-Caveat Lector- http://www.africana.com/index_19990802.htm Activists: More Slaves Today Than Ever Before On July 3, following a solemn ceremony, the Homeward Bound Foundation lowered a monument into the Atlantic Ocean off New York harbor in honor of the millions who died during the notorious Middle Passage, one of the most grisly aspects of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, at Colonial Williamsburg, actors stage skits showing the mistreatment of early American slaves. Although some tourists have been upset by the enactments, Williamsburg authorities say realism is necessary to tell the full story of colonial life. Perhaps America is finally coming to terms with its slave past. However, some people may find it even harder to confront the reality of present-day slavery.As a growing band of international abolitionists are quick to explain, slavery is not just an unpleasant historical memory. These modern-day William Lloyd Garrisons seek to liberate the estimated 27 million men, women and children who live in bondage today. In fact, activists say there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. They can be found over much of the world. Slaves mine gold in South America, cut sugar cane in the Caribbean, tend cattle in West Africa, weave carpets in India and populate brothels in East Asia, and most are women and children. Although the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, AASG, opposes all forms of slavery, it is concentrating on two countries where activists say the situation is widespread and serious � the African nations of the Sudan and Mauritania. �They are really the only places with chattel slavery,� said Jesse Sage, associate director of AASG. Derived from the French word for cattle, chattel slavery refers to a practice in which �people are bought and sold like livestock.� Children born of slave parents automatically enter bondage themselves. Sage said that abuses in other parts of the world, such as the Asian sex trade, have been widely reported in the international media, but that slavery in Sudan and Mauritania has received little coverage until recently. �This has attracted almost no attention from the human rights community,� he said. �Our group was founded to fill in that void. There is not a lot of academic interest in this. Whatever the reasons, it�s a serious failing. There has been a little bit of a conspiracy of silence.� Sage estimated that there are some 50,000 slaves in Sudan, Africa�s largest nation. Most of them are believed to be Christian or followers of traditional religion from the southern part of the country, which has been fighting for an independent state periodically since the British departed in 1955. The Islamic government in the north has been accused of using slavery to terrorize the south. In 1996 Gregory Kane, a writer for The Baltimore Sun, traveled to Sudan and purchased two young boys, returning them to their father. The organization Christian Solidarity International has reportedly also bought the freedom of some 11,000 slaves in the past four years. But many activists feel that this does little to change things. �Buying slaves is not the solution,� Sage said. �This is just a fraction of the slaves.� Sage said slavery in Sudan is part of a wider campaign of genocide, which has killed some two million southerners, and displaced another four million, especially members of the Dinka ethnic group, who have been particularly resistant to northern domination. He also said the national government wants to drive people from sections of the Dinka homeland to make way for oil exploration. To pressure the government to stop such practices, AASG is calling for an international economic boycott of the Sudan. �Sudan needs to be isolated,� Sage said. �It is unconscionable for western companies to do business there. They are fueling human rights violations. The money is being used to wage genocide.� The AASG bulletin, The Anti-Slavery Report, quotes The London Sunday Telegraph as stating that Osama bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind behind bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania last year, uses slave children captured in Uganda to work in Sudanese marijuana fields, or to serve as soldiers or concubines. Across the continent in the West African nation of Mauritania, slavery is practiced on �a massive scale,� according to Sage. Some one million Mauritanians, more than one third of the country�s total population, live in servitude, which was legal until the 1980�s. Most Mauritanian slaves are blacks from the southern part of the country, owned by members of the lighter-skinned Berber ethnic group. Moctar Teyeb, an escaped Mauritanian slave, is AASG�s outreach director. Writing in The Anti-Slavery Report, Teyeb said that Islam has been incorrectly used to justify slavery. �They [slave owners] said, �Listen, this is a religion that comes from God. This is how God created you � black. The important thing for you is to get a reward in paradise. To do this, you have to obey your master in the present,�� he writes. �In Mauritania, there is a saying, �The path to heaven is under your master�s foot.�� Despite the distortions of some slave owners, the Islamic Koran stresses that servants should be well treated, and the prophet Muhammad is said to have condemned slave traders as �the wickedest people.� Elsewhere in Africa, AASG has taken aim at Trokosi slavery in Ghana. Practiced only in remote, northern regions, Trokosi (�slaves of the gods� in Ewe) slavery occurs when parents give a young daughter to a traditional healer in order to atone for a family members� sin. The girl serves the priest �in his field and in his bed,� for a few years and then returns to her family. While the girl wins her freedom, her social status is diminished. However, Sage said the situation is very different than in either Mauritania or Sudan because the Ghanaian government and national public opinion strongly oppose Trokosi and are working to stop it. He estimated that there are some 4,000 Trokosi slaves in the country and possibly more in neighboring nations, such as Togo and Benin. In other parts of the world slavery takes on still different faces. In Brazil and Paraguay, where unemployment and poverty are endemic, men are often lured to remote mines with promises of employment. With no escape route possible, the men are often forced into unpaid labor for a year or so. Even after they are released, the men often return to work in the mines since they have no money to make their way home. Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, Haitians are often forced to work in sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic without pay. Most servitude occurs in Asia, where thousands of children, mostly girls, are forced into the brothels of South East Asia and China. In India, Pakistan and Nepal, Sage estimated that some 20 million people work in carpet making and other industries in �debt bondage,� forced to pay off the financial obligations of a long-dead ancestor. �They all deserve their freedom,� Keri Lindsay said recently as she passed out literature in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. �Slavery is so unimaginable to us. They are shackled.� Although many people walk past her table indifferently, those who do stop are disturbed what they learn. �I�m so impressed by how outraged people are,� she said. �People are shocked at the situation abroad.� A junior at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he is majoring in international affairs with an emphasis on the Middle East and Africa, Lindsay is a summer intern with AASG. And although she receives only a token wage, Lindsay felt compelled to get involved in this cause after receiving a newspaper article on slavery in the Sudan. �Being black, I feel an affinity for that part of the world,� she said. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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