In 1994, the U.S. Department of State began investigating the trafficking in persons as a result of human rights interests.1 The “Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000” lays out a description of severe trafficking of persons as follows:
(A) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or
(B) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.2
Trafficking is also commented there as being a modern form of slavery, involving some 700,000 persons annually trafficked inter- and intra-nationally; 50,000 of which may pass into the U.S..3 The act amends methods of analyzing countries that are to be recipients of economic assistance from the U.S., creates a task force to monitor and combat trafficking, and provisions for economic assistance to both victims and potential victims, as well as the management of other trafficking concerns. There are an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide.4
Subsequent to this, in 2001, the State Department produced “The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report”. This stipulates four conditions governments should adhere to in order to be considered to have minimally eliminated the trafficking of persons in their domains, with an additional seven criteria regulating the efforts the governments appear to be exercising to do so. Depending upon how a country fares in these regards, they are placed in one of three tiers, the first tier being of the most compliant with the minimal standards, and the third tier consisting of countries neither compliant with the four standards, nor making an effort to do so. The second tier encompasses those countries not compliant but appear to be making an effort.5
To a great degree, both acts focus on women and children, which, due to their relatively compromised economic status throughout most of the world, makes them easier prey than men to opportunistic trafficking. But trafficking in men, women, and children has transpired for centuries, and how the entrapment and subjugation of people is now “new” is unclear. What is clear, however, is that it is now statutorily illegal throughout most of the world to own slaves, and that rapid social changes combined with the post-WWII population explosion as well as the “modernization and the globalization of the world economy”6 have provided many new opportunities for thugs and their slyly cooperating governments to exploit a growing number of poor people. Many traditional agricultural societies now suffer from the displacement of land into the hands of the elite:
The forced shift from subsistence to cash-crop agriculture, the loss of common land, and government policies that suppress farm income in favor of cheap food for the cities have all helped bankrupt millions of peasants and drive them from their land—sometimes into slavery.7
The end of the Cold War may have compounded the problem redirecting the focus of nations and companies away from human rights issues and towards commercialization and financial gain. This has increased the gap between the wealthy and the poor.8
With the numbers of available victims increasing, and the onus of ownership gone (one can’t own a slave anymore), slaveholders no longer need to care for their workers for extended periods, and tend to invest in them lightly, providing them with little or no medical care and just enough food for subsistence. With the focus on high profits over short periods, and with a glut of poor driving the cost of slaves down, slaves who are too young, too old, or too infirm are disposable. This can most strikingly be seen in Thai brothels and Brazilian batterias, and to a far lesser degree in still other forms of the new slavery. One thing that all forms of the new slavery have in common is that “people are enslaved by violence and held against their wills for purposes of exploitation”9.
Chattel slavery, contract slavery, and debt bondage, are three of many types of slavery still being practiced today.10 Among them, chattel slavery, which resembles the racially inflected behavior of the old slavery (not only the bondage of blacks in U.S. history, but also a much older Muslim form of servitude) is the least common, but may still be seen in parts of north and western Africa, including Mauritania where White Moors (Beydannes/Arab-Berbers) have enslaved blacks for hundreds of years. According to the CIA’s The World Factbook 2001 on the background of Mauritania,
Independent from France in 1960, Mauritania annexed the southern third of the former Spanish Sahara (now Western Sahara) in 1976, but relinquished it after three years of raids by the Polisario guerrilla front seeking independence for the territory. Opposition parties were legalized and a new constitution approved in 1991. Two multiparty presidential elections since then were widely seen as being flawed; Mauritania remains, in reality, a one-party state. The country continues to experience ethnic tensions between its black minority population and the dominant Maur (Arab-Berber) populace.11
Conspicuously missing is mention of Mauritania’s slave population. The country has the largest proportion of slaves to free people than anywhere else in the world12, yet it doesn’t even appear in the U.S State Department’s report on trafficking.
According to iAbolish (a project of the American Anti-Slavery Group):
Estimates to the number of black Africans enslaved in Mauritania ranges from 100,000 as many as one million. Chattel slavery, in which one person is owned as another's property, has existed in Mauritania for 800 years, born out of racism and a skewed version of Islamic fundamentalism. Slaves are raised to believe that serving their Arabo-Berber masters is a religious duty, and most remain in bondage their entire lives.13
Out of a population of about 2.7 million people, about one third may be slaves. Most of these were born from generations of slaves and know no other life. They spend their days monotonously working on their masters’ farms or in mines, or performing manual labor in their masters’ shops in the cities. But, slavery was abolished in Mauritania by its government in 1980. Unfortunately, many Maur slaves don’t know it, and those that do, and act on it, are frequently tortured and/or killed. There are compelling issues of illiteracy, lineage, religion, and cultural isolation that keep the slaves bound to their masters. Not only are the slaves not educated, but surviving elders who have been indentured their whole lives naturally reinforce the master-slave relationship, and the Muslim language they share with their masters isolates them from other, non-slave, blacks in the country. The white masters, running a country that’s over 2 billion dollars in debt, and depending mainly on local agriculture for survival (the heavily commercialized, rich offshore fishing has been depleted, and the value of iron ore, their chief export, has decreased on the world market), continue to rely on the grunt labor of their slaves to farm their lands for them. When groups of slaves have claimed previously lands discarded by their masters, they’ve been driven off, possibly out of the masters’ need to keep as much land as possible in a dwindling local economy, but just as likely out of a desire to cripple the independence of their slaves. Attempts by slaves to access their constitutional freedom have been met with indifference by Mauritania’s courts, which run by slaveholders, naturally protect their own interests. Also, slaves are not granted citizenship, limiting their ability to appeal the courts’ decisions. Furthermore, the government frequently harasses in-country anti-slavery organizations like El Hor and SOS Slaves, preventing aid from reaching the needy.
To compound issues, female Haratines are accorded a higher value than the males (a young, healthy female for over $1000, a male for half that15), presumably for their ability to produce yet more slaves, as well as for the sex they might provide to their masters. Children, too, have a value:
Enslaved women are often kept as concubines, raped by members of the master's family. Slaves are not allowed to marry without the master's consent, and woman are stripped of the right of motherhood: At the master's whim, their children can be taken from them and sold off or given as wedding gifts. As an act of repentance, masters will often donate one of their slaves to the poor.16
The natural result of whimsical, political, and punitive separations of family members is that male slaves are less committed to keeping their families together, further preventing the slaves from organizing themselves into a body capable of effectively plying for their freedom.
In 1969, there was a large shift of the population from rural areas of Mauritania to the capital, Nouakchott: “When the first great drought began in 1969 and the city became a center for food aid, refugees from the countryside flooded in. Today it holds between 500,000 and 600,000 people—over a quarter of the country’s population.”17
When white masters moved into the city, which had become the capital only nine years earlier, some of their slaves came with them. And, given the opportunity to create new businesses for themselves, the Beydannes began to exploit the skills of their slaves to operate a variety of shops, and paid them nothing.18
Although there are many obvious parallels between Mauritanian slavery and the familiar old-style slavery of the southern U.S. (and elsewhere), the goal is not to demonstrate those, but to show how Mauritania’s slavery, as a historically older system, has taken on characteristics of the new (modern) slavery. As mentioned earlier, one of the characteristics of modern slavery is its illegality; another is the use of violence, or the threat of violence, used to keep the slaves under the control of the masters, and yet a third characteristic is high profitability over a short period. As more slaves come to recognize their right to freedom and move away from their masters, and as their plight becomes more prominent due to anti-slavery groups like iAbolish, El Hor, and SOS Slaves, et al, one can expect the level of violence used by the masters to maintain their control over the slaves will necessarily increase due to their historical dependence on the latter for farming, mining, running shops, and other tasks. In a system of slavery where generations of people are born into servitude, the need to resort to violence to enforce slavery isn’t very pressing. But, as the population has become more urbanized, the profitability of having slaves has increased unprecedentedly due to the marketability of their skills and their low overhead. Also, the White Moors, outnumbered by non-citizen, non-slave, Afro-Mauritanians, are desperate to maintain their position in the country. As a result of the latter groups petition for more rights, the Beydannes took violent action in 1989: “The torture, maiming, and murder of over five hundred Afro-Mauritanians, many of them members of the military or holders of public positions, has been documented by the United Nations”19. The threat of violence towards groups considered dissenting by the government in Mauritania is real. Although the nature of Mauritanian slavery currently exploits the Haratines for high profits over a long period of time, probably a full lifetime, instead of the much shorter periods of servitude seen in countries like Thailand, the evolution of this old system into the new type of slavery is apparent.
The question remains as to why the U.S. doesn’t recognize the existence of slavery in Mauritania. The answers may lie in the strategic position of having an economically disadvantaged, coastal ally in northwestern Africa. With Algeria to the north and Senegal to the south both being destabilized by internal distress caused by fundamentalist Islamic factions, the U.S. may have found a relative stable pawn in Africa. With the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. pours into Mauritania, and the latter’s continuing development of a telecommunications industry despite having a poor internal transportation system (only one railway system exists, for mining, and there are few roads) which might one might assume would be more important, gathering intelligence about the surrounding countries for the U.S. may be one aspect of their relationship.
Another aspect is Mauritania’s support of Israel. According to Arabic News.com in November, 2000:
The Nouakchott government is still persistent to maintain normalization with Israel. A process that started several months ago, when it established diplomatic relations with Israel and refused to sever them.
To this effect, Mauritania's minister of telecommunications al-Rashid Weld Saleh stressed that his country will not sever its relations with Israel under any condition.
Commenting on the call advocated by the Islamic summit on the states that established relations with Israel to cut them, the Mauritania's minister added that peace is the choice of the government of Mauritania and that his country is committed to this option.19
That Israel is of vital interest to the U.S. in the Middle East is unquestionable. That there is anything but a political advantage to Mauritania in this is moot.
A final reason for the lack of U.S. recognition of slavery in Mauritania may be a perceived plausible deniability. According to Kevin Bales in Disposable People: new slavery in the global economy:
Since some human rights organizations persist in demonstrating the existence of slavery, the government (of Mauritania) has set up two “human rights” organizations of its own: the National Committee for the Struggle against the Vestiges of Slavery in Mauritania and the Initiative for the Support of the Activities of the President.20
With the voices of anti-slaver groups in country being squelched, the account that slavery can be disregarded as existing as a mere remnant is the loudest. But, the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.
The socio-political scene in Mauritania is even more complex than I’ve laid out, involving issues of France’s historical and current interest, Mauritania’s old slave trade to the west, Israel’s dumping nuclear waste in the Mauritania, and others. But, the scope of this paper is necessarily limited. Having shown how a small, relatively unindustrialized country steeped in a traditional type of slavery has been developing characteristics of the modern type, attributes of slavery in Thailand, a country highly exploited by the U.S., Japan, and other countries for its sex industry won’t be surprising.
According to an article in Time Asia.com
With a girl's virginity selling for as much as $3,500 in Bangkok, recurring recessions have ensured a ready supply of daughters sold by poverty-stricken families. The number of child prostitutes in Thailand is at least 60,000, though estimates go as high as 200,000. Almost all are working under duress: 21st century slaves.21
Bales estimates between 500,000 and 1 million slaves currently work in Thailand.22 Although most of Thailand is agriculturally prosperous, an economic boom in the 1980’s and 1990’s helped transform the country into an industrial state: “in a country the size of Britain, one-tenth of the workforce moved from the land to industry in just 3 years…the number of factory workers doubled from less than 2 million to more than 4 million in eight years…and urban wages doubled.”22 Unfortunately for the poor in northern Thailand, whose customs and Buddhist religion disregard women, the development of industry in the south created a greatly increased gap in income between them and those in the south. Selling children for sex slavery to brothels in the south is part of their customs. The brokers of the slaves may even live in their villages. Where there is a glut of poor workers who have moved to the south, the northern Thai send their girls, where they are driven into prostitution. Although some of the girls may have a good idea of what prostitution is through mothers or other relatives who have done it, many don’t fully understand it until they are forced to have sex with strangers. Many aren’t even aware that they are to become prostitutes, but expect some job in industry. This is contract slavery, where a contract is negotiated but violence and the threat of violence are ultimately used to enforce whatever policies the owners of the contracts choose to pursue. Additionally, this becomes debt bondage; because the girls are sold by their parents to the brokers, the girls must work of f a debt that will be managed by the pimps and brothel owners. In the case of Thai prostitution, the duration of a prostitutes service is further determined outside of any (specious) contract by such factors as age and health, with victims of HIV being sent home to die. Thus, working as a sex slave requires less time of one’s natural life than does being a chattel slave.
With a glut of new poor and working class wage earners willing to spend money on prostitution in a culture that advocates spending time with a prostitute as being part of a night out, there is always a need for more prostitutes. Thus, sex slaves are plenty, and when there aren’t enough Thai girls, Burmese and Laotians can be imported.
In 1960, prostitution was made illegal in Thailand. Shortly after, another law specified that women in the entertainment business were to provide sex services.22 This and other proclamations by the government have further created an atmosphere fertile for sexual abuse. As Bales describes it:
The machinery for social protection is so ineffectual that slaves are bought and sold…the law can do little against the combined strength of a sexist culture, rationalizing religion, amoral exploitative economy, and corrupt government…Thailand is a country sick with and addiction to slavery.23
A revision of the prostitution law was made in 1997 that includes punishing sex customers. But this too is hardly enforced.
This fits neatly into the scheme of modern slavery: the slaves are disposable, quick profits are made on them, prostitution is illegal, and violence is used to enforce the enslavement. Much the same as in Mauritania, the government is culpable in the persistence of slavery. Notable here is that race is not an issue in Thai slavery, although countries like Japan may treated imported Thais with prejudice. Discrimination based on income is another element of the new slavery, and can be similarly observed in Pakistan, Brazil, and India. Thailand is in the Trafficking Act reports second tier.24
Slavery is global and takes on many forms, but many of the same key factors described here are common to them all. Although I haven’t discussed guises of debt bondage, the most prevalent type of slavery, such as the practice of peshgi in Pakistan, or mentioned the war slavery of Burma, where children are kidnapped and forced into military service, the importance of these in evidencing modern slavery isn’t diminished. Human rights groups struggle for fair wages and treatment of the victims in these countries as well, but large investments in slavery by governments and slaveholders constantly thwart them there, as elsewhere. However, as involvement by the United Nations and the U.S. indicate, awareness has grown as a result of their efforts. Hopefully, with properly applied economic sanctions, and incentives to re-educate slaves, modern slavery, an abstraction of the evolution of older forms, can be abolished.
References
1. U.S. Department of State, “Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report,” (2001)
2. U.S. Department of Justice, “Division A—Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000,” Violence Against Women Office (2000),
3. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 8.
4. U.S. Dept. of State.
5. U.S. Dept. of State.
6. Bales, 13.
7. Ibid., 13.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Ibid., 19.
11. Ibid., 20.
12. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, (2001),
13. Bales, 80.
14. American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), "Paradise Under the Master's Foot," (2001), iAbolish.com
15. Bales, 86.
16. AASG.
17. Bales, 98.
18. Ibid., 99.
19. Arabic News.com, “Mauritania refuses to sever relations with Israel,” Arabic News.com (17 November 2000),
20. Bales, 115.
21. Alex Perry and Mae Sai, “Child Slavery,” Time Asia (2002),
22. Bales, 75.
23. Bales, 78.
24. U.S. Dept. of State,
Bibliography
American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG). "Paradise Under the Master's Foot." (2001). iAbolish.com
Arabic News.com. “Mauritania refuses to sever relations with Israel.” Arabic News.com (17 November 2000).
Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999).
Central Intelligence Agency. The World Factbook. (2001).
Perry, Alex and Sai, Mae. “Child Slavery.” Time Asia (2002).
U.S. Department of Justice. “Division A—Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.” Violence Against Women Office (2000).
U.S. Department of State. “Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report.” (2001).