Sarah Harte: Aged 21, I was traumatised by my arrest in the Middle East

Not wanting to minimise Tori Towey's nightmare, aspects of her experience have chimed with me. Because I too have run afoul of state/religious authorities in the Middle East

Tori Towey brushes back tears after arriving back at Dublin Airport from Dubai last Thursday. Picture: Sam Boal/Collins

It's hard to imagine what Tori Towey has endured. But she might still be languishing in a Dubai jail had she not been able to make a hurried call to her mother before they took her mobile phone. As she said, it would have looked like she “disappeared off the face of the earth”.

Ms Towey, the victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband, tried to take her own life and awoke to police and paramedics speaking Arabic. Instead of being taken to hospital, she was brought to a police station.

As she told this newspaper: “I called my mother because I was hysterical. I was like, I’m in a police station and don’t know why.”

Not wanting to minimise her nightmare, certain aspects of her experience chimed with me. 

Because, at 21, travelling alone, I was arrested at Jeddah airport. 

It’s one of those stories that I’ve never been able to parlay into an amusing anecdote.

The short version of the story is that, due to a bureaucratic error, I was made a resident of Saudi Arabia, which is illegal for a foreigner. 

Unwittingly, I was travelling on illegal travel documents, not something you want to do in a Gulf state. Naturally being unable to read Arabic, I had no idea. 

You need entry and exit visas to enter and to leave the country. I was attempting to board a flight to London, when the expression of the official checking my passport changed and he started shouting at me. 

Police arrived to take me away.

What I remember most clearly is sobbing that I had to get on the flight because I had finals in three weeks. Exams transpired to be the least of my problems.

A crucial intervention

I was lucky in that a Jordanian air official who had spent many years working in London saw me being carted off and followed me to the detention centre where he intervened. 

He arranged a phone call to my family in rural Saudi Arabia. 

He spoke to them on the phone (horrible for them), because I was incoherent, and had zero details of what I had done.

Smuggled out with a coat over my head  

There were many twists and turns, but in the end, I was released through a combination of this man’s intervention, and that of a family friend, now dead, who spoke fluent Arabic, lived in the country for decades, and had superb contacts.

At great risk to himself, this friend smuggled me out with a coat over my head, whereupon I lay down on the back seat of his car hiding. He called in favours to achieve this. 

I spent a night or two in his house which was highly illegal.

My rescuer and I could have been arrested

If either of us had been caught together as an unmarried man and woman, we would both have been arrested, and thrown in jail, and he risked losing his job and being deported. Religious police wandered the streets looking for unmarried couples.

The winding episode concluded with me over a week later arriving in London Heathrow, with all my law notes and law books gone into the bargain.

A clear memory is becoming emotional seeing the Aer Lingus shamrock in Heathrow, and thinking 'I am home, I am safe'.

However, when I missed the evening connecting flight from London to Cork, drained and exhausted, I broke down. 

A helping hand from Aer Lingus 

I will always be grateful to Aer Lingus because the staff were incredible. I remember the person on the desk saying 'we have a very distressed young lady here'. They put me up in an airport hotel for free but, most of all, they talked to me.

One of the air hostesses said that they regularly had women coming from Saudi Arabia traumatised. I never set foot in the kingdom again.

Tori Towey has pointed out that in the Dubai prison, there were Nigerian and Filipina women who had no idea why they were there, no prospect of getting out, and had been imprisoned for a long time for minor offences.

She said: “I think that’s just due to the fact of just having no one on the outside that can help them and not having any financial help to help them get out. So they just ended up staying for years.”

Tori Towey

In Ms Towey’s case, her release was brokered through a combination of political influence, diplomacy, and the intervention of a human rights organisation, Detained in Dubai.

Its chief executive, Radha Stirling, has called for upgraded warnings about the dangers in the United Arab Emirates and the judicial system where a woman can be jailed for being raped.

She pointed out that the police there often encourage people to drop domestic abuse cases.

Conservative Islamic Gulf states are supposedly modernising with a narrative about reforms but in reality, women’s human rights are largely a PR exercise.

This is not a pop at Islam 

Taking a pop at Islam is not my intention, in any case, it’s diverse and factional. 

Reformist scholars are undertaking new interpretations of the Sharia or Islamic law which is written mainly from a Sunni perspective to respond to the demands of modern life. Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and other religions are also distinguished by patriarchal thought.

A view that Islam emancipates women compared to the West, where women are reduced to sex objects, holds a degree of truth. But in reality, a gulf exists (pun intended) between the lived experience of women and girls under autocratic Islamic regimes and the official story. Deriding it as an ethnocentric view doesn’t make it any less true.

Gender equality index

In June, Saudi Arabia ranked 126 out of 146 countries on gender equality in a World Economic Forum. United Arab Emirates, which is relatively liberal compared to Saudi Arabia, ranked 74. To put it in context we came in ninth place, five spots ahead of the UK.

Although Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had loosened many of the restrictions in Saudi Arabia with a law introduced two years ago, much of this is window dressing and designed to chime with Western sensibilities to attract investors and tourists.

Women can still be arrested for not dressing or behaving in the prescribed manner. They need the permission of a male guardian to marry, and marital rape is not criminalised.

There remains multiple discriminatory practices too numerous to list, plus polygamy is permitted. Most strikingly female advocates for women’s rights have received lengthy prison sentences and Amnesty International has called Saudi’s record on women’s rights “abysmal”.

UN decision is a farce  

So, it’s a farce that, in March, Saudi Arabia should have been chosen by the United Nations to chair its Commission on Status of Women. 

It supposedly promotes gender equality and empowers women globally. None of the 45 member states of the committee challenged their two-year appointment, including Ireland.

'Appointing an arsonist as your fire chief'

Seven years ago, when Saudi Arabia was first appointed to the committee, one human rights activist described it as making “an arsonist the town fire chief”. 

Holding the chair burnishes Saudi’s reputation, and gives them a platform and influence. What’s in it for the member states that remained silent? Saudi Arabia is a lucrative export market and money talks.

The conclusion has to be that, as ever, women’s rights come low down the totem pole compared to economic imperatives. Business as usual. 

How depressingly familiar.