Life is indeed priceless

| by Hana Ibrahim

( January 22, 2013, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Rizana Nafeek's sad saga of life began in 2005. In order to augment the income of an already impoverished family of five, she sought greener pastures. The surreptitious manner in which her age and other birth details in the travel documents were altered, is now history, as is her life.

A voyage undertaken with a world of hopes, aspirations and expectations came to an agonizing end at the end of an executioner's weapon on 9 January 2013. The so-called Saudi 'justice' passed off as Sharia Law, was meted out to a hapless domestic servant, employed to carry out domestic chores, but asked to do much more.

We don't aim to sit in judgment of a seemingly unjust and inhumane system of laws practiced by another country; suffice to say, the sublime truth of the often used axiom, 'to err is human and to forgive is divine' does not seem to hold any water in the deserts of the Middle East.

Many an editorial and an op-ed have been written about this forbidding tale of the young Sri Lankan woman over the past few weeks. But no amount of words or paper can change that final chilling reality, that of Rizana's execution at the hands of the Saudi Government. The tragedy is, this was not the first nor will it be the last example of such a cruel fate to befall a Sri Lankan, men and women, employed as foreign domiciles, not only in the Saudi Kingdom, but the entire Middle East and the Gulf States.

But every sad ending, every miserable story and every wretched action of man has the ability to throw up something positive, a redeeming quality of action, which if taken in context and contemplated upon, helps restore faith in humanity and human dignity.

Life, as we know, is priceless. So is a mother's love for her offspring. There is no amount of money that would help bring back a loved one back to life. The mother of the infant Rizana is purported to have killed, no doubt understood this in a warped sense, when she demanded life for a life, and not blood money for a life. Yet, Saudi Arabia put a prize on Rizana's life and as reports would have it, offered Rs 1 M to her mother, who flatly refused to accept such a ration of compensation.

The gesture is significant and shames many Sri Lankan Muslim politicians, particularly the deputy minister from Kathankudi, who accepted the paltry amount on the family's behalf, and others who have been issuing statements to the media that they are procuring financial aid from Saudi Arabian individuals and agencies for the Nafeek family.

As the mother had said to the website 'Jaffnamuslim' even if Saudi Arabia offered a thousand corers (ten billion), that would not compensate the loss of her daughter or bring her back to life. The onus of mitigating the issue was on Sri Lanka and her government, and more in particular, on the Ministry of External Affairs. Another failure on the part of the External Affairs Ministry apparatus is no surprise. It has also been alleged that the Sri Lankan Government did not even chip in towards the legal expenditure incurred by the Nafeek family in this matter.

Closing barn gates after the horses have bolted did not help yesterday, and nor would it, tomorrow. The lessons to be learnt are many, but there are too few to learn them. Yet Rizana's mother exhibited that rare kind of courage and stoicism that is usually found in the living fibre of our rural villagers, whether they are Muslims, Tamils or Sinhalese.

By refusing to accept any monetary compensation from the Saudi Kingdom, Rizana's mother sent a very resilient and clear signal to everyone concerned that in a land in which a peon is taking bribes to push a paper from one desk to another, where big and small government servants are deeply entrenched in both giving and taking money to do the most menial of jobs, where politicians are openly taking santosam even before they approve a project, where drug traffickers and owners of houses of ill-fame have more acceptability in government circles than a hardworking graduate, where money is God and givers and takers of bribes are the Pusaris of these ugly Temples of God, there are some genuine specimen of human beings who still value human qualities, self-esteem and conscionable practices. That is the redeemable feature of this sad saga.

( The writer is the editor of the Ceylon Today )