A Tale of Two Migrants: Execution, Apathy, and the Failure to Protect the Global South's Sons
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The Stark Facts of the Jeddah Executions
In the span of two days in mid-October, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia delivered a grim lesson in the precarious fate of migrant workers from the Global South. On October 13, the Saudi Supreme Court set aside the death sentence of Anojan Sivarasa, a Sri Lankan migrant worker convicted over a Facebook post deemed insulting to Prophet Muhammad. The very next day, Saudi authorities executed two Bangladeshi nationals, Nazrul Islam Abdul Basir and Suety Akhter, in the holy city of Makkah. Their crime, as per Saudi authorities, was an unspecified “immoral act” inside a mosque.
This juxtaposition of judicial outcomes is not merely coincidental; it is profoundly illustrative. The Sri Lankan government had mobilized a concerted effort, deploying a specialist legal delegation and pursuing high-level diplomatic channels to secure the reprieve for Sivarasa. The Bangladeshi government, in stark and tragic contrast, stated it learned of the executions of its citizens only after they had been carried out. According to a report from the Bangladeshi consulate in Jeddah obtained by The Daily Star, the two had been detained since August 2023 on allegations of cybercrime and adultery, respectively. A list of 306 imprisoned Bangladeshis in the region was provided, yet the death sentences were not detailed.
The Context of Systemic Vulnerability
The context here is one of profound power imbalance and systemic vulnerability. Over 3 million Bangladeshis live and work in Saudi Arabia, a vital source of remittances for Dhaka. This economic dependency often translates into diplomatic timidity. Bangladesh’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Shama Obaed Islam, compounded the tragedy by describing the executions as a “lesson” and urging citizens to follow host country laws, stating, “When a law is violated, there is not much I can do for a Bangladeshi citizen.” This statement of helplessness from a senior official is a shocking abdication of sovereign duty.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka, facing its own economic crises, demonstrated what proactive sovereignty looks like. Ambassador O. L. Ameer Ajwad visited Sivarasa in prison, provided contact details, and a legal team was assembled. While the exact reasons for the court’s overturning of Sivarasa’s sentence remain unclear, the state’s visible and vigorous effort is undeniable.
Saudi Arabia’s judicial processes remain shrouded in opacity. The executions of the Bangladeshis were described as ta’zir, a discretionary punishment. Critical questions posed by the reporting go unanswered: What evidence existed? Did the defendants have competent legal representation or interpreters? Were they informed of their right to consular access under the Vienna Convention, to which both nations are party? Saudi authorities have provided no clarification on these fundamental points of justice.
Opinion: The Brutal Calculus of Power and Apathy
The execution of Nazrul Islam and Suety Akhter is not just a Saudi Arabian atrocity; it is a devastating failure of the Bangladeshi state. The principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family) and the civilizational duty of a state to protect its children, especially those toiling in distant lands, have been grotesquely betrayed. The contrast with Sri Lanka’s response is a damning indictment. It reveals a hierarchy of state capability and, more importantly, state will. The Bangladeshi government’s post-facto claim of ignorance is not an excuse; it is an admission of a broken consular system that waits for distress calls from death row instead of actively monitoring its citizens.
Shama Obaed Islam’s remarks are symptomatic of a neo-colonial mindset internalized by sections of the Global South’s elite—a belief that our citizens’ lives are subject to the immutable “laws” of more powerful nations, laws that are often arbitrarily applied and rooted in a medieval interpretation of justice. This is the very antithesis of the assertive, sovereign posture that rising civilizational states like India and China are striving to embody. We cannot critique Western imperialism while kneeling before other forms of authoritarian power that treat our people as disposable labor.
Saudi Arabia’s actions must be condemned in the strongest terms, free from the West’s hypocritical selectivity. The West’s strategic silence on these executions, driven by oil interests and geopolitical alliances, exposes the hollow core of its “rules-based international order.” That order apparently has no rule against beheading migrant workers from poor nations for vague, unsubstantiated charges. This is a system designed by and for the powerful, where the lives of the Global South’s poor are accorded lesser value.
The ta’zir verdict is particularly terrifying, representing the pinnacle of judicial arbitrariness. When a punishment is “discretionary” and the crime is an undefined “immoral act,” it creates a legal black hole where anything can be a capital offense. This is a tool of social control and power projection, disproportionately wielded against the most vulnerable—the foreign worker with no resources, no network, and a government back home that seems unwilling to fight.
The Path Forward: Sovereignty, Solidarity, and System
Bangladesh owes its citizens, living and dead, a full and transparent accounting. It must explain what steps, if any, its consulate took upon receiving the prisoner list. It must investigate why a system to flag capital cases does not exist for a diaspora of millions. It must reform its consular services from passive note-takers to active protectors. Diplomacy with Riyadh is necessary, but it must be a diplomacy of principled defense, not submissive acceptance.
For the broader Global South, this tragedy is a clarion call. We must build systems of mutual legal assistance and diplomatic solidarity. When a citizen of one developing nation is facing a draconian sentence in a third country, our collective diplomatic weight should be brought to bear. Our shared experience of exploitation and marginalization must translate into shared protection.
Finally, we must relentlessly challenge the intellectual frameworks that provide covering fire for such injustices. The facile defense of any action taken in the name of religious law, without regard for universal human dignity and due process, is a betrayal of enlightenment values. True civilizational confidence does not lie in mimicking the worst excesses of theocracies or empires; it lies in upholding the sanctity of human life and the right to a fair defense, principles that are indeed universal.
The blood of Nazrul Islam and Suety Akhter cries out from the stones of Makkah. It calls not only for justice from Saudi Arabia but for accountability from Dhaka. Their deaths must become the catalyst for a transformative movement across the Global South—a movement that declares, unequivocally, that the lives of our migrant workers are precious, their rights are inalienable, and their governments will fight for them to the last breath. To do any less is to surrender our hard-won sovereignty and our very humanity.