US rich accused of servant abuse as Saudi princess goes into hiding King's niece could face 15 years in American prison
Helena Smith in Washington Sunday March 24, 2002 The Observer Princess Buniah al Saud, socialite and niece of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, no longer wants to show her face. She has gone to ground in Washington, under the protection of the Saudi embassy. Her live-in maid, Ismiyati Soryono, has accused her of abuse, which has highlighted concerns about what human rights groups say are ugly truths about the treatment of foreign servants in the US. Now she faces criminal proceedings and a civil lawsuit. Worse, as far her uncle is concerned, has been the notoriety. There have been pictures of the timid Indonesian servant's bruised and battered body all over America's media. Viewers have been given virtual tours of the princess's plush, pink townhouse in Orlando, Florida, a favourite haunt of the Saudi royals. When Buniah, 41, arrived there last March to study at the University of Central Florida, she brought Soryono, 36, as her personal servant. In Saudi Arabia she had never hit her but, claimed Soryono, this changed in Florida. She says she was slapped for minor misdemeanours - such as walking in front of the princess while they were shopping. She said she was seldom paid her small salary of $200 a month and that the princess threatened to have her jailed when they returned to Saudi Arabia. One day last December Soryono tried to assert her rights. We are in America now, she told her employer. The princess told her she could treat her how she liked because she was a member of the Saudi royal family with a diplomatic passport. Soryono answered back. And then, she claims, the princess reached out with two hands and pushed her. She fell backwards down the stairs, hitting her head and injuring a knee. She ran to a neighbour's house and asked them to ring the police. She was taken to hospital, treated and discharged. When Orange County sheriff's deputies arrived, the princess denied pushing Soryono. Charges were not pressed because Saudi officials told investigators the princess had diplomatic immunity. But they sooned learnt from the State Department that she did not. Three days after the incident, they charged her with aggravated battery, a crime that can carry a sentence of 15 years. Detectives went to the luxury hotel in which the princess had taken refuge. She was handcuffed and brought to the Orange County jail, where she was photographed, fingerprinted and locked up overnight. In the morning, a judge released her on $5,000 bail and ordered her to surrender her passport. She also faces a civil action from Soryono. The lawsuit describes Soryono as having a 'meek disposition' but she is determined to stand up to her employer now. 'I dare to do that because I am right,' she told ABC television. Whatever the outcome of the trial, rights appear to be in short supply for thousands of migrant servants living in slave-like conditions in the US. In Washington, behind the doors of glamorous Watergate condominiums, elegant Georgetown mansions and the town houses of Embassy Row, lurk tales of horror and sadness. Often, servants - mostly poor women from Latin America, Asia and the Philippines - are held in virtual captivity. 'I am a Colombian and I know about long hours,' said Ruth Vargas. She recited the abuse she and her husband, Luis, endured in the employment of an ambassador to the Organisation of American States. They were forbidden to leave the premises, take telephone calls or talk to strangers. Pay was docked and the couple had to sleep in a single bed. Luis, hired as a chauffeur, became butler, valet and gardener. Ruth often worked from 6am to 2am. In the end they escaped. Such servitude is not uncommon, according to the Washington-based Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers' Rights. 'There are gradations of abuse,' said Joy Zarembka who heads the campaign. 'But domestics are, almost always, forced to work extraordinarily long hours, with little or no time off, and for little or no pay.' 'What we are seeing, despite all of our civil rights, is slavery in the shadow of the nation's Capitol,' said Edward Leavy, an immigration attorney who encountered his first runaway maid back in the Seventies. 'There are women kept under virtual house arrest, in basements, who have not seen the light of day for two years - people working up the block from the White House.' Last year, he said, a Brazilian engineer in Maryland received a six-and-a-half-year jail sentence for imprisoning a Brazilian maid in his home, without pay, for 20 years. The woman, who was forced to eat household leftovers 'as her employers padlocked the fridge', emerged one day with a stomach tumour the size of a football. Over the past decade more than 30,000 domestic workers have entered the US on special visas sponsored mainly by foreign diplomats and international civil servants. Others are deceived, the victims of traffickers who have them placed in situations of forced labour. They leave their own children back home - in what experts call 'chains of care' - to act as cleaners and nannies in jobs they hope will enable them to feed their families back home. In Washington and New York, it is estimated about 4,000 domestics a year are brought in by employees of the World Bank, UN and International Monetary Fund and US and foreign diplomats. While these organisations have missions to eradicate labour abuse and global poverty, a growing number of lawsuits has shown that their employees exploit the less privileged. 'All too often [the migrants] become some of the world's most disadvantaged workers held captive by some of the world's most powerful employers, who exploit, abuse, degrade, mock and humiliate them,' said Carol Pier of the Washington-based Human Rights Watch group. And, all too often, the offenders duck punishment by invoking diplomatic immunity. Under pressure, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund agreed last year to implement reforms including a code of conduct. Leavy said the World Bank was among the worst offenders. 'For 12 years, now, I've been writing World Bank officials foul correspondence, I mean really foul, saying they have to do something about it. I've never got a reply. They just don't seem to care.'
