Zainab

Zainab Shtet photo by Alalam newspaper

I cannot imagine what the life of Zainab Shtet is like. And nor can you. Her father, Mohammed, compelled by dire financial circumstances, placed her as maid for a pittance when she was barely ten. His excuse can never abrogate his responsibility in his daughter’s unspeakable ordeal. Her employer is an affluent family of five, a husband and his wife and their three sons, living in a large villa in the swanky Al-Wahda neighborhood, in the suburbs of Oujda. The husband is a judge, an arbiter of justice, a guardian of society’s moral compass. Zainab, who is eleven-years old today, was their servant, their beast of burden, their slave. And much like when Moroccan nobility owned slaves, the dignified judge and his family thought they had the right of life and death over her.

A few days ago, Zainab was found badly injured, disoriented, and running for her life away from the family’s home. She knew not where to go, to whom to talk; she was weak and hysterical, still a short distance from her employer’s villa, when she drew the attention of passersby. They stopped her. Their eyes widened in horror and their jaws dropped to the floor when they discovered the extent of her injuries.

Zainab looked emaciated. Her body was bruised and bleeding from beatings. She was branded on her lips with a red-hot iron. She was burned with boiling oil on her chest and private areas. She was illiterate. She never experienced the joy of playing with friends. Her future was decided for her: trudge around the mill till the day she dies. And a few days ago, she almost did.

The case of Zainab is a shocking reminder of how the mentality of some members of our society is still encapsulated in a primitive time we thought was long dissolved by our civility and modern education. It is an indicator the feral violence we thought subdued still writhes beneath the surface of our perfunctory affability. For I think that, albeit Zainab’s plight was exceptional in its savagery, the unlawful employment, physical, mental, and sexual abuse of underage children is a pervasive problem in a Morocco where employing maids is believed to elevate one’s social status. The issue fronts and centers only when the insidious abuses are discovered, which often happens by sheer happenstance.

The application of the law to the facts should serve justice in this case for the facts are undeniable. However, there have been precedents in Morocco’s judicial annals where exonerations were impossible, and yet justice was never served. The Moroccan justice system is replete with decisions warped by corruption and partnership. The judge-perpetrator has already been reported trying to hound the victim’s father to settle the matter out of court. I am sure there is a gaggle of judges whose behavior in private circles does not comport with the principles of human rights and decency and who themselves employ underage children siding with him.

The father of Zainab is guilty, the judge and his family are guilty, and we as a society whose indifference exacerbates and prolongs the victimization of these children are equally accountable. Often when there is an outcry, it is too late, but the signs have been present all along and we chose to ignore them. The judge’s apathetic neighbors have been witnessing the torturers’ contemptible depredations against zainab for months; they heard her tormented cries and screams, their insults and the dastardly beatings.

I am reminded of a speech Mr. Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel gave at the White House in 1999 “The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.”

Let us not betray Zainab.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009