By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Apr 9 2003 (IPS)

Despite the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, workers from Sri Lanka are continuing to travel to countries like Kuwait next door, even as Asian labour-sending countries try to see what role there would be for their workers in the Middle East after this war.

Lalith Peiris, executive director of the foreign employment recruitment arm of George Steuarts Ltd, a big Colombo conglomerate, told a discussion in Colombo this week that they were sending Sri Lankan workers and a group was leaving on Wednesday for Kuwait.

”A lot of Sri Lankans want to go to Kuwait and Saudi and those there do not want to come back. There is a misconception that Sri Lankan workers are desperate to return,” he said at the meeting organised by Action Network for Migrants (ACTFORM) and the local office of the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity (ACILS), a U.S. labour rights group.

Kalyani Herath of the state-owned Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Bureau (SLFEB) agreed: ”Many workers who are home on vacation and have return tickets are keen to return even though we have explained to them some of the possible problems in case the war escalates.”

She said some migrant workers’ families were more interested in mundane issues like seeking information about clearing goods sent by their mothers, wives or daughters working in the Gulf.

She said there are 155,000 Sri Lankans in Kuwait out of close to a million Sri Lankan workers in the Gulf.

But groups working with returning migrant workers had a different version of events.

Dudley Wijesiri, a consultant at the Migrant Workers Centre, said that according to information collected from migrant workers abroad and their families here, migrants were unaware of the two-dozen welfare centres set up for workers in Kuwait.

”Many of the workers have told us that they had no information about these centres,” he said, adding that workers in Kuwait also found it difficult to call their families in Sri Lanka because telephone lines were congested.

He said workers were also unaware of any Sri Lankan government plans to evacuate them in case the war spread to countries bordering Iraq or leads to disturbances or conflicts that stretch into months, even with the U.S. troops now in Baghdad.

At this stage, William Conklin, local representative of ACILS, said that other concerns that labour-sending governments should have are the major political changes expected in the Gulf in a post-Saddam era, especially now that U.S. troops are in Baghdad and the British in Basra.

“This would have an impact on the patterns of migration,” he added, and the government needs to discuss this and come up with a migration policy taking these new issues into account.

Wijesiri said that if the war, violence or instability continued for a longer period, this would adversely affect remittances, which total one billion dollars a year and are Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign exchange earner.

Some activists were also concerned about a recent proposal by the Philippines for labour-sending countries to initiate joint action to ensure their workers benefit from the opportunities that would emerge in rebuilding Iraq.

The proposal was made last week when Asian ministers from labour-sending countries met in Colombo to work out joint measures to boost foreign employment prospects for their nationals.

”We should not be seen benefiting from a war,” said Aruna Shantha of the Colombo Young Men’s Christian Association, which has welfare centres in Sri Lanka for returning migrants. ”On the other hand there would be so much unemployment in Iraq that the authorities there won’t have enough jobs for their own people.”

“Are we also going to share the spoils of war like the Americans? We should not be seen benefiting over a tragedy (even it means more jobs for our workers),a senior official, who declined to be named, from an NGO working with migrant workers, told IPS last week.

But ACILS’ Conklin, while noting that he was opposed to the war, said that for a country like Sri Lanka, migration for work was both a national policy and one of individual choice. Everyone had a legal right to work abroad and the attitudes of labour-sending countries have often been mercenary on this issue, activists say.

”My view is that most likely the Sri Lankan government would see this as an opportunity to find more jobs for their people,” he said.

Employment agencies have also welcomed the Philippines’ proposal. Suraj Dandeniya, President of the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agencies, said Sri Lanka was part of the development of Iraq in the late 1970s to mid-1980s with engineers, drivers and construction workers being among the 15,000 to 20,000 Sri Lankan workers working there.

“We lost control of that market thereafter. It’s a good opportunity for us to get back in and it would good (if Sri Lanka supports the Philippine proposal),” he said.

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