chokes, blood
gushing from his body.
Over the next few minutes of the video, the
Nepalese are brought out in pairs, laid on the
ground and shot at close range. Some men double
up as they are shot, their faces contorted in
pain.
Khadka's family did not watch the execution video. But a childhood friend did.
He said that he immediately recognized Khadka
when he was laid in the ditch alongside a second
man.
The insurgents shot three bullets into the back of Khadka's head.
He did not appear to suffer, his friend said.
Killings Spark Riots
In Katmandu, the execution of the workers touched off a government crisis.
Protesters set upon Katmandu's only mosque,
burning it and ripping the Koran to pieces,
according to local reports. They also attacked
hundreds of the widely reviled employment
agencies. In two days of rioting, one protester
was shot to death and the government clamped down
with a 24-hour curfew.
The unrest contributed to the instability that
King Gyanendra later cited in dissolving the
Cabinet and declaring a state of emergency that
gave him absolute power in February 2005.
"All Nepalese were shocked," said Bijaya Bishta,
the editor of Shram Weekly, a newspaper focused
on labor issues. "We found out that our
government is very weak."
In the days that followed, the government revoked
Moonlight's license. Seeking to quell the
outrage, the government announced it would
compensate the survivors. Each family was given
nearly $14,000, a large sum in a country where
the annual income is $279.
The Khadkas have used their money to pay off
Ramesh's debt and for Radhika's medical expenses.
She had fainting spells after the news of her
son's death and refused to leave the family's
home for seven months.
An earthy, blunt-spoken woman, Radhika has harsh
words for the government, and for Piri. The
government paid the money, she said, to stop the
violence. But nobody ever apologized.
"If we had been big shots, they would have said
that they were sorry," she said. "But we're poor
people. We're nobody."
For Radhika, the violent confluence of world
events that led to her son's death remains a
mystery.
"He was not a rebel, nor in the army. He was
simply a worker," she said. "He did what they
told him to do. He would have swept if they'd
told him to sweep, clean if they'd told him to
clean a toilet. He would have done anything."
More than a year later, the labor markets operate as usual in Iraq.
U.S. officials said they were about to include
new regulations in all Defense Department
contracts to prevent labor trafficking. The
payment of labor broker fees is not considered
trafficking, although exceptionally high fees or
interest rates are illegal under U.S. trafficking
laws.
Commanders "need to be vigilant to the terms and
conditions of employment for individuals employed
by DoD contractors," Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld wrote in a memo in September 2004.
"Trafficking includes involuntary servitude and
debt bondage. These trafficking practices will
not be tolerated."
In Jordan, the Labor and Interior ministries
launched investigations after the killings.
Morning Star was shut down for four months but
allowed to reopen after promising to stop sending
workers to Iraq.
Habashneh, the Jordanian labor official, said his
office had struggled to prevent the transit of
workers through the nation's borders. Local
migrant workers in Jordan described such business
as thriving.
"We feel we need to do so much more," Habashneh said.
For its part, KBR, the Halliburton division, says
all its subcontractors are required to respect
local labor laws and provide appropriate housing,
medical treatment and security protection for
workers.
All KBR subcontractors also must provide
employees with so-called Defense Base Act
insurance, a federal program that provides for
medical care and death benefits worth as much as
$54,000 a year to survivors.
"KBR believes that all personnel should be
treated with dignity and respect, and we are
committed to maintaining a work environment that
fosters these principles," Melissa Norcross, a
KBR spokeswoman, said in a written response to
questions.
In Nepal, the government recently announced the
closure of 32 additional agencies for sending
workers to Iraq. It has also proposed a labor law
that would set criminal sentences for labor
brokers, instead of fines.
The measure is facing strong resistance from the brokers.
"The government is feeling constrained in our
resources in this department," said Deependra
Bickram Thupa, director-general of the Labor
Ministry, whose windows are still shattered from
last year's riot. "The job is huge."
Even if a new law is passed, skeptics doubt it
will have much effect. First, several brokers
interviewed in Katmandu said that existing laws
could be bypassed easily, thanks to corruption in
the government.
"There's a lot of money and bribes," the owner of one agency said.
Second, the international nature of the problem
makes it difficult to crack down. For instance,
Nepal forbids its workers to go directly to Iraq,
so some Nepalese circumvent the law by traveling
to India and from there to Iraq.
Finally, the Nepalese government is heavily
dependent on the money its workers send home, and
it gains little from objecting to abuse of its
workers, which is widespread. If Nepal makes it
harder to hire its workers - by demanding higher
wages, for instance - the hiring countries will
turn to another poor country, depriving Nepal of
needed cash.
"If we demand too many [things], they'll say, 'Go
to hell, we'll go to Vietnam or Bangladesh,' "
said Pradhan, the head of the employment trade
group in Nepal. "We have to be very carefulĀ. We
are not in a strong position to bargain."
After his death, Khadka's family spent nearly
$1,000 to have a sculpture made of the young man,
whose body has never been found. The sculpture
was dedicated Sept. 1, a year after he was
executed.
Dozens of villagers turned out for the ceremony.
The black bust was heaped with a profusion of
bright red, orange and fuchsia flowers as
offerings.
It is the only likeness the family has of Khadka,
who never had his picture taken. The only other
images of Ramesh Khadka are the blurry videotapes
of his kidnapping and execution.
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