Ask the Author Live: Sarah Stillman on Foreign Workers for the U.S. Military
This week in the magazine, Sarah Stillman writes about foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Subscribers can read the full text; others can buy access to the issue via the digital edition.) On Wednesday, Stillman answered readers’ questions in a live chat. Read a transcript of the discussion below.
Sarah Stillman: Hi all, I’m here and looking forward to your questions!
COMMENT FROM DOUGLAS: Did you consider doing reporting for this story in Afghanistan?
SARAH STILLMAN: Indeed—I not only considered it, I did it. I had the opportunity to travel to Kandahar in the summer of 2010, where I did a significant amount of my reporting. As you’ll read in the piece, many of the stories come from Kandahar Airfield, where I spoke with Filipino, Nepali, Indian, and Sri Lankan workers.
COMMENT FROM WANDA BERSHEN: This is a truly appalling story—yet another instance of utterly corrupt practices overlooked by the US Military. A human rights disaster that is shameful. How can the US claim any legitimacy behaving like this?
SARAH STILLMAN: What’s interesting, Wanda, is that many of the alleged abuses taking place happen at the hands of foreign subcontractors. Many third-country nationals I met viewed the U.S. military as their allies in battling the companies for better treatment. Yet because the Pentagon’s contracting chains in Iraq and Afghanistan are so convoluted — sometimes as many as five or six tiers of subcontracts—accountability is hard to come by, and everyone involved can wash their hands of responsibility.
COMMENT FROM CARMEN CANEDA: Sarah, Was it difficult to get the workers to talk with you as a reporter?
SARAH STILLMAN: Often, yes—the climate of fear was quite pervasive. In some instances, workers were threatened in front of me by their subcontractor bosses, who claimed that the workers would be fired if they were seen speaking to a journalist. In the piece, I write that my reporting took more than a year, but the reality is that this project stretched all the way back to 2008 for me, when I took my first trip to Iraq—it took that long to built trustworthy contacts and create relationships with workers, managers, and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who would be willing to share their stories.
COMMENT FROM MICHAEL: Do other countries use the same practices?
SARAH STILLMAN: Absolutely. As I discuss in the piece, the Pentagon’s contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan draw upon the very same labor pipelines that have long supplied much of the Middle East—countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—with cheap foreign labor.
COMMENT FROM FRED: You really documented some very bad mistreatment of the foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why did it take so long for this story to come to light, given that we’ve been fighting wars in those countries for 8 or 10 years?
SARAH STILLMAN: Back in 2004, there was a devastating incident in which a caravan of Nepalese workers was hijacked by Sunni insurgents; eleven of the men, who were en route to jobs on U.S. bases, were shot, and a twelfth beheaded. Following that gruesome event, there was some brilliant reporting by T. Christian Miller, Cam Simpson, David Phinney, and others, exposing some of the alleged mistreatment of foreign workers on U.S. bases. It was great work, and the Pentagon responded with a range of reforms—after which, I suspect, many people considered the issue “handled.” But the mistreatment has clearly continued, and there are fewer journalists than ever before on U.S. bases to cover it. It’s hard enough to get readers to be willing to engage the issues facing U.S. troops; perhaps it’s war fatigue?
COMMENT FROM GUEST: Sarah, Wars are now commodities, fought and supplied with outsourced labor. Are there any indications from the DOD that more oversight and enforcement will reduce these kinds of exploitations? Thanks, Mark Ratledge
SARAH STILLMAN: Mark, that’s an interesting question, in light of what I wrote above. The reforms I mention from an earlier moment—which included an order from George W. Casey, then the commanding general for Iraq, mandating “measurable, enforceable standards for living conditions,” etc. — certainly made a concrete impact. For instance, at the time, many workers had their passports confiscated by their employer; after Casey’s order, which banned the practice, there seem to be very few workers facing that particular abuse. But the passport confiscation issue was one of the few easily enforceable portions of the order. Most of the other provisions proved toothless. The Commission on Wartime Contracting notes that a lot of positive change might come from more clear laws protecting third-country nationals, and more clear enforcement mechanisms. I suspect they’re right.
COMMENT FROM TOBIN: You write that these mistreated foreign workers lured to the U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq still seem to like the American military, even though it’s that same military that is failing to insure that the TCNs are given adequate food, housing, wages and so on. Isn’t this a contradiction?
SARAH STILLMAN: In some respects, yes. But the troops on the ground and the big decision-makers at, say, the Pentagon, are entirely different populations, and I think the third-country nationals actually recognize that distinction. Some told me that explicitly. Many of these workers are serving and interacting with soldiers on a daily basis — providing their haircuts, cooking their dinners, etc. — and, as a result, friendships sometimes form, and soldiers (or, in some cases, American contractors for companies like KBR) stand up for these workers against their foreign subcontractor bosses. I met several soldiers who would sneak the workers extra food, send gifts home to their families, etc. But the question of why these abuses are allowed to take place on U.S. bases in the first place is a good one.
COMMENT FROM JONES: How have subsidiaries of Halliburton continued to get government contracts at such a rate?
SARAH STILLMAN: This is a great mystery to me. (Although, to clarify, KBR is no longer a subsidiary of Halliburton, I believe.) In the course of my reporting, I encountered several companies who were accused of ignoring rather grave abuses, yet it seemed to have little impact on their ability to obtain new government contracts. It’s an issue the Obama Administration pledged to address, but I’m not sure we’ve seen as much movement on it as one might have expected.
COMMENT FROM GEORGE: What brought your attention to Fiji?
SARAH STILLMAN: I first became interested in the recruitment of workers in Fiji after meeting the three Fijian beauticians whom I write about in the story — Vinnie, Lydia, and Melanie. They worked at a beauty salon on a U.S. military base I visited in northwest Iraq in 2008. When the women told me the story of their deceptive recruitment, I began researching their claims, and I found that the same company that allegedly duped them had also deceived more than 20,000 other Fijians with promises of jobs in the Middle East. The scale of the claims was stunning, and I knew I’d want to incorporate that into the article. The Fijian press has done some fascinating reporting on the topic, too.
COMMENT FROM DARIN: This sort of thing reminds me of the old British tactic of essentially kidnapping and forcing men into the navy. Doesn’t having this sort of forced labor threaten the safety of our Armed Forces, in addition to being a horrible human rights violation?
SARAH STILLMAN: One thing that surprised me was that so many thousands of workers volunteer for these war zone jobs — albeit, quite often, on false terms. Back in 2004/2005, I think outright human trafficking was a bigger issue on U.S. bases; now, most of what you see involves impoverished men who were so desperate for employment that they took out enormous loans, sold their land/livestock, and risked their lives to do some of the world’s most dangerous work for U.S. forces. You’re right, though: having this unregulated, invisible army can pose a serious security risk to U.S. forces. For one thing, many of these workers are not trained to U.S. technical standards in their home countries, by no fault of their own. When a Congressional inquiry was launched into the accidental electrocution deaths of dozens of U.S. troops in Iraq, for instance, it came out that some of the workers who had done the electrical wiring were poorly trained third-country nationals. Then, of course, there’s the security threat posed by workers being smuggled on and off the base without proper clearances, which has also been raised by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting.
COMMENT FROM FR: What do you think the true cost of war would be if Americans had to support the military by taking these jobs in war zones?
SARAH STILLMAN: Interesting. Huge. Outsourcing so many of the logistics jobs on U.S. bases has also meant outsourcing the costs of war. For instance, a recent study showed that, for the first time in U.S. history, private contractor losses are now on a par with those of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that’s not even counting the fact that many third-country nationals’ deaths and injuries are never tallied, since contractors are ordered to self-report, with questionable compliance.
COMMENT FROM M. MALIK: What steps have the soldiers themselves taken to help the workers and address some of the issues they face?
SARAH STILLMAN: The workers’ fear of retribution is a major barrier to this. In the piece, I write about a major riot that took place last spring on the largest U.S. base in Baghdad. Workers in one of the labor camps claimed they weren’t getting enough to eat, and eventually, after more peaceful attempts to voice their grievances with the company, they rioted, with more than 1,200 Indian and Nepali workers throwing stones, smashing windows, overturning vehicles, etc. The U.S. military police were brought in to control the scene, and I spent time last summer with one of the military policemen (a sergeant) involved. He told me that his MPs tried everything to find out why the workers had rioted, and to help them, but everyone was too afraid to talk. Many of the workers had paid large recruiting fees to get their jobs, and they couldn’t afford the risk of speaking out, lest they be sent home to face loan sharks in India or Nepal.
COMMENT FROM GREGORY TAYLOR: I was shocked that Al Qaeda has started targeting these workers. Could you elaborate on what’s going on?
SARAH STILLMAN: This was particularly true in Iraq in 2004/2005. AQI and other insurgent groups realized that these foreign workers were one of the keys to the U.S. military’s supply chains. If they could target, say, Ghanaian and Bangladeshi men trucking containers of food and fuel from Kuwait into Iraq, then they could throw a wrench in the military’s ability to feed and move their troops. Often, militants would kidnap these foreign workers, make a video demanding that their home country ban its workers from supporting Coalition forces, and send it to the relevant government entities. In many cases, they were successful. After a Filipino worker named Angelo de la Cruz was kidnapped, the government of the Philippines decided to withdraw its limited number of troops from Iraq and make it illegal for its citizens to work there. Angelo was then freed and became a national celebrity.
SARAH STILLMAN: There are so many more great questions, but, sadly, we’re out of time. Thanks so much for reading and engaging the article, and I hope the conversation will continue in other forums.
THE NEW YORKER: Thanks to readers, and thank you Sarah Stillman.
Photograph by Peter Van Agtmael/Magnum.
No comments:
Post a Comment