Saudi Arabia declares all atheists are terrorists in new law to crack down on political dissidents

[struggle4progress]

7. The problems posed by Saudi Arabia go far beyond issues of mixing religion and politics

A Maid’s Execution
BY BASHARAT PEER
JANUARY 11, 2013

... On Wednesday, the Saudi Arabian government beheaded Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan woman who had worked as a maid ... She said that she had been bottle-feeding him when he choked. Her employer, Naif Al-Otaibi, accused her of strangling the child ... Nafeek was tried .. without legal representation ... “I worked in a garage as a mechanic, but I didn’t make enough. I got married and had a child. So I came here. I thought I am going to Mecca. I will get to perform the Hajj and earn a lot more than I ever would,” he said. “I didn’t know people here would treat us like dirt” ... Sumiati Binti Salan Mustapa, I learned, was a twenty-three-year-old Indonesian maid who had been hospitalized in the Saudi city of Medina in November of 2010, after her employer had cut off her lips with scissors, burnt her back with an iron, pulped her legs with beatings, and broken a finger ... Days after her ordeal, Saudi employers murdered another Indonesian maid, the thirty-six-year-old Kikim Komalasari, whose body had been dumped in a garbage bin ... In yet another incident in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, a forty-nine-year-old Sri Lankan maid named Lahadapurage Daneris Ariyawathie had nails and metal objects hammered into her by her employers in March, 2010, after she complained of being overworked ...