It's good to see the endemic ill-treatment of domestic workers in the Middle East finally getting some attention from the mainstream international media. Under the headline "Little better than slavery", this week's Economist says:

Huge numbers of migrant domestic workers, mostly from Asia and Africa, are employed throughout the region. Some 1.5m work in Saudi Arabia, 660,000 in Kuwait and 200,000 in Lebanon. Many work very long hours and receive little food, no time off and pay that is a fraction of any minimum wage, if it materialises at all. 

Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based group, says at least one domestic worker died every week in Lebanon between January 2007 and August 2008. Almost half were suicides and many were as a result of falling from high buildings, often while trying to escape their employers. 

Mistreatment is so widespread that the Philippines, Ethiopia and Nepal no longer let their citizens go to Lebanon to work as maids, though such bans have had little effect.

The reason for this sudden interest is the widely-reported case of 49-year-old Lahanda Purage Ariyawathie, who returned home to Sri Lanka from Saudi Arabia recently – and had to have at least 24 nails and needles surgically removed from her body.

She alleges that the nails were embedded by her Saudi employer and his wife, in a bizarre form of torture.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been documenting reports about the abuse of housemaids fairly systematically (as has the Angry Arab blog) but I refrained from writing about Ms Ariyawathie's story when it first surfaced because I wasn't sure whether to believe it. I hesitated mainly because it's so unlike the types of abuse normally reported.

Today, Arab News raised some doubts about the story and said that Ms Ariyawathie did not seek medical help until several days after her arrival in Sri Lanka. If so, why the delay? 

I do hope the Saudi and Sri Lankan authorities will investigate the case thoroughly. If true, the story is of course appalling but until more is known it may be unwise to jump to any conclusions.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese newspaper, al-Akhbar (in Arabic),reports the death of a Kenyan woman who fell from the sixth floor of a building, apparently trying to escape from her employer by climbing down a rope.

The same paper also reports legal action against the employer of an Ethiopian maid in Lebanon who suffered a non-lethal fall from a balcony almost two years ago.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 2 September 2010.

UPDATE, 3 September: An interview with Ms Ariyawathie was published here in The Sunday Leader.