Migrant workers’ voice: illegal and silenced in the Maldives

ExpatriateWorkers

by Mushfique Mohamed

As news of socio-political turmoil forces the world to shift its eyes away from the pristine beaches of its beautiful tropical islands, Maldives is losing its untainted image as a luxury tourist destination with more exposure of its appalling track record on human rights. This article looks closely at the lack of both compassion and adequate law enforcement in the Maldivian society’s (mis)treatment of the South Asian expatriate community. It highlights not just the plight of the many Bangladeshi labourers but also the increasing number of South Asian women who are becoming victims of the corrupt and prejudiced criminal justice system of the country.

In addition to the Maldivian population of approximately 330,000, there are 200,000 expatriate workers living in the country, of which a quarter does not have legal status in the country. The Maldives’ treatment of migrant workers is degrading enough for it to be called ‘modern-day slavery.’ The trade generates over US$ 123 million in illegal profits in the Maldives. Last week two Bangladeshi workers, Shaheen Mia and Kazi Bilal were brutally killed bringing to the fore, in tragic circumstances, the unheard voice of the subaltern in today’s Maldivian society.

The government on 25 March banned a planned protest against the deplorable treatment faced by expatriate workers. The protest was planned to highlight the resurgence in violent crime against the South Asian workers. The government of current President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom’s brother; Asia’s longest serving leader until August 2008, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, also criminalised a planned protest following similar racially motivated assaults in August 2007, threatening expatriates with deportation.

In addition to silencing their voices and denying them agency, the criminal justice system, primarily the Criminal Court and law enforcement authorities perpetuate injustices against the marginalised. The violation of their fundamental rights is facilitated through certain judicial actors who are untrained, uneducated and corrupt. These judges do not pay any attention to the Constitution or domestic laws or international legal instruments the Maldives has ratified. Increasingly women are becoming victims of the system.

Malékalyanam: buying brides

RubeenaAn Indian woman was arrested night before last on allegations of infanticide and attempted suicide, raising concerns that she could be subject to the same judicial torture as Rubeena Buruhanudeen who was kept under pre-trial detention for over four years. The New Indian Express reported that Rubeena was part of a procedure known in India as ‘Malékalyanam’ in which impoverished girls from the Indian state of Kerala are married off to Maldivian men. Rubeena, married off to a Maldivian man under this procedure, ended up in pre-trial detention in the Maldives for over four years, accused of killing the child she had with her Maldivian husband.

Fareesha Abdulla, a Maldivian lawyer who took the case in 2012 on a pro-bono basis, emphasised that the investigation and remand hearings were not conducted with interpreters. “She [Rubeena] can’t understand Dhivehi, but the entire investigation was carried out without an interpreter. Maldives’ police wrote down a statement in Dhivehi and she signed it,” said the defence lawyer. “Infanticide is a serious allegation but when she requested legal aid before I took on the case, the Attorney General denied it,” Fareesha Abdulla explained further.

Before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, the Manmohan Singh government’s Minister for External Affairs also urged Maldives to repatriate such detainees. Modi was scheduled to visit the Maldives last month but with international concerns growing over the arrest of former President Mohamed Nasheed on 23 February 2015, took the Maldives off his tour of Indian Ocean island nations. Soon after the diplomatic brushoff, Rubeena was repatriated to India in early March.

Aminath Zara, a Nepalese woman who was fighting for custody of her child with a Maldivian succeeded only after a yearlong legal battle at the Family Court. Zara arrived in the Maldives initially in October 2009 as Tasi Telisa to work at a beauty salon as a beauty therapist. She converted to Islam in 2010. She then left the country in September 2011 and returned after marrying a Maldivian in Sri Lanka in December 2011. When the baby was three, her husband demanded Zara to go back to work; she was the sole breadwinner at times. According to Zara, the marriage came to an end due to her husband’s infidelity while she was away working.

The couple filed for a divorce at the Guraidhoo Magistrate Court in September 2013, but the proceedings and documents were all in Dhivehi, and an interpreter was not offered. The magistrate decided “disobedience” by the wife was sufficient grounds for divorce. As a result Zara became a homeless – and soon to be illegal – single mother. She filed a complaint at the Gender Ministry because her ex-husband was threatening to deport her and gain full custody of the baby. A Maldivian lawyer, Lua Shaheer, who was providing pro-bono legal assistance, said that Zara’s husband repeatedly told her “you are a foreigner, you will have no choice but to leave this country without the child.”

The Gender Ministry provided Zara with temporary accommodation for three months. At the end of the three months she moved back to the island of Guradhoo but could not stand the abuse she was subjected to. With nowhere to live, her former lawyer Lua Shaheer took Zara in to her own home. She is now represented by another lawyer, Fathmath Sama, whose firm took the case on pro-bono.

The husband was represented by Ibrahim Riza, an MP for Gayoom’s Progressive Party of Maldives. The main argument in court was that “the mother is a Buddhist, the mother’s family is Buddhist, and the child would be deprived of a Muslim upbringing.” Zara’s husband also accused her of “abandoning the baby for monetary greed.” Shaheer testified in court that Zara is a practicing Muslim. Even though Zara won custody, the verdict states she cannot leave the country without the ex-husband’s permission if she decides to leave with the baby, effectively leaving her stranded in the Maldives without a place to live.

According to the Indian High Commission in the Maldives, an Indian woman named Manyama Orsu was charged with pre-marital sex and abortion. According to the new penal code, abortions after 120 days of pregnancy are illegal, but a pregnancy caused by rape is an exception to the 120-day rule. Orsu was charged before the new penal code came into effect. The court proceedings against her went on for two and a half years. She confessed to the first charge, and the State dropped abortion charges bringing an end to her arbitrary detention, facilitating her repatriation in late March this year.

DhoonidhooThere are also reports of other foreign women held at Dhoonidhoo Island Detention Centre on allegations of prostitution, abortion and drug trafficking. Some of these women are victims of sex trafficking and trafficking in persons. But without a systematic mechanism to identify victims, or the mentality to view such individuals as victims, Maldives’ authorities exacerbate psychological and physical trauma suffered by human trafficking victims.

Two foreign women identified by police as sex trafficking victims in 2008 were provided temporary shelter before being repatriated with the help of their home country’s diplomatic mission in the capital Malé. Due to the lack of investigative infrastructure based on the problem of Trafficking in Persons, nobody was prosecuted for the crime, and the case was dropped due to “lack of evidence.”

Lack of infrastructure & lack of will

There are other instances where lack of legislation, and lack of enforcement, have hindered any efforts to tackle the problem. In 2009, a Bangladeshi man was chained inside a small room for weeks; the chains were removed only when the man was put to work. The employer was released after merely four months’ imprisonment due to lack of anti-trafficking legislation at the time.

The Maldives’ government passed anti-trafficking legislation only in 2013, motivated only by the fear of threatened international sanctions. The Bill had been in Majlis since 2011. However, expatriate workers from South Asian countries continue to be victimized under forced labour conditions notwithstanding the legislation. The US State Department’s Report on Trafficking in Persons states that ‘the [Maldivian] government does not have procedures in place to identify victims of human trafficking.’ As a result trafficked persons are further victimized by the corrupt criminal justice system. At the same time, the legal system remains highly inaccessible to foreigners, especially in relation to criminal law.

Transparency International’s local chapter provided over 560 expatriate workers with legal aid in 2014, mostly with regard to cases that consist of forced labour indicators. ‘We believe that migrant workers are the most vulnerable community in the Maldives today, they do not have access to the legal system due to the language barrier,’ Transparency Maldives’ Senior Project Coordinator for its Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre, Ahid Rasheed, has said.

‘Maldivian society in general views Bangladeshi expatriates as lower class non-citizens; harassment against them has been completely normalized. The authorities view them as the problem and not victims of discriminatory attacks and human trafficking offences.’ Highlighting a history of institutionalised xenophobia, Rasheed said ‘the latest word from the government we heard – regarding the protest – questions basic rights afforded to migrant workers, similar to how all previous governments neglected migrant workers’ grievances.’

The Maldives enacted the Employment Act in 2008, and as a Member State of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Act harmonises domestic law of the Maldives with the principles and standards prescribed by the organisation. Independent institutions such as the Employment Tribunal and Labour Relations Authority were established through this Act. ‘Forced labour’ is prohibited and broadly defined to be any instance where there are elements of undue influence, threat, or intimidation with regards to employment. The Act also addresses discrimination at the work place and ensures both local and foreign employees right to freedom from discrimination based on race, religion, social standing, political beliefs, marital status, gender, or family obligations.

It is a common misconception that ‘human trafficking’ or ‘trafficking in persons’ requires illegal entry, similar to ‘human smuggling.’ Human trafficking sometimes begins as smuggling, can end up as exploitation and trafficking, but not all trafficking involves crossing-borders.The United Nations (UN) defines ‘trafficking in persons’ as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation or the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution was ratified by the Maldives in May 2003; a legal instrument recognizing the importance of establishing effective regional cooperation for preventing trafficking for prostitution and for investigation, detection, interdiction, prosecution, and punishment of those responsible for such trafficking.

The ILO defines the following as elements of forced labour: withholding payment and identity documents; abusive working and living conditions; debt bondage; restriction of movement; excessive overtime; deception; isolation; physical and sexual violence; and intimidation and threats. All of which are daily grievances faced by most low-skilled expatriate workers in the Maldives.

A report by the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives (HRCM) in February 2009[8] states that Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Indian nationals are detained at the Malé Immigration Detention Center, managed by the Expatriate Monitoring Center under the Department of Immigration and Emigration. Ordinarily detained for not holding a valid passport, visa or work permit. HRCM urged the Maldives to become a member of the International Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers (ICRMW). The national human rights committee’s report recommended development and implementation of systematic procedures for government officials to identify victims of trafficking among vulnerable groups such as undocumented migrants and women in prostitution, who are human trafficking victims. It also urged identified victims of trafficking to be provided necessary assistance and not be penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of them being trafficked.

CaptureThe US State Department has consistently raised the issue of increasing debt bondage among South Asian migrant workers under its annual Trafficking in Persons report. According to its most recent report, migrant workers pay agents around US$2,000-4,000 to work in the Maldives. There have been reports that some of the 200 registered agents bring migrant workers to the Maldives under terms of employment that amount to criminal acts of deception or fraud, entangling employees in a vicious cycle of debt. The report also recommends that Maldives accede to the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.

The government has failed at implementing enacted laws, and it appears to be using the rise in violent crime to militarize the police service, and enact legislations that strip away the protections, freedoms and liberties enshrined under the Constitution that introduced democratization to the Maldives. As the focus remains on suppressing dissent from citizens who oppose the regime, the plight of the subaltern stays at the political periphery. The Maldives has yet to fulfill the minimum standards required to eliminate human trafficking.

Human trafficking victims are regularly penalized for acts that are the result of being trafficked; excluded from the legal system; and viewed as offenders. Maldivian authorities are known to detain such victims under inhumane conditions. The real perpetrators of trafficking such as employers, officials, recruitment agents or firms are rarely brought to justice, giving full impunity to these powerful offenders who have connections to transnational organized crime. The insularity observed among majority of Maldivians is reinforced on an institutional level by denying inalienable rights that are to be afforded to all citizens and non-citizens indiscriminately. Sex trafficking, forced labour, debt bondage and other forms of exploitation do not end with enacting legislations or acceding to treaties in order to be accepted as a member of the international community. A stipulation under law is only powerful to the extent to which it is realized, and for the subaltern – without the qualification to even speak – those rights are continually denied.

Mushfique Mohamed is a practising lawyer at Hisaan, Riffath & Co., and also works as a consultant for Maldivian Democracy Network.

Main Photo: primecollective.com, Rubeena Buruhanudeen, Minivan News

 

Consciousness and the Development Paradigm

Leftover Illustration

Illustration by Ahmed Fauzan

“ No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created It. ” – Albert Einstein 

by Salma Fikry

Here I am traveling in Denmark, in a rickety van, cramped together with people from all around the world trying to learn about sustainable development. From the Freetown of Christiania in Copenhagen to the remote island of Samsoe to the appropriately entitled Friland (Freeland) near Arhus, I found people trying to return to the very roots that they came from.

I try to understand why Pia and Johan have chosen to live in a caravan with their two children for the past three years while their ‘home’ is being built on “The Self-Sufficient Village”, using second-hand material. I try to understand the purposefulness in Mai, the gentle but strong woman with whom I cooked a meal for 70 people for the dinner they have as a community four days a week. She chose to build her own house with her bare hands when she could have got hired help or a construction company to do it. I try to understand why Christiania (Freetown) functions with its community rules and community spirit, even while not having any elected body to oversee those rules or foster that community spirit. I try to comprehend why Soren and Anna, the sophisticated and obviously wealthy couple, chose to built their own home, with recycled material and live in the remoteness of Halingelille. I am amazed at the leadership of Soren Hermanson, an Environment Teacher who mobilized the Samsingers to turn the island of Samso into a model of Renewable Energy, no longer dependant on fuel from the mainland.

Sadly, they are just a few. They are just a handful of people in the Global North, seeking to reverse the harm done. The majority is still driven by ideologies of capitalism and democracy, propagated by institutions and powerful nations that brought ruin to many of our life-systems in the Global South.

In the search for superiority and certainty, the Global North taught us to split subject from object – res cogitans – thinking substance, consciousness was separated from res extensa – matter, the physical universe. Monotheistic religions taught us that Man was superior to all else in the world and everything in the universe was there to satisfy Man. Devoid of soul, the material world was investigated like a machine, vivisected and exploited through colonialism, Newtonian physics, the industrial revolution and more recently through vehicles of globalization. Thus developed our contemporary development paradigm.

We were given engineering and mechanization plans and money for capital-intensive infrastructure development as the key to alleviating poverty. In doing so, we pushed ourselves into the concrete jungles of cities, where clean air and water became a commodity to be bought and sold. We were forced to give up traditional livelihoods and millions were made jobless. In doing so our self-sufficiency was converted to the laws of demand and supply, driven by market forces. We were told that norms should be prescribed into Constitutions and Laws in order to ensure participation of people. In doing so, millions of years of traditions, social norms and social contracts that were sacred and unwritten in the Global South, were eroded.

And here we are now. We now regard the environment and our communities as a problem to be solved. We look for technological and institutional innovations. Few of us stop to ponder that it is neither the environment nor the lack of institutions that is the problem. The problem was and is Us. It is our individual mindsets and habits that have contributed to Collective Ruin. Our level of consciousness is such that we have moved from exploiting resources for human comfort, to trying to develop systems where technology and democracy can revert the degradation that we ourselves have brought to our environment and our once thriving participatory communities. We fail to realize that the environment has its secrets and it will outlast us; it is the fittest in the great scheme of things where we are the weakest link, especially when we are not united by the bonds that make us a community.

As I sit in the community dinners with old and young alike, who come from varied backgrounds, talking about their vision and plans for the community, talking about the chores for the next day, I become nostalgic. I remember how I used to belong to and live under one roof with an extended family. I remember how the neighborhood got together to mark festivals, clean the road, celebrate a birth or mourn a death. It was not so long ago. Life has changed now, although there are a few remnants of what it was like before. I remember how inspired I was working in small communities when people came whole-heartedly to participate in community projects to renovate their school, to build their sea-wall, to clean their roads, to build their water tanks, to do a lot of things that were deemed as ‘collective’– for the service and enjoyment of everyone and not a few. There were no laws subscribed, they did it voluntarily. Ironical that I, who found it so beautiful had wanted to and worked to ‘institutionalize’ this aspect of social capital not knowing that I would be contributing to consolidating ‘power and politics’ into the hands of a few.

I realize painfully, that our mindsets, mine included, and our development paradigm remains at the same level of consciousness as those that crafted this vicious cycle of rootless growth, a few thousand years ago.

It is the level of consciousness that we have made many mistakes, that we need to rectify the harm done and rise above our individual mindsets to develop a new paradigm, a new life system for our world that strikes me in the eco-villages. Perhaps, Pia , Johan, Mai, Soren, Anna and Hermanson reached a new level of consciousness in order to do what they are doing now. Sadly, I have not reached that level of consciousness yet. My mindset is changing but it is not totally there yet…

Salma Fikry advocates decentralised governance and sustainable development through community empowerment. She wrote the above in November 2010, while on a study trip to Denmark. She has a Master’s in Development Management. She is a recipient of the National Award of Recognition for her services towards improving good governance in the Maldives.

If you are worried about the government’s plans to concentrate all development in the ‘Greater Male’ Area’ while ignoring all other parts of the country, sign the Avaaz petition and lobby the government for more sustainable ways that would decrease rather than increase the inequalities that currently exist among the Maldivian population.

Getting away with murder

Murder

by Azra Naseem

In the early hours of this morning a 24-year-old Bangladeshi waiter, Shaheen Mia, was brutally murdered at a Male’ café he was working in. A group of masked men stabbed him to death. The day before, on the island of Mundoo in Laamu Atoll, another young man, 29-year-old Ali Ziyadham, was knifed to death allegedly in an argument among a group of men who were drinking home brewed alcohol. Last month, on 22 February, a 24-year-old was murdered outside his home in Male’, he was almost decapitated. In January, in the island of Vaavu Rakeedhoo, a three-year-old boy was beaten to death by his mentally ill mother, herself a victim of sexual abuse over a long period of time. All in all, since November 2013, there have been 12 murders and three abductions in the Maldives. Few have received justice.

Ex-Defence Minister Mohamed Nazim was fired on 20 January. Police raided his home in the middle of the night and ‘found’ weapons. Charged first with conspiracy to overthrow the government and later with importation of weapons into the country, he was remanded in custody. Before being imprisoned Nazim gave a press conference in which he said, ‘no Maldivian citizen will have safety and security.’ He could not have made a truer statement. Law and order are now non-existent in the once peaceful islands.

Just a short decade or so ago, a murder in the Maldives was a rare occasion that got the whole country talking. Back in the early 1970s, a German tourist killed his girlfriend in a Male’ guesthouse. Throughout the eighties and well into the 1990s, Maldivian people still spoke of the murder in hushed tones—killing was such a rare occurrence that people could not forget even the smallest details about the event. Today, killing is so common it is hard to remember who, when or why.

The blame must be taken squarely by the failed criminal justice system of the Maldives. Investigations are set to fail—often deliberately—at all stages: the police never seem to find evidence; when they do, they charge the wrong person; or when the right person is charged, the courts release them for ‘lack of evidence’ or wrongfully obtained evidence, or to teach the government a lesson. In 2011 Judge Abdulla Ghazee, whose continued releasing of violent offenders had made him a national security threat, released a suspected murderer, Shahum Adam, to teach the Health Ministry a lesson. He went on to kill again.

In the year that followed Ablow Ghazee’s release from custody on 7th February 2012, after Mohamed Nasheed was deposed on the pretext of having acted unconstitutionally by having the lawless judge taken into military custody, there were nine murders.

The first was of 21-year-old Abdulla Muheeth (Bobby), killed by gangs in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. On the night he was killed, there were three other violent attacks in Male’. Muheeth’s killers are awaiting the death penalty. Less than a month after Muheeth’s death, 33-year-old Ali Shifan was attacked and killed by two men on a motorbike in Male’. The next victim was a 75-year-old woman, Fathimath Zakariyya, attacked and killed in her own home on the island of Neykurendhoo; the next a 65-year-old man, Hassanbe, on the island of Maafaru, also attacked and killed in his own home; he was followed by a 16-year-old schoolboy, Mohamed Aruham, attacked and killed while sleeping on a park bench in Male’; 65-year-old lawyer Ahmed Najeeb came next, killed and thrown into a garbage bin; he was followed by a 26-year-old policeman, attacked and killed while on duty on the island of Kaashidhoo; then came the murder of 46-year-old MP Afrasheem, brutally attacked just outside his own apartment; followed by Moneerul Islam, a Bangladeshi worker, also killed in his own home in November 2012.

There was a drop in the number of killings after that, with three in total in the year 2013 – one in March, in July and in December of that year. In 2014, however, the number of killings went up again—five lives were taken violently that year. In 2015, only in its third month, this morning’s murder of Shaheen Mia is the year’s fourth.

The police are not doing their job of law enforcement, and of protecting and serving the community. As observers have pointed out, their main focus seems to be on the political rather than the criminal.

Hundreds of policemen and women are deployed to man every peaceful protest; a flurry of press releases and media briefings precede and follow any demonstration; and dozens are taken into custody from each of them. The gangs that operate on the fringes of these protests, meanwhile, get away with throwing crude oil, chilli water and even petrol at the demonstrators; and with attacking them physically. The only purpose of the police seems to be to stifle opposition to the government, to enforce the government’s power, and to keep people from rising up against it.

The current Home Minister, Umar Naseer, competed in the PPM primaries as a presidential candidate in the 2013 election. He lost to the incumbent president Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom. According to Umar, Yameen rigged the primaries to win. In the subsequent fallout, he alleged that Yameen has deep connections with the gangs of Male’; and also that the President was connected to the murder of MP Afrasheem Ali.

Once made the Home Minister in Yameen’s government, however, he has gone silent on whatever it is that he knows about the president and his gangs. Not only is he silent on Yameen’s alleged criminal activities, but also on any criminal activity. He is Home Minister in name only, his wings cut and vocal chords either bought or being held to ransom. He has no power over the police either. This week, he resorted to issuing orders to the police through Twitter, so powerless is he.

More recently, former PPM MP Ahmed Mahloof who has now been kicked out of the party, has come up with similar allegations of Yameen’s criminality. He implicates Yameen’s right-hand man in government, Tourism Minister Ahmed Adeeb, of being as closely connected with the gangs of Male’ as Umar accused Yameen of being. According to Mahloof, Adeeb knows what happened to journalist and blogger Ahamed Rilwan, abducted at knifepoint from outside his home in August 2014. Pictures of Yameen and Adeeb with members of Male’s various gangs are everywhere. Pictorial evidence shows Adeeb’s connections with gangs exist not only at the local level but also the international – he posed shamelessly with the notorious Artur brothers from Armenia, implicated in arms and drugs smuggling worldwide.

The fact is none of these people with information—Nazim, Umar or Mahloof—are willing to share what they know with the public. It may be because the information is their only bargaining tool, it could be what keeps them alive. According to what Nazim has been revealing in his sham trial, police acts as thugs when commanded by Adeeb, Yameen’s proxy. In October 2014, a group of masked men wielding machetes cut down the areca nut palms lining Male’s main streets. The perpetrators were never identified by the police. According to recent revelations by Nazim during his on-going trial, it was the Special Operations police, pretending to be gang members who committed the crime. Rumour has it that Yameen suspects the trees have been used to put a curse on him using black magic.

The police are also implicated in enabling, and the cover-up of Afrasheem’s murder—they were on duty, closing the roads to his home when the murder occurred. Did they let the killer in, then closed off the road so there would be no witnesses? The public widely suspects they had a role in the abduction of Rilwan. An eyewitness to his abduction called the police immediately after seeing a man being bundled into a car at knifepoint from outside Rilwan’s apartment on the island of HulhuMale’. They did not respond, and never publicised the event allowing Rilwan’s disappearance to go unknown for days. They are still deliberately neglecting the investigation, hiding, obfuscating, impeding any progress. In the killing of Ziyadham on the island of Mundoo on Friday night, according to local media, people reported unrest to the police repeatedly, suspecting something was about to go very wrong. The police did not respond, arriving on the island hours after the killing despite having hours to have prevented it from happening. Less than an hour ago, in response to the latest killing, the police have told local news outlet cnm.mv that it ‘believes’ all citizens are safe.

A deadly mixture of deliberate collusion with violent gangs, the country’s incompetent law enforcement authorities, and the unqualified corrupt judiciary, has made life in the Maldives hell for its inhabitants.

This government is an utter failure on every level. Yet, half the people are fighting to keep it, and the judiciary, in place.

Visit mvmurders.com for details of murders in Maldives since 2001.

Pic: thepublicslate.com