OMAN HOME TO 100,000 ILLEGAL WORKERS
▶ They live in squalor to avoid labour inspectors, saving cash to send home
Indian national Ravi Dilwalla and two compatriots live in an abandoned building site on the eastern side of the Omani capital.
It has been their home for the past nine days but won’t be for much longer.
Every two weeks they are on the move, looking for other lodgings, often squalid, to escape labour inspectors looking for illegal foreign workers.
They survive by doing odd jobs, which are hard to come by, and sometimes the search leads to an ugly end at the hands of other illegal workers.
“My friend was stabbed by a Pakistani man for taking his customers by charging only half the price to wash their cars,” Mr Dilwalla said.
“He was in hospital for two weeks and then got deported because he had entered the country illegally.
“They never found the man who stabbed him.”
There are no official statistics on how many illegal workers – are in Oman. But some labour experts put the figure at more than 100,000.
Hareb Al Falahy, an independent recruitment consultant, said the workers entered Oman mainly by sea, and mostly through the UAE, on boats owned by people traffickers.
“It is difficult to know exactly how many are here illegally, but 100,000 or above is not an exaggeration,” Mr Al Falahy said.
Oman has one of the longest shorelines in the region, stretching for 1,700 kilometres.
EU figures show the international waters off Oman territory to be among the busiest in the world because of oil exports from other Gulf countries.
Mr Al Falahy said the favourite dropoff point for human smuggling is the Musandam Peninsula.
It faces the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway shared by Oman and Iran.
In 2010, Oman declared an amnesty for illegal workers, and more than 70,000 of them returned to their homelands.
Most of the deported foreign workers were from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and were working in Muscat.
Mohammed Rahman, a Bangladeshi, is on his second stint as an illegal worker. He was sent home in 2010, but found his way back to Oman from the UAE in 2015.
“I lost my job as a bricklayer in the UAE and decided to pay Dh3,500 to an Indian with a fishing trawler to come to Musandam from Fujairah,” Mr Rahman said.
“There were 14 of us in that vessel. The sailing took us four hours and we were dropped off on the beach.
“Most of us had friends waiting for us to put us up in temporary accommodation.”
On average, Mr Rahman makes about 180 Omani rials (Dh1,765) a month from odd jobs, such as gardening and washing cars.
After sending home half his earnings, he has very little left for rent, bills and food.
“I decided to live rough to save money – sometimes in the mosques, in the cow sheds on farms or construction sites with my friends,” Mr Rahman said.
Coastguard officers say stamping out people smuggling is difficult.
“It is a thriving business. It mostly goes on from Oman to the UAE or vice versa,” one officer said.
“People make money from it. It is hard to stop because Oman has a very open coastline, and we don’t have the resources to patrol every square kilometre of the sea.”
Residents in most towns in Oman are wary of thousands of undocumented foreign workers, with no fixed address or proper papers.
“If they commit a crime, where would you find them?” asked Suleiman Al Haddafi, a Muscat resident.
“They move around from one town to another. It is also frightening to know that they are around in large numbers without money or food.”
Some residents have become nervous when the workers knock on their doors looking for odd jobs.
“They roam the streets and go door to door looking for work,” said Ghalib Al Fazzari, who lives in Musannah in the Batnah region.
“They don’t demand much payment – anything will do – but how can you trust people staying in the country illegally, especially when they are desperate for cash?”
My friend was stabbed by a Pakistani man for taking his customers by charging only half the price to wash their cars. He was in hospital for two weeks then deported