This is a conversation with Zecharias Zelalem. He’s an Ethiopian journalist with Addis Standard as well as a freelance journalist focusing on the Horn of Africa region. More recently, Zelalem has also been investigating widespread abuses of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, and in particular Lebanon.

This is why I wanted to have this conversation with Zecharias. The conversation around the abusive Kafala system in Lebanon rarely includes the stories of the people who leave their homes to go work in a stranger’s house in another country. This episode is the third on the Kafala system in Lebanon focusing on Ethiopian migrant domestic workers, who constitute the majority of those working in Lebanon.

Migrant Domestic Workers are, alongside the rest of the labor force, the primary force keeping Lebanon running. And yet, despite their central role, they are regularly ignored alongside the widespread abuses affecting them.

In a previous episode, I spoke with Banchi Yimer, founder of Egna Legna who define themselves as “community-based feminist activists working on migrant domestic workers’ issues and general women’s issues in Lebanon and Ethiopia.” You can find it here.

And in an earlier episode I spoke with Sami, a Beirut-based Ethiopian activist with, Mesewat, a solidarity network that supports migrant workers in Lebanon and the Middle East, and Ali, an activist with the Anti-Racism Movement. It was recorded at one of the Migrant Community Centers in Beirut. You can find it here.

You can find these episodes on your podcast app or on the website – they are at number 2 and 5.

You can follow the podcast on Twitter @FireTheseTimes.

If you like what I do, please consider supporting this project with only 1$ a month on Patreon or on BuyMeACoffee.com. You can also do so directly on PayPal if you prefer.

Patreon is for monthly, PayPal is for one-offs and BuyMeACoffee has both options.

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Zecharias Zelalem’s investigations:

• Special Edition: Ethio-Lebanese corpse disposal inc: A bilateral effort to cover-up Ethiopian deaths in Lebanon
• In-depth Analysis: Amidst fear of #COVID19 Ethiopian domestic workers coerced into making heavy payments to flee Lebanon
• Feature: Addressing Ethiopians in Lebanon a Foreign Ministry official threatens to sue Addis Standard
• In-depth analysis: Seven Ethiopians die in Lebanon as new Ethiopian Consulate policy abandons citizens to their fate

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Transcript prepared by Thomas Cugini and Antidote Zine:

This institutional unwillingness to address the endless woes of domestic workers is a massive stain on Lebanon’s reputation. And thanks to the collective efforts by members of the press and by activists, it will not go away. This will not be shoved under the rug. This is the era of social media, and the cries of these women will not be confined to the homes of their employers.

Zacharias Zelalem: My name is Zecharias Zelalem. I am an Ethiopian journalist with the Ethiopian magazine Addis Standard, and I also freelance for a variety of other Horn-of-Africa-centric portals. My focus is on the Horn of Africa and on domestic workers and their plight in the Middle East.

Joey Ayoub: Thanks a lot for taking the time to talk with me about this. Hopefully listeners will have listened to the previous two episodes that I published on this topic. The reason I wanted to talk to you especially is because you happen to be an Ethiopian journalist who has done very good investigative work on what’s been happening from an angle that I feel most Lebanese, even those who are well-meaning, simply do not get. Our media back home, for various reasons, tends to be pretty bad (and there’s a podcast episode on that as well). 

So if you don’t mind, give us some background into why so many Ethiopians go to Lebanon.

ZZ: In terms of the demographic of Ethiopians who migrate to the Middle East—whether it’s Lebanon, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia, it’s pretty similar. They tend to be women from rural upbringings, and they tend to be on the lower half of the food chain in terms of income. They tend to come from poorer families. 

Ethiopian women have been migrating to work as domestic workers in Lebanon for much of the past twenty-five years, but things saw an uptick starting in 2010 when Ethiopia went through a series of economic downturns—maybe not as drastic as what we’ve seen in Lebanon, but we saw the value of Ethiopian currency, the birr, go down by something like half, soaring inflation rates, and skyrocketing living costs. These made living life in Ethiopia considerably more difficult for what was formerly the Ethiopian middle class; we saw what has since become the very vast gap between the rich and the poor in the country. 

So most of the Ethiopians who do migrate to Lebanon tend to be those from farming backgrounds, those whose families have struggled to adjust to life post-2010. They also migrate in large numbers due to a lack of awareness of what awaits them in Lebanon—something that many of us have focused on in our work. And it will continue this way, because Ethiopia has still failed to address the job-creation woes that it has found itself in for much of the past ten, fifteen years or so.

JA: For those who don’t know, there is this thing called the kafala system. I’ll just give a brief summary. In the case of Lebanon, the legal status of migrant domestic workers—let’s say the Ethiopian women who go to Lebanon—is dependent upon the whims of their sponsor. What this translates into, according to many migrant domestic workers themselves, including Banchi Yimer who I have interviewed previously on the podcast, is essentially a state of de facto slavery. It’s a matter of whether you’re lucky enough to be put in a family that is nice and decides to treat you well, or you’re unlucky and horrible things follow. 

Speaking of these horrible things, unfortunately, can you give some kind of summary of your investigations into the kafala system in Lebanon, and how both the Lebanese and the Ethiopian governments have been reacting to reports of widespread abuse coming from journalists and human rights organizations? If you don’t mind, also mention your interactions with the ministry of foreign affairs’ Middle Eastern envoy.

ZZ: The kafala system has been the problem child of Ethiopian society for something like two decades now. We’ve normalized it to the extent that it does not provoke the same sort of fury that it might have ten or fifteen years ago. This, alongside the fact that Ethiopia lacks a media culture, is one of the reasons why not only in Lebanon but even in Ethiopia the plight of domestic workers has been shoved under the rug for a long time. That’s why I wanted to take a greater look and investigate some of the shortcomings in institutional measures to protect their dignity. I wanted to learn what exactly it was that led to such ghastly numbers of deaths, injuries, rapes, and suicides. 

Starting in early 2019, I started investigating the deaths. I looked primarily into the deaths of three Ethiopian domestic workers, all of whom had died between January and May of 2019, and I found a common pattern that linked all three of them. The victims are Tigist Belay, Mulu Tilaye, and Desta Tafesse. Though they all lived in different parts of Lebanon, they all died in considerably suspicious circumstances. All three of the deaths pointed to some sort of wrongdoing or foul play involving their employers.

In all three cases, the Ethiopian consulate facilitated the transport of the remains of the victims to Ethiopia and did very little else. I was able to obtain the police reports, which showed that typically after the death of an Ethiopian domestic worker in Lebanon, a representative from the consulate of the Ethiopian government might go as far as a meeting with police officers involved in the case, maybe even communicating with the employer, but do little else. So the human remains would be sent to Ethiopia for burial, and you would hear little else. In the first part of my investigation, I decided to name it “The Ethio-Lebanese corpse disposal inc.” because after recognizing the pattern, it just seemed like an operation. Someone dies and then a well-oiled machine works to quickly dispose of the body, go through whatever bureaucratic processes are needed to amend things with Lebanese authorities or the police, and then they’re back to their desk jobs. 

This would go on and on, and the more I looked at it—it’s very easy to see why the tally of deaths among Ethiopians was skyrocketing, because there was literally nothing being done to prevent this. Nothing on the part of Ethiopian authorities to demand any sort of accountability, any sort of answers, or some sort of closure for most of the families. I went as far as visiting the families in their homes in Ethiopia, and they all told me that besides receiving a phone call one day and being told that their daughters had died, they had received no other communications and no other information from anybody in the Ethiopian government with regard to the death of their loved ones. 

As I mentioned earlier, these families come from rural backgrounds, and a lot of them are poor and unable to afford a lawyer. So these are the last people you would expect to pursue justice, as many of them are unaware of what their rights are, and many of them don’t have the means to do anything beyond visiting the foreign ministry and asking in vain for some sort of answer. And they don’t even get that. These families are so vulnerable, and they are deemed in the eyes of the Ethiopian government as meek and voiceless.

Another disturbing trend that I’ve been able to track in the past few months or so is that even after death, a lot of these families don’t receive the insurance money that they’re entitled to. When Ethiopians go to work as domestic workers in Lebanon, even under the kafala system, Lebanese employers have to pay for medical health insurance, so in the case of death or injury there is a sum of money that’s delivered to the family. Even this money disappears without a trace. 

This was what was happening when Ethiopian media, and Ethiopian society as a whole, normalized the plight of these women and systematically turned a blind eye. The longer this went on, Ethiopian consulate staff members felt more emboldened to engage in a variety of practices, including theft. I might as well announce it now: I have a report coming out on how Ethiopian diplomats managed to rob Ethiopian domestic workers and the Ethiopian community in Lebanon of their hard earned money. That will come out in the next few days. This is what happens when Ethiopian society as a whole turns a blind eye to the suffering of so many of their own women in the Middle East. 

The longer this went on, the worse some of the practices got. After two or three reports into this, and after the involvement of many of our Lebanese allies (including a mutual friend of ours, Timour Azhari, and his reporting—and of course the efforts of the one and only Joey Ayoub), a lot of international media outlets and activists started to take greater notice, and these stories that were once talked about only maybe in the homes of these employers started to make the headlines.

When this happened, and when the Ethiopian government came under increasing pressure to address the issue because of the ample negative press, I believe it was in October of 2019, the foreign ministry announced that it would send a fact-finding delegation to Lebanon to meet with the community and to attempt to address their problems. Initially, for someone like me who had just gotten into investigating this issue, it seemed somewhat promising that a mere five, six months after the first of my reports was published in the Addis Standard, the Ethiopian government appeared willing to take notice and seemingly, at least on paper, appeared willing to do what it could to reverse the situation.

Something else that must be noted is that Ethiopia had the same administration, the same ruling party, in government for the past twenty-seven years, up until 2018. So the common view was that the new administration under prime minister Abiy Ahmed post-2018 might see things in a different light, might take a different course of action, and might enact the sorts of policies that would diminish the numbers of deaths and injuries that Ethiopians incur in Lebanon. 

Unfortunately it did not turn out that way. What happened was that in December, when the Ethiopian foreign ministry’s fact-finding delegation finally did travel to Beirut, at a meeting that it had with members of the community and domestic workers there, it told those gathered that they had to stop communicating with press. I should mention names. The Ethiopian foreign ministry’s director general for Middle Eastern affairs is Shamebo Fitamo. He told those gathered that they had to stop communicating with journalists because they were “tarnishing their country’s reputation” this way. He singled out my outlet, as well as openDemocracy, which also published some of my work. He urged those there to stop communicating with these outlets, and he went as far as threatening to sue me, and he warned those there that he was aware of who in Lebanon was communicating with me. 

This was recorded by a member of the community, who passed it on to me, and that’s how I became aware of it. It was clear to me from that point on that the Ethiopian government was not intent on taking measures that would curb the problem. Instead it just wanted to return to the pre-2019 era where deaths of Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon barely made headlines and where the Ethiopian government and consulate members could get away with virtually anything. They could act with impunity and not have to deal with inquiring members of the press.

For me, this was very disappointing as a whole, and it made me realize that we would have to double our efforts. Members of the Ethiopian press would have to double their efforts if we are to see any sort of concrete change in terms of institutional efforts to safeguard the dignity of Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon.

JA: The Filipino Embassy in Lebanon, the Filipino government, said that it would cover the costs of Filipino domestic workers in Lebanon, most of whom are also women, if they want to go back to the Philippines. My understanding is that there’s no equivalent plan as far as the Ethiopian government is concerned. Correct?

ZZ: Yes, you’re correct. Since the Lebanese revolution and Lebanon’s economic downturn, embassies and consulates and various diplomatic missions here—primarily the Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and several others—have been working around the clock to evacuate their citizens. We must add here that Ethiopian domestic workers are the lowest paid among domestic workers in Lebanon, due to the fact that there are no government representatives lobbying for their rights and due to the fact that they are generally neglected. There has been no one to argue on their behalf to improve their conditions at all. This has not been the case with the Philippines and with other communities in Lebanon. 

Because of the cutthroat approach that the embassy of the Philippines has had, we’ve seen a very gradual improvement of the conditions of Filipino domestic workers, who can now almost demand a minimum salary. And even abusive Lebanese employers are less likely to inflict abuse upon them because they are aware that doing so might turn into a diplomatic incident. Among Ethiopians, since this doesn’t exist, the prevailing belief is that you can do anything to an Ethiopian and nothing will happen. 

Ethiopian domestic workers are already the lowest earning demographic among domestic workers in Lebanon. They form the majority of domestic workers in Lebanon, almost eighty percent (seventy-seven percent was the number Amnesty International put out in a report two years ago), and they’re the lowest paid. They can earn as low as 150 dollars a month, whereas domestic workers from other countries can command as much as 250-300 US dollars a month, which for domestic workers makes all the difference.

The Ethiopian consulate has not taken any considerable measures to evacuate its citizens from the country. It has only decided to assist those who were able to pay a 550 US dollar fee. Those who were able to pay that fee would then be placed on a waiting list, and some would wait as much as five, six, seven months before finally being jetted back to Ethiopia. As the value of Lebanese currency plummeted, as foreign currency evaporated in Lebanon, the Ethiopian consulate demanded 550 US dollars—not even its equivalent in lira—from the lowest paid domestic workers seeking evacuation. So those who are truly in need of being evacuated have not been evacuated. There is no real privilege being an Ethiopian domestic worker in Lebanon, but those who were slightly better off than some of their kin were the ones who were able to get out, and even then only after waiting five, six, seven months. 

Right now, the most vulnerable, endangered domestic workers were not able to get out of the country—and they were not evacuated because they could not afford the exorbitant fee demanded of them by the consulate. So they remain in Lebanon, where, if it continues like this, there will be a humanitarian crisis. A lot of these domestic workers no longer have savings; a lot of their savings disappeared over the course of the past few months with the layoffs and the economic crisis. So now they’re struggling just to be able to put food on the table and cover rent costs. A lot of them have already been evicted from their homes. A lot of them are begging. CNN spoke to women who said that some are even being forced into prostitution.

Despite this, Ethiopia’s foreign minister himself, Gedu Andargachew is his name, addressed the issues of Ethiopian migrants pleading to be evacuated in a national address on the state broadcaster, and he said, Due to our inability to quarantine the large number of migrants that would be coming from countries like Lebanon, they’re just going to have to patiently wait. That’s extremely demoralizing if you have been in Lebanon without a job, with virtually no money, for the past eight months, barely able to eat. To be told by your leaders that you’re going to have to wait! 

If that wasn’t bad enough, Shamebo Fitamo actually went out and said, Look, Ethiopians in Lebanon being repatriated en masse would endanger the well-being of the 110 million people in Ethiopia. This devalues these people, and renders them less human, less of a citizen, than the rest of the country. It’s shocking, and quite frankly, as an Ethiopian, it’s embarrassing that our own taxpayer-maintained leaders are resorting to using this sort of dehumanizing, degrading rhetoric and language to describe our own fellow citizens in their time of need.

JA: As you mentioned, you started investigating early last year. As it happens, since then quite a lot of things have been happening in Lebanon: the uprising in October and the parallel economic crisis, which started before October but definitely took a downward turn since then as well. At the same time, as far as migrant domestic workers are concerned, as you mentioned there seems to be a bit more attention on this issue. Timour Azhari definitely deserves a lot of credit for this due to his tireless work, initially at The Daily Star and now with Al Jazeera. 

Also, an organized migrant domestic workers movement in Lebanon has been trying to see the light for almost a decade now, but the Migrant Domestic Workers Union has simply not been recognized by the government, which is using very dubious methods to limit this organization and its power. At the end of the day we are talking about hundreds of thousands of migrant domestic workers in a country that’s only five to six million, and if they all decided to strike at the same time the whole country would come to a halt, which would obviously force the hand of the government to do something about what’s happening. 

Given that that’s not happening, and realistically might not happen any time soon, the next best thing is media attention, media pressure. There are ways for Lebanese activists and journalists to team up with Ethiopian journalists and activists (and indeed journalists and activists from other nationalities that are affected by the kafala system in Lebanon)—and that is not just as me as an activist hoping this might be the case; this is what we’re actually seeing. Timour Azhari’s reporting has actually forced the hand of the labor ministry in Lebanon to do some investigation. I have been involved in the movement to abolish the kafala system for almost a decade now, and these are some of the first signs we’re seeing that this might actually happen. It’s very small; it’s barely enough to have hope that things can change for the better; but it’s really the only thing that we have right now.

If you were able, as an Ethiopian journalist, to address many more Lebanese citizens than you’ve managed to so far through your writing, what would you want them to know specifically about how Ethiopian citizens are affected by the kafala system in Lebanon? You already mentioned the background, the fact that these workers come from lower socioeconomic status. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if even that is news to many Lebanese, because knowledge of Ethiopia in Lebanon (and for that matter the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and other countries affected) is really minimal—pretty much non-existent. So even though there is a direct flight between Addis Ababa and Beirut, this tends to be almost exclusively to pump in the workforce to maintain this kafala system. 

So just imagine that you have this large podium where you are able to address as many Lebanese people as possible. What would you want them to know about how the kafala system is actually affecting Ethiopian citizens?

ZZ: As you mentioned, I think Ethiopians would tip their hats off to our gallant Lebanese allies: the activists and journalists who are taking up the cause, who have taken notice of the goings-on in their homes and in their neighborhoods, and who have decided to take a stand against it. It’s very commendable to look at the log in the eye of your own society, in your own communities, so to speak. I’m eternally grateful for those who I could count on for sources of information, for a greater understanding on Lebanese society as a whole. I have many people—you, Timour Azhari, and plenty more—to thank for this. 

In terms of what the next step of the struggle would be, I would agree with you: there has to be bilateral cooperation between Lebanon and Ethiopia in terms of media and activists and human rights campaigners, because it’s sad to say, but this is the only way we’ve been able to see the minimal progress that we’ve been able to see in recent years. You mentioned that there have been discussions among Lebanese about finally doing away with the kafala system, about finding alternatives to what is essentially a stain on Lebanon as a whole. I think obviously we have to continue with this. 

At the same time, I also have to point a finger at Ethiopian society. We need to realize that this is a twenty-five-year-old problem. Ethiopians have been dying with regularity in Lebanon since 1995 or 1996, and the annual death toll has only increased. There has been no slowing of the rate of deaths, suicides, and cases of abuse of Ethiopians in Lebanon. In Ethiopia as a whole, due to the fact that we’ve had something like thirty years of the same authoritarian regime in power, there has been a sense of helplessness, that we could not change anything, that we are unable to affect any sort of institutional change. But I believe that myth has been debunked, since Ethiopia was able to do away with the previous administration via national uprisings in 2015 and 2016. They are what gave way to the ascension of the new post-2018 reform-era government. Of course, a lot remains to be desired, but that’s another topic. 

Ethiopian society as a whole needs to realize we need to grab the initiative. Right now the impetus is with the domestic workers; the impetus is with those calling for the kafala system to be abolished, so the more we condemn the government’s practices, the more we take a hands-on approach to solving the issues that have led to two domestic workers dying every week in Lebanon, the more likely we are to usher in change.

In terms of the Ethiopian press, we were very few working on this issue in 2019, but we did manage to put an end to a consular policy in September 2019 which had forbidden Ethiopians from heading in person to the consulate and pleading for intervention on behalf of a victim of abuse. Prior to the press getting involved, an Ethiopian would have to file a case with the foreign ministry in Addis Ababa, which was a lengthy bureaucratic process, which was set up with the intention of having the consulate wash its hands of all duties. This discriminatory policy was cast away due to pressure on the government that came as a result of ample press coverage.

This was one small victory, and there could be more victories and more giant leaps for Ethiopians in this battle against the kafala system if Ethiopian media and Ethiopian activists, alongside their many counterparts in Lebanon, collaborate so that more people—a global audience—can really see what has been confined to the bedrooms where these women are unfortunately locked in so often in Lebanon. 

For Lebanon as a whole—in Lebanese society, there’s always a progressive element, if you compare it with a lot of the other regional players, and especially with some of the states in the Middle East. There is an attempt to create some sort of national cohesion between varying peoples, ethnicities, religious groups, in society and in government. Whether or not it’s succeeded, I’m not really the proper person to speak on that. But there is that effort, whereas elsewhere in the Middle East (and especially in the Gulf countries) you will notice one powerful sect dominating others. In Lebanon there has been a serious attempt at preventing this from happening, so along with secularism and the relative freedom of worship, and taking in large numbers of refugees, there is a foundation to build upon. 

There are lots of things that are commendable about Lebanon as a whole, lots of progressive elements. But the fact is, this institutional unwillingness to address the endless woes of domestic workers is a black mark, a massive stain on the country’s general reputation. And thanks to the collective efforts by members of the press and by activists, it will not go away. This will not be shoved under the rug. This is the era of social media, and the cries of these women, whether we like it or not, will not be confined to the homes of their employers. The revolution will be tweeted, so to say. 

There are obviously many progressive Lebanese allies, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, but I don’t know, I feel that they tend to be on the periphery, are fringe elements of Lebanese society, which is sort of disappointing. I think the Lebanese people as a whole have to look at what their national standing looks like on a global scale while maintaining the kafala system, and I would like to see the voices calling for reform and eventual abolition of the kafala system become louder in Lebanon. I hope it’s a call that is adopted by a much larger section of the population than what there is now.

JA: Absolutely. I agree this has not yet become mainstream. I was on the streets as soon as the October protests started, and between October 18 and roughly mid-February or so, I could only count maybe a couple of protests that even mentioned the kafala system (it was never the main topic of a protest, to be clear), and these were mainly feminist-led, with a politics of intersectionality. For example, there was a feminist march I took part in where they had a number of signs with messages like, We are thinking about the migrant domestic workers who could not be with us. There is widespread knowledge—this is not something that’s hidden—that even if they could go out, they can only do so on a Sunday. As we know, unfortunately, many women don’t have even that.

Can you talk a bit about the protests in 2015 and 2016 that you mentioned? That’s around the same time that Lebanon had a big protest movement as well, in the summer of 2015. I would be very curious, if you can talk a bit about them. What were they about? Just as a matter of an open question for me, to see if I can have folks communicate from Lebanon and Ethiopia on parallel protest movements and how to link them up.

ZZ: In Ethiopia, from 1991 to 2018, it was the same collection of ruling party elites that controlled the government and monopolized much of Ethiopia’s security and political sectors. Over the course of that twenty-seven year period, things deteriorated. The period can be characterized as one where an authoritarian government reigned supreme and dissenting voices, opposition voices, were clamped down upon. Ethiopia, prior to 2018, was one of the world’s top jailers of journalists. I know of many friends who spent a year, two years, or longer in prison for either writing content that was critical of the government or for posting the wrong things about the government on Facebook. 

This was the reality of the time period that I grew up in. Eventually, push came to shove and people had enough, very similar to what we’ve seen in Sudan and in Algeria over the past two years. 2015 saw the first batch of protests, known as the Oromo protests because they started in Oromia, the largest region in the country. Anti-government protests that had started there then erupted across the country, and over the course of 2015 and 2016 these protests were violently clamped down upon. In that time period, there was something like a thousand deaths of innocent unarmed protesters due to the authoritarian regime feeling that it could crush the uprisings and restore its stronghold on power.

The protesters had plenty of questions, but the obvious one linking every protester was the lack of basic freedoms. My own Ethiopian journalism outlet, Addis Standard, was forced to close in 2016 as a result of the protests intensifying and the government measures meant to muzzle voices and independent reporting. The longer the protests went on, the government realized it was unable to maintain what it had maintained for twenty-seven years, so an era of reform was ushered in. It is what brought in the ascension of prime minister Abiy Ahmed in 2018. With his coming to power in 2018, most of the journalists and activists and political prisoners, who numbered in the tens of thousands, were released from prison, and independent outlets that had been forced into exile were allowed back in. 

Especially in the initial months, there was a very promising period of freedom where many thought that we could actually raise the standards that Ethiopians had had in terms of basic freedoms, especially in terms of being able to exercise the freedom of speech, which was the main pretext for arrest for twenty-seven years. That was part of what garnered the prime minister the votes to win the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. 

Of course, it’s been two years since then, and there are lots of shortcomings with the current government; too many to go in detail. But journalists are allowed to operate in the country with a lot less restrictions compared to the pre-2018 era, and we are only able to dissect the problem of domestic workers in Lebanon, and to criticize the institutional failings of the government and the consulate to this degree, due to some of the changes that were brought on as a result of the protests.

JA: I see. Zacharias, this has been really informative. Thank you a lot for this. Is there anything you want to expand upon or that I forgot to ask or anything like that?

ZZ: No—I mean, journalists are not supposed to take sides or anything like that; we’re supposed to be neutral parties and it’s the activists who have the right to be one-sided or whatever. But in terms of the kafala system I don’t think there are two sides. The humanitarian in anyone would point towards supporting the campaign to abolish it in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. Journalists, activists, whoever you are, lawmakers—anyone with remote knowledge of what it is to work as a migrant in the Middle East would take the side of those calling for its abolition. We’re not supposed to be taking part in a struggle as journalists, but this is one of the very few struggles around the world that would see activists and journalists fight alongside each other. A luta continua.

JA: Absolutely. Thank you a lot for your time, really.

ZZ: It’s my pleasure.