WASHINGTON - In the past few years there
have been numerous stories about unscrupulous
contractors hiring people from low-wage Asian
countries such as the Philippines, India,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan for work
in Iraq and then exploiting them with low pay,
unsafe conditions, seized passports, cramped
housing, and poor food, medical care and safety
gear. But generally these were stories about
people hired by private contractors working for
other private corporations
But new
accusations are changing that. Disturbing reports have
surfaced about the nearly 900
laborers being used to build the new
multimillion-dollar US Embassy in Baghdad and the
conditions under which they work.
The
accusations are rather ironic for the
administration of US President George W Bush, as
the they charge that workers are being treated as
virtual slave laborers, a human-rights issue the
administration has previously claimed it is
dedicated to combating.
The specific
allegations are that the new US Embassy compound
is being built by trafficked workers from Asia and
Africa who were beaten and subjected to squalid
living conditions. Former employees of First
Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co (FKTC),
the contractor building the nearly 42-hectare,
US$600 million embassy complex on the Tigris River
scheduled for completion next month, are making
some of the charges.
The embassy compound
is a huge project, generally described as the
biggest US embassy in the world. It was envisaged
as a totally self-sustaining cluster of 21
buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards.
The 1,000 or more US officials who will call the
new compound home will have access to a gym,
swimming pool, fast-food outlets, barber and
beauty shops, a food court, and a commissary.
There will also be a large-scale US Marine
Corps barracks, a school, locker rooms, a
warehouse, a vehicle-maintenance garage, and six
apartment buildings with a total of 619
one-bedroom units. Water, electricity, and
sewage-treatment plants will all be independent of
Baghdad's city utilities.
With the
advantage of hindsight, this scandal was
inevitable. Articles about First Kuwaiti's
problems with workers it has hired are not new.
Such groups as Corpwatch, based in California,
have been reporting on its problems for years.
In fact, many observers wonder how FKTC
got the $592-million contract in the first place.
It was awarded to it by the US State Department in
the summer of 2005. Many of its competitors, such
as Framaco, Parsons, Fluor and the Sandi Group,
which have established track records for building
secure embassies or large-scale construction
projects, were viewed as possessing far stronger
experience. Many contractors believe that a
high-level decision was made to favor a
Kuwait-based firm in appreciation for that
country's support of the invasion and occupation
of Iraq.
Investigations by the State
Department's inspector general and his counterpart
in the US military in Iraq found no evidence of
wrongdoing. However, the State Department
inspector general, Howard Krongard, did
acknowledge that recruiters in foreign countries
may have misled potential workers about the pay
and living conditions and said he had told the US
Justice Department about the situation. The
Justice Department has also launched a preliminary
inquiry into these allegations, just to see if
they warrant any further investigation.
But during testimony before the House of
Representatives Oversight Committee last Thursday,
Rory Mayberry, a former subcontract employee of
the FKTC, said he believes that at least 52
Philippine nationals had been kidnapped to work on
the embassy project. He testified:
Mr Chairman, when the airplane took
off and the captain announced that we were
heading to Baghdad, all you-know-what broke out
on the airplane. The men started shouting; it
wasn't until the security guy working for First
Kuwaiti waved an MP5 [submachine-gun] in the air
that the men settled down. They realized that
they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad
...
I've read the State Department
inspector general's report on the construction
of the embassy. Mr Chairman, it's not worth the
paper it's printed on. This is a cover-up and
I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to set
the record straight.
Let me spell it out
clearly. I believe these men were kidnapped by
First Kuwaiti to work on the US Embassy. They
had no passports because they were confiscated
at the Kuwait airport. When the airplane touched
down at Baghdad airport, they were loaded into
buses and taken away. Later, I found that they
were being smuggled into the Green Zone. They
had no IDs, no passports, nothing. They were
being smuggled in past US security forces. I had
a trailer all to myself in the Green Zone. But
they were packed 25 to 30 in a trailer, and
every day they went out to work on the
construction of the embassy without the proper
safety equipment.
Another former
employee, John Owens, who worked as a general
foreman from November 2005 to June 2006, said
conditions were deplorable, "beyond what even a
working man should tolerate".
The contract for these workers said
they had to work 12 hours a day, seven days a
week, with some time off on Friday for prayers.
A few people from India told me they were making
$240 a month. A guy from Sierra Leone got paid
$300 a month. A Pakistani worker told me he got
$900 a month, but that he had to pay additional
costs for their work permits and visas, and that
all told he was making about $300 a month after
those costs.
Many of the workers were
verbally and physically abused, intimidated, and
had their salary docked for as much as three
days' pay for reasons such as being five minutes
late, sitting down on the job, and other crazy
stuff. Because I was the only American on-site
working for First Kuwaiti, many of the workers
thought I had the power to help them with their
problems. Workers often came to me and told me
they hadn't been paid overtime or that their
salary had been shorted. They also came to me
with their health problems, asking me if I could
go off-site and get them some medication.
It is not uncommon for a construction
company to use native workers or even foreign
workers to build an embassy. I witnessed this at
the other embassy-construction sites I have
worked on. However, I believe that if more
Americans had been on-site at this embassy, the
abuses I witnessed would not have been taking
place. No American company would treat people
the way I saw those people being treated. As I
think about it, given the size of this job, my
experience tells me that [the] State Department
would usually have far more American staff
members on hand to oversee the construction
project.
FKTC did not send an official
to testify at the hearing. But in a written
statement, it denied the allegations about workers
being mistreated and said it was doing a good job
against the difficult backdrop of rising violence.
First Kuwaiti is still a US contractor and working
on embassy projects in Asia and Africa.
It
is worth bearing in mind, regarding wages paid to
workers, that the Bush administration had
previously suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which
required contractors to pay "prevailing wages" for
labor used to fulfill government contracts.
Another irony regarding the embassy is
that like much US planning in Iraq, it was
conceived nearly three years ago on the optimistic
assumption that stability was around the corner,
and that the military effort would gradually draw
down, leaving behind a vast array of civilian
experts who would remain intimately engaged in
Iraqi state-building. That assumption is no longer
valid.
The embassy site is also within
easy range of Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim militants,
whose attacks on the Green Zone are becoming more
frequent and deadly, which helps explain the
concern when, in a security breach, architectural
plans for the compound were briefly posted on the
Internet in May.
David Isenberg
is a senior research analyst at the British
American Security Information Council, a member of
the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a
research fellow at the Independent Institute, and
an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project
of the Center for Defense Information, Washington.
These views are his own.
(Copyright
2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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