She Fights for Children She Left Behind in Saudi Arabia

FRESNO -- At 6 o’clock on a sweltering June morning in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, Sarah Saga dressed in the traditional veil and full-length covering that many Muslim women wear and roused her two children from a deep sleep.

The house was silent as other relatives slept. Saga, the 24-year-old daughter of an American mother and Saudi father, hurried with daughter and son to a nearby market, where they hailed a cab for the U.S. Consulate.

Worried that someone might recognize them, Saga waited nervously at the consulate’s gates for several minutes before being let inside.

“I want to go to my mother,” she told a consular official, “and take my kids with me.”

Saga and her children spent the next week holed up in a simple apartment and roaming the consulate grounds, where her 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter spent hours on the playground as their mother desperately tried to arrange their passage to the United States. But U.S. officials and Saga faced a dilemma, because Saudi law requires that a father give permission for his children to leave the country.

Saga realized too late that she had to make an impossible decision: She could seek her own freedom and fulfill an 18-year dream of seeing her mother, a schoolteacher in Fresno. Or she could stay in Saudi Arabia with her children and face the likely vengeance of her father, who was disgraced by her decision to flee.

At least one U.S. congressman believes that hundreds of American women are trapped in Saudi Arabia and unable to leave with their children. Many are caught in troubled relationships, often with abusive men, said Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who will chair a hearing beginning today on the issue. But the U.S. Foreign Service says it can do little for the women because of the power of sharia, Islamic law, as interpreted by the Saudi government.

Difficult Choice

Saga made her choice: She returned to America, leaving her son and daughter in the care of her estranged husband. “I wish I hadn’t left them,” Saga said this week after reuniting with her mother in Fresno. “I wish I had had a choice.”

Saga’s is the latest in a growing number of cases involving American women and children in Saudi Arabia, refocusing a spotlight on the issue raised last year by Burton, who chairs the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness.

The congressman hopes the new hearings will help resolve what advocates and lawmakers decry as an abuse of American citizens by another country. Saga will testify during the session, along with representatives from the Saudi Embassy and U.S. State Department.

“The bottom line is that these women have no rights and the children have no rights. They are being held prisoner,” Burton said.

State Department officials and Islamic experts, however, describe a more complicated dynamic in which there is little that can be done in the face of unbending Saudi law.

Born in Hayward, Calif., Sarah Saga spent the first six years of her life in Texas and California. In September 1985, her father took her to Saudi Arabia, supposedly for a month’s visit. On the day her daughter was scheduled to return, however, Saga’s mother, Debbie Dornier, went to San Francisco International Airport to meet her. The girl never arrived.

Dornier said the couple’s marriage had frayed as her husband struggled with school and family life.

“I just lost it,” Dornier said. “On the phone her father told me, ‘Don’t think you’ll ever get her back. I’ll kill her before I let her return.’ ”

Cut off from her mother for the next 18 years, Saga said she was raised by a tyrannical father and abusive stepmothers, often subjected to beatings

Wanting to escape her father, Saga said, she agreed when she was 18 to marry a suitor, Adham Jad, a devout Muslim. Jad moved his young bride to Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. There they had a son, Ibrahim, and a daughter, Hanin.

The birth of her daughter in 2000 inspired Saga to search out her own mother. “My daughter woke up a lot of things in me,” she said. “She had lighter hair and reminded me of my mother.”

Saga found her grandmother’s name and telephone number on the Internet. She then reconnected with her mother by phone, and the two began planning a reunion in Egypt.

But Saga says the meeting never occurred because her husband would not take her to Egypt. She also says Jad began to falter in his responsibilities, failing to provide enough money for food for the children while growing more harsh in his treatment of his family.

“He changed a lot,” Saga said. “He became like my father in his thoughts. I decided I had to do something, and I had my family in California that loved me.”

Husband’s Version

Jad denies Saga’s account. Reached by phone in Saudi Arabia, he said he had always been supportive of his wife’s wishes to find her mother and that the marriage suffered from no major problems.

“I was shocked when I heard she had gone to the consulate,” Jad said. “I didn’t then and still don’t understand the reasons for her behavior. I told her whatever the problem was, we could work it out.”

Working it out, however, proved impossible. Saudi law dictates that a father must grant permission before his children can leave the country.

Professor Mohamed Mattar, an expert on Islamic law at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the Saudi law is rooted in a Muslim man’s responsibility under the Koran to ensure that his children are raised within the faith.

“Leaving the country or not is not the issue,” Mattar said. “The real issue is bringing the child up in accordance with the principles of Islam.”

Believing that he would never see the children again if he allowed them to go, Jad refused to let them leave with their mother.

Saga, meanwhile, refused to leave the consulate, saying she would not return to the United States without the children.

Her resolve, however, was not enough.

“I hoped the American government would do something, say something,” Saga said, adding that she had been aware of child custody rules under Saudi law before entering the consulate. “I knew it was going to be hard, but I had no doubt that the children would come with me.”

In the end, Saga and Jad signed an agreement asserting Saga’s right to visit the children if she ever chooses to return to Saudi Arabia. Jad paid for at least part of her ticket to the United States. Saga left the country on a Saudi passport that allows her to return, but it seems unlikely that she will.

“I’m afraid that I will never return,” she said, “because it is too dangerous.”

Burton expresses frustration that consular officials can do little for what he said are the hundreds of American women and children being held against their will in Saudi Arabia. He said much more needed to be done, even though the State Department had made the issue of American women’s and children’s rights in Saudi Arabia a higher priority over the past year.

“The Saudis have got to get into the 21st century,” Burton said. “They have an awful lot to lose,” he added, referring to the Arab nation’s reliance on the United States for military aid and oil purchases.

Burton said he hoped that diplomatic pressure would push the Saudi government to at least become a tardy signatory to the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. That international agreement in some instances can provide mediation to resolve cases like Saga’s.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington refused to comment on Saga’s case or the issue of child custody.

State Department officials familiar with Saga’s ordeal acknowledged the roiling emotions that govern such cases, but said there was little that could have been done for Saga’s children. Considered Saudi citizens, the children have no claim to American citizenship because Saga left the U.S. at such an early age, officials said.

“These cases are heart-wrenching and are never easy,” said Kelly Shannon, a State Department representative. “But we cannot assist anyone in breaking the laws of another country.”

Shannon and consular officials said the Saudi government has been more cooperative recently in granting exit visas to married American women who want to leave the country. But no such concessions, they said, have been made for the children of American-Saudi couples.

Saudi Contacts

Shannon said the State Department is continuing to press the issue with Saudi diplomats, adding that in the last year, Assistant Secretary of State Maura Harty made two trips to Saudi Arabia to discuss the issue with her Saudi counterparts.

“It is a never-ending conversation,” Harty said recently of attempts to resolve differences between the two countries.

That is exactly what worries Saga and Dornier, who teaches fourth grade in Fresno. Both expressed sadness that -- just as Dornier spent nearly 20 years wondering about her daughter -- Saga now faces a future cut off from her children.

“It’s a second generation of pain all over again,” Dornier said. “I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.”

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Jailan Zayan of The Times’ Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.