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Stranded Indian family marks end of ordeal with Eid

July 31, 2014

Stranded Indian

Riyadh, Jul 31: The ordeal of a stranded Indian family from Hyderabad finally came to an end with the climax being the wishful Eid Al-Fitr celebration with family and friends at home as they departed from King Khaled International Airport, Riyadh to India, celebrating the festival on Tuesday.

The Saudi government, the Indian Embassy in Riyadh, Shifa Al-Jazeera Hospital and some Indian social workers helped the family to go home after they could not facilitate their departure during the amnesty period due to non-availability of documents.

The saga of the family’s traumatic experience began with Mohammed Abdul Aziz from Hyderabad bringing his family here in 2000 and subsequently living illegally in the Kingdom.

Abdul Aziz, came to the Kingdom 19 years ago to work as an assistant pharmacist. He brought his wife Aneesa Begum and two children Hannan and Hadi on a family visa in 2000, but the same year he had a dispute with his employer and left his job to become a driver and do other small jobs for survival and livelihood.

However, he neglected to renew his iqama for 14 years and did not register his four children born in Riyadh subsequently — Noora, Aisha, Subhan and Mannan — due to poverty.

The children never went to school as they did not have proper documents like birth certificates.

However, they learned Arabic at home from their mother and could read the Holy Qur’an.

Aneesa Begum told Arab News that the family had not been able to make use of last year’s amnesty to return home. “We tried our best to get an emergency certificate to go home during the grace period but were unable to do so because we did not have the required documents.”

She said her husband had stayed illegally in the Kingdom because he wanted to support their poor family back home.

Luckily, Abdul Aziz’s sponsor never declared him an absconder (Haroob) although he had not been in touch with him for almost 15 years.

Abdul Aziz was subsequently held at the Shumaisi deportation center for several months after being detained in a routine inspection by the Riyadh police in the Batha area.

When he was arrested, the family faced further problems because their landlord evicted them for not paying the rent.

Furthermore, Abdul Aziz was facing separation from his family after languishing at the deportation center for months, but after the eviction from the rented house, the family stayed for some time at the SAPTCO bus stand in Azizia, where they were spotted by Indian social workers and eventually received aid from the Indian diplomatic mission, Shifa Al-Jazeera and Tarheel.

As the family requested assistance from the authorities to be granted final exit visas along with Abdul Aziz, their sole breadwinner, they received assistance from the embassy to return home on final exit visa on humanitarian grounds as they were without valid papers.

Indian Ambassador Hamid Ali Rao was regularly following the developments to facilitate the final exit for the stranded family, and embassy volunteer Shihab Kottukad along with other social workers helped the family get exit visas.

The family was moved to the Shifa Al-Jazeera polyclinic and provided initial accommodation.

Later, the embassy sponsored the family’s lodging and provided them with eight tickets to go home and transportation to the airport.

Shifa Al-Jazeera has also provided monetary help to the family amounting to 100,000 Indian rupees as financial assistance to enable them return home and resettle with family and friends.

Notably, the family celebrated Eid Al-Fitr here on Monday and reached home to participate in the festivities in Hyderabad on Tuesday, the day India and the rest of the world celebrated the festival sighting moon on Monday.

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Agencies
June 18,2020

Riyadh, Jun 18: Minister of Tourism Ahmed Al-Khateeb said that Saudi Arabia will resume tourist activities at the end of Shawwal (June 21) after a hiatus of more than three months due to lockdown measures imposed following the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic.

The minister made the remarks during a television interview after chairing the emergency meeting of the Arab Ministerial Council for Tourism on Wednesday. He said that the current indications are positive and that the Kingdom is ready to launch the summer program, which will be a boost for domestic tourism.

“It was revealed in a research study carried out by the Tourism Authority that 80 percent of Saudi citizens want to take advantage of domestic tourism. We will launch the domestic tourism program for the public after having made necessary coordination with the Ministry of Health and the concerned higher authorities,” he said.

Several Arab tourism ministers and officials of the relevant organizations attended the meeting, which discussed the challenges that the region’s tourism sector is facing due to the pandemic. Al-Khateeb pointed out that the Arab Ministerial Council for Tourism, headed by Saudi Arabia, held the virtual session in exceptional circumstances to discuss ways to get out of this pandemic and revitalize the tourism sector.

“Saudi Arabia has initiated a package of financial stimulus activities with a total value of more than $61 billion to protect jobs and businesses and reduce the economic burden of the crisis. The domestic tourism sector has benefited from it as one of the important economic sectors, as it covered 60 percent of salaries of Saudi employees in the private sector for a period of three months,” he added.

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Agencies
August 2,2020

Dubai, Aug 2: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced on Saturday that it has started operations in the first of four reactors at the Barakah nuclear power station - the first nuclear power plant in the Arab world.

Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC), which is building and operating the plant with Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) said in a press release that its subsidiary Nawah Energy Company "has successfully started up Unit 1 of the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant, located in the Al Dhafrah Region of Abu Dhabi".

That signals that Unit 1, which had fuel rods loaded in March, has achieved "criticality" - a sustained fission chain reaction.

"The start-up of Unit 1 marks the first time that the reactor safely produces heat, which is used to create steam, turning a turbine to generate electricity," said ENEC.

Barakah, which was originally scheduled to open in 2017, has been dogged by delays and is billions of dollars over budget. It has also raised myriad concerns among nuclear energy veterans who are concerned about the potential risks Barakah could visit upon the Arabian Peninsula, from an environmental catastrophe to a nuclear arms race.

Paul Dorfman, an honorary senior research fellow at the Energy Institute, University College London and founder and chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, has criticised the Barakah reactors' "cheap and cheerful" design that he says cuts corners on safety.

Dorfman authored a report (PDF) last year detailing key safety features Barakah's reactors lack, such as a "core catcher" to literally stop the core of a reactor from breaching the containment building in the event of a meltdown. The reactors are also missing so-called Generation III Defence-In-Depth reinforcements to the containment building to shield against a radiological release resulting from a missile or fighter jet attack.

Both of these engineering features are standard on new reactors built in Europe, says Dorfman.

There have been at least 13 aerial attacks on nuclear facilities in the Middle East - more than any other region on earth.

The vulnerability of critical infrastructure in the Arabian Peninsula was further laid bare last year after Saudi Arabia's oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais were attacked by 18 drones and seven cruise missiles - an assault that temporarily knocked out more than half of the kingdom's oil production.

On Saturday, Dorfman reiterated his concern that there is no regional protocol in place to determine liability should an accident or incident at Barakah result in radioactive contamination spreading from the UAE to its neighbours. 

"Given Barakah has started up, because of all the well-rehearsed nuclear safety and security problems, it may be critically important that the Gulf states collectively evolve a Nuclear Accident Liability Convention, so that if anything does go wrong, victim states may have some sort of redress," Dorfman told Al Jazeera. 

The UAE has substantial oil and gas reserves, but it has made huge investments in developing alternative energy sources, including nuclear and solar.

Experts though have questioned why the UAE - which is bathed in sunlight and wind - has pushed ahead with nuclear energy - a far more expensive and riskier option than renewable energy sources.

When the UAE first announced Barakah in 2009, nuclear power was cheaper than solar and wind. But by 2012 - when the Emirates started breaking ground to build the reactors - solar and wind costs had plummeted dramatically.

Between 2009 and 2019, utility-scale average solar photovoltaic costs fell 89 percent and wind fell 43 percent, while nuclear jumped 26 percent, according to an analysis by the financial advisory and asset manager Lazard.

There are also concerns about the potential for Barakah to foment nuclear proliferation in the Middle East - a region rife with geopolitical fault lines and well-documented history of nuclear secrecy.

The UAE has sought to distance itself from the region's bad behaviour by agreeing not to enrich its own uranium or reprocess spent fuel. It has also signed up to the United Nation's nuclear watchdog's Additional Protocol, significantly enhancing inspection capabilities, and secured a 123 Agreement with the United States that allows bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation.

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News Network
April 13,2020

Dubai, Apr 13: The UAE plans to impose "strict restrictions" on countries reluctant to take back their nationals working in the Gulf country in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak and restructure its cooperation and labour relations with them, a state-run media report said on Sunday.

Indian expatriate community of nearly 33 lakh is the largest ethnic community in UAE constituting roughly about 30 per cent of the country’s population. Among the Indian states, Kerala is the most represented followed by Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

The options being considered by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation include "imposing strict future restrictions on the recruitment" of workers from these countries and activating the "quota" system in recruitment operations, state-run WAM news agency reported, citing an official.

It said the options also include suspending memoranda of understanding signed between the ministry and concerned authorities in these countries.

Citing the unnamed official, it said these options are being considered after many countries did not respond to requests by their nationals to return home following the coronavirus outbreak.

The official made it clear that all countries of foreign workers in the UAE should be responsible for their nationals wishing to return to their countries as part of the humanitarian initiative launched recently by the ministry.

Earlier this month, the ministry launched the initiative to enable residents who work in the UAE and wish to return to their countries to do so during the period of precautionary measures undertaken in the UAE to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Employees will be asked to submit their annual leave dates or agree with their employers on unpaid leave.

UAE's Ambassador to India Ahmed Abdul Rahman Al Banna has said that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MOFAIC) had sent out a “note verbale” to all the embassies in the UAE, including the Indian mission, during the past couple of weeks on the issue.

“We have sent the note verbale and all the embassies have been informed including the Indian embassy in the UAE and even the Ministry of External Affairs in India,” Al Banna told Gulf News over phone on Saturday.

He said the UAE has offered to test those who want to be evacuated.

“We are assuring everybody that we have the best of the facilities, the best of the testing centres and we have tested more than 500,000 people,” he said.

“We are assuring them also of our cooperation to fly those who got stranded in the UAE for some reasons. Some got stuck because of the lockdown and closure of airports in India. Some were visiting the UAE.”

“We are offering our system and making sure that they are good (to fly) by doing all the tests and transport them according to the request of their own government,” he said.

The envoy said those who test positive for COVID-19 will remain in the UAE. “They will be treated in our home facilities,” he added.

The Kerala High Court on Saturday sought the central government's response to a petition seeking a direction to bring back Indians stranded in the UAE in view of the coronavirus outbreak in the gulf nation.

Considering the plea by Kerala Muslim Cultural Centre (KMCC) in Dubai, the court directed the Centre to file an affidavit on the steps taken by it to ensure the safety of Indians living there and bring back those stuck in the Gulf countries.

In its plea, KMCC, the organisation for non-resident Indians from Kerala, sought directions to the Ministries of External Affairs and Civil Aviation to provide exemptions in the international air travel ban to bring back those Indians stranded in the UAE.

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