POVERTY: Slavery is alive and well

CAIRO, Jul 11, 2011 (IPS) - Simba Russeau

In dire need of money to assist her family back home, 27-year-old Makeda from Ethiopia was forced to return to the Middle East as a domestic worker.
As the world marks the Global Population Day Jul. 11, the plight of many like her is increasingly in focus.
Instead of taking the legal route, Makeda opted to seek out assistance from another Ethiopian woman who had been employed in the Middle East for more than ten years, and was known for helping women find sponsors.
Some five years later Makeda ran into difficulties when she took on work with an expat family that wanted to sponsor her. But her passport was with the female trafficker who had brought her in.
"The initial sponsorship that the trafficker brought me under had expired, and the local man who allowed us to use his name for a fee wasn’t paid, so he placed a claim with the authorities that I had run away," Makeda told IPS.
"The woman demanded more money for me to relinquish my passport, so we sought legal counseling. A migration lawyer contacted the woman, and threatened to inform her employer. But in the end it was discovered that the woman’s employer was a well-known lawyer in the country who was helping her traffic women into the region," Makeda said.
"It took me years to pay off the fees she charged to bring me in. Although I paid the extra money and obtained my passport, the process took so long that the expat family left and I ended up illegal."
"For many, the simplicity of the transaction when dealing with illegal recruiters is more attractive," Pardis Mahdavi, author of ‘Gridlock: Labour, Migration and Human Trafficking’ told IPS. "If governments could put into place a system that allows the legal channels for migration to be easier, it could limit the number of workers migrating under informal middlemen."
Slavery, which is a system where people are treated as property and forced to work, is very much a part of today’s global economy. It rivals and in some regions eclipses the international drug trade.
There are nearly 27 million slaves worldwide, generating 1.3 billion dollars in annual profits, according to conservative estimates. Some estimates show a world slave population as high as 200 million, with the majority held under debt bondage.
Considered a new form of slavery, human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world. The United Nations (UN) estimates that nearly three million people are trafficked annually.
"Global human trafficking is fueled by the insatiable demand for unmediated access to other human beings - to their labour, their personhood, to all that makes each of us unique, and all of us generic," Eileen Scully, author of ‘Pre-Cold War Traffic in Sex Labor’ told IPS.
"The demand in EU countries for ‘exotic women’, for example, is not merely a demand for non-local women, or for women from cultures that supposedly do not stigmatise prostitution. This demand is, rather, for ‘trafficked women’ and ‘trafficked children’, meaning individuals who have been manoeuvered into untenable, inescapable situations, where having once said yes to the general proposition, they are unable to say no to the particulars when later presented."
The new International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention on Domestic Workers adopted in June aims to ensure that women - who constitute nearly 50 percent of the global migrant population – are treated as human beings.
"When male migrant workers come to work in construction or other service and industry sectors in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, they are protected under the labour law. Even if they don’t have full rights their work is recognised as work under the law, which is not the case for domestic workers (in the Arab region)," Simel Esim, gender specialist at the ILO's Regional Office for the Arab States told IPS.
"Jordan and Lebanon are the only countries where ministries of labour are in charge of a significant number of the institutional responsibilities regarding migrant domestic workers," adds Esim.
"In the case of the GCC countries the oversight of domestic workers is under the jurisdiction of the ministries of interior instead of the ministries of labour, which leaves domestic workers outside the purview of the labour law. The emphasis on domestic workers is, therefore about their recognition as workers, with equal rights to workers in other sectors."
Lacking legal protection, domestic workers are among the most exploited and abused workers in the world. Rights advocates have long argued that exclusion from labour laws and recruitment-related abuses has left domestic workers in the Middle East vulnerable to exploitation, sexual abuse, forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking and conditions akin to slavery.
The new convention requires governments to regulate private employment agencies that impose heavy debt burdens or misinform migrant domestic workers about their jobs, prohibit the practice of deducting domestic workers’ salaries to pay recruitment fees, investigate complaints, and labour inspection in private homes.
"Policies relating to trafficking need to fall more in line with the reality of forced migration globally because most migrant workers are not the stereotypical sex worker chained to a bed," adds Mahdavi.
"In fact they are men and women that are tied to metaphorical chains like debt and poverty that forces these workers to migrate and remain in poor working conditions."
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56424

POVERTY: NEPAL: No clear route out of servitude for indentured girls

KATHAMANDU, 20 June 2011 (IRIN)
 Photo: Courtesy of the Advocacy Project
Stronger rehabilitation support is needed

 Efforts to free thousands of enslaved girls in Nepal and get them into school need more funding and less government bureaucracy, activists say.
Since the year 2000, more than 11,000 Kamlaris, girls committed to indentured servitude by their parents, have been rescued. But without financial support, those freed remain impoverished and some say they are forced to consider returning to work as Kamlaris.
“Many of my friends are now planning to resume their life as Kamlaris and this really worries me,” 20-year-old Urmila Chaudhary, an ex-Kamlari, told IRIN.
She was barely six when her parents sold her to work in a rich household in Kathmandu. In 2007, after 12 years of servitude, the Nepalese Youth Foundation (NYOF) rescued her.
Though the government has a budget of nearly US$2.3 million for the education and vocational training of freed Kamlari girls in 2011, most of the funds remain unspent, activists say.
The budget allocation was a political move and a form of window-dressing, said NYOF’s Som Paneru said. He explained that the money is tied up in red tape, with officials often blaming each other for inaction over the former Kamlaris.
In 2009, the government had a budget of nearly $1.6 million for 7,000 girls but not even $150,000 was spent. The rest of the money was frozen by the end of fiscal year 2010, according to NYOF. The NGO fears the same will happen in 2011.

Government to blame?
“It is a big failure of our system and the government remains irresponsible,” said Paneru.
There is concern that many of the formerly indentured girls are already dropping out of school because they cannot afford the fees. In Dang District, western Nepal, about 400km south of Kathmandu, more than 200 former Kamlaris have already dropped out of school this year, according to NGO the Society Welfare Action Nepal (SWAN).
Of the 11,000 girls rescued, 6,500 are now aged 6-19 and were supposed to receive a monthly government grant of $20 for school fees.
Ex-Kamlari Urmila Chaudhary, an activist with NGO Common Forum for Kamlari Freedom, started by ex-Kamlari girls in Dang District, said the group routinely approaches the government for answers and help - only to be told funds have been sent to district offices.
“But the girls have never seen the funds. The cash is usually sent to the school administration which charges for school registration, monthly fees and other things,” said Bhagiram Chaudhary, executive director of SWAN.
All Kamlaris, and many activists, are from the Thauru ethnic group and have the same surname - Chaudhary.
The Ministry of Education, which is responsible for helping to fund the girls’ education, said financial assistance had already reached the Kamlari students.
“We will verify this information because our ministry has already disbursed the funds,” Janardhan Nepal, joint secretary of the ministry, told IRIN, pointing out that the money was used to cover school fees and administrative costs, but also acknowledging that the funds were insufficient and the girls still vulnerable.


People living in Nepal's mid- and far-western regions suffer from extreme neglect due to a lack of development : Naresh Newar/IRIN

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93016

POVERTY: China Moves to End ‘Modern Slavery’

Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jan 14, 2011 (IPS) - Authorities in remote Xinjiang province rescued a group of mentally ill men last month. The men had been sold by a shelter operator and forced to work in a factory. The rescue shone a light on the darkest side of China’s rapid economic growth – slavery.
Police arrested Li Xinglin, the boss of the building materials factory in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. He had attempted to flee after state media ran reports exposing the plant’s working conditions, according to Xinhua News Agency.
Reports said at least a dozen workers, eight of them mental disabilities, were sold to the factory to work without pay. Authorities said the workers were given no protective gear, forced to work during the winter when other factories suspended operations, and were fed the same food as the factory leader’s dog. Some of them had been held for four years.
Li Xinglin’s son Li Chenglong was also arrested, in Chengdu, capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province. He had fled to the region with 12 mentally ill workers. The workers were rescued and placed in government custody.
In January, three more people were detained in the case, according to official news reports. Zeng Lingquan and his wife ran a beggars’ shelter in Quxian country, Sichuan, and had allegedly sold mentally handicapped people to workplaces since 1993. Several officials tied to the case were fired from their jobs.
Zeng, a farmer who once served as an executive committee member of the Quxian Federation of Industry and Commerce, sold a number of workers to the Jiaersi Green Construction Material Chemical Factory in Xinjiang, and received salaries that were supposed to be paid to the workers. Officials said Zeng’s shelter was a front for a slavery ring.
Tales of modern slavery periodically make news in China, which last year overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy. While working conditions and salaries have generally improved for factory workers across the country as the economy has soared, experts say slavery of mentally ill workers and children remains a persistent problem.
In May 2009, police in Anhui province arrested ten men for allegedly enslaving more than 30 mentally handicapped people who had been forced to work at brick kilns. In 2007, hundreds of brick kiln slaves, many of them children or mentally handicapped, were freed in raids across northern China.
Reports of enslaved mentally ill workers have come from ten provinces since 2007, according to the China Association of Mentally Handicapped People. There have been 20 cases of mentally ill workers being killed, a Legal Daily report said.
Meng Weina, founder of the Beijing Huiling Community Services for People with Learning Disabilities, says mentally ill people are especially vulnerable in China, where the social security net is small and care generally falls into the hands of the family. When parents die, many mentally handicapped people have no one to care for them. In rural areas, where 70 percent of mentally disabled people live, there are virtually no organisations that offer support.
"We have seen so many cases of abduction," Meng tells IPS, "but when they are reported to place, no one really cares."
Liu Kaiming, labour researcher and executive director at the Shenzhen-based Institute of Contemporary Observation, says the root cause is imperfect social safety nets, inadequate laws and regulations protecting mentally ill people, and lack of punishment for officials who neglect their duties.
"I don’t think the central and local governments have done anything to protect mentally ill workers," Liu tells IPS.
Meng says social services for mentally handicapped workers need to be improved. Support needs to reach China’s more remote regions as well, he says, instead of focusing on major centres such as Beijing.
After the publicity sparked by the brick kilns slavery reports, major revisions were made to laws governing children’s rights in China. New laws included mandated adequate sleep time as well as time for entertainment and sports.
But little appears to have been done to protect the rights of mentally ill workers. Last November Luis CdeBaca, senior advisor to the U.S. State Department, said in a visit to Beijing that China needed to improve its effort in the fight against "modern slavery" and better support forced labour and human trafficking victims. "The government itself cannot solve the problem of modern slavery," CdeBaca said, according to a report in China Daily. "Instead, you have to have civil society working with government; the two working together to harness the power in a way that the victims find themselves in a better place."
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54128

POVERTY: South Sudan: Countdown to the world's unlikeliest state

Geoffrey York :  Globe and Mail :  Jan. 09, 2011




When I first met the ragtag rebels of Southern Sudan, it was hard to suppress a skeptical chuckle. They had a broken-wheeled howitzer that they pulled laboriously by hand, and they had a bugle that they couldn’t play. Most of them had no uniforms; many were barefoot.
In place of uniforms, the rebels wore an oddly flamboyant collection of scrap clothing. One fighter was wearing a tattered woman’s dress, while another had donned a clown-like purple plaid suit. A third was sporting a beekeeper’s helmet.


The proposed border between North and South Sudan [Video]

South Sudan braced for independence referendum It was 1993, in the famine-ravaged town of Ayod in the remote scrub-lands of the Upper Nile, and the endless rebellion seemed as hopeless as ever. It was difficult to imagine how these ill-equipped insurgents could win a small local skirmish, let alone a protracted war against Khartoum’s powerful army and air force.
Today, 18 years later, those barefoot rebels are on the verge of an astonishing victory. If confirmed, as widely expected, by a referendum on secession that begins Sunday, Southern Sudan will soon begin negotiating its independence – its dream since the 1950s. It will be the birth of an unlikely new nation.
But the cost has been horrific. Southern Sudan has been consumed by devastating wars for most of the past half-century. An estimated 2.5 million people have perished in those wars, with atrocities on all sides that were shocking in their cruelty.
After decades of indifference by most of the world, the irony is that Southern Sudan suddenly became a fashionable cause over the past decade. Its oil exports became lucrative, forcing the north and south to try to settle their conflict in order to protect their revenue flows. Simultaneously, there was a rapid escalation of U.S. diplomatic pressure on both sides, including the threat of sanctions – partly because evangelical Christian lobbyists had persuaded Congress that it needed to protect the south’s Christians from Muslim persecution.
The U.S. diplomatic pressure was a key factor in forging the 2005 peace agreement, which in turn paved the way for this month’s referendum on secession. Politicians from the United States are jetting into Khartoum to ensure that the vote proceeds on schedule. And now the evangelical Christians have been joined by a flutter of Hollywood celebrities. Film star George Clooney flew into Southern Sudan this week to monitor the referendum, with moral support from Hollywood pals such as Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. It was his second trip to Southern Sudan in the past three months.
All of this frenzied activity is in stark contrast to the worldwide apathy that surrounded Sudan’s civil war at its bloodiest moments. It was a conflict that killed civilians on a fantastic scale, yet few people outside Sudan seemed to care.
The government in Khartoum, fighting to impose an Islamic state on the non-Muslim tribes of the south, gave thousands of weapons to Arab militias to help them raid the southern villages. The militias burned huts, poisoned wells, stole cattle, and kidnapped women and children to trade as slaves. In one massacre in 1987, more than 1,000 people were burned alive in the railway carriages where they had taken shelter.
Both sides used famine as a weapon, destroying the food supplies of villages that they deemed disloyal. Khartoum ordered airplanes to bomb the south indiscriminately from the air. The survivors retreated into the bush. “Southern Sudan went back to the Iron Age,” author Richard Dowden wrote.
When I met the rebels in a remote corner of Southern Sudan in 1993, they were filled with bravado, undeterred by their lack of uniforms and equipment. “We can even fight without clothes,” the local commander, Elijah Hon, told me. “The gun and the bullet will cry, even if the soldier is naked.”
He ordered his men to drill, and it looked briefly impressive. They jogged past the stick-and-grass huts of their town, chanting anti-Arab slogans as they carried their Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers, and they presented arms in a well-rehearsed ceremony.
But what I noticed were the vultures circling in the sky, above the half-buried skeletons of the children who had died of hunger and disease. I saw the bomb craters where the Sudanese Air Force had struck the town, and I saw the panic in the eyes of the villagers when they heard the distant sound of an airplane engine. I saw the emaciated infants, the adults with untreated bullet wounds, the refugees surviving on wild fruit and leaves, and the solitary desperate health worker who had no medicine to give the queues of sick people at his door.
Illiteracy and superstition were rife. Mr. Hon said the rebels had followed the guidance of a tribal prophet who promised they would be immune to bullets when they fought the government troops. The prophet, he admitted, had been wrong.
Despite the constant warfare, he claimed that the children of the rebels were happy. “They are born in war and they die in war,” he told me. “Even our young ones play with little Kalashnikovs.”
I’m still not sure why he was boasting of how the war had twisted the children, but it revealed all the tragedy of Southern Sudan. Entire generations were lost to war.
Juba, the capital of the south, was controlled by government forces for most of the war, but it was besieged by the rebels, year after year. It was crowded with refugees who lived in grass huts, dependent on relief supplies flown into the city, while the rebels fired shells from the outskirts. The city barely survived.
Today, after five years of ceasefire, Juba is springing back to life. Its streets are bustling with cars, trucks, traders, merchants, and the jeeps of hundreds of aid organizations and United Nations agencies.
Yet while some business people are making money (especially traders of East Indian descent from Uganda and Kenya, who have flocked to Juba), the people of Southern Sudan are still dogged by the same crippling problems that I saw in the 1990s. If the south gains its formal independence – which could happen as early as July – it will become one of the poorest and hungriest nations in the world.
Malnutrition and illiteracy are almost as widespread today as they were in the 1990s. About 85 per cent of the population is illiterate, the maternal death rate is one of the highest in the world, one-seventh of children die before they reach the age of five, and less than half of the population has access to clean water. Almost half of the population was dependent on food aid last year. A 15-year-old girl in Southern Sudan has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than finishing her primary school education.
The people of the south are willing to endure all of this, however, because of their memories of the civil war. In the referendum campaign this month, the slogan of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement is a simple one: throw off the shackles of slavery. “It was the SPLM that said No to slavery,” says one southern official.
The reference to slavery is a powerfully evocative one. It alludes to the Arab slave traders who raided the south to capture slaves in the nineteenth century. It evokes memories of the Arab militias that seized southerners as slaves in the 1980s. And it implicitly suggests that Khartoum would still prefer to treat the southerners as slaves to Islamic law.
“We are African, but we are suffering inside an Arab country,” says Major Abraham Ajith, an officer in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
“They are Muslims, and they don’t want Christians. They don’t want the black person to rule anything. They don’t want to recognize our rights. They sell our oil and they don’t tell us. We are going to rule ourselves. We will get our freedom and independence, and then we will get our oil.”
In Juba, the unbearably heavy cost of the 50-year conflict still lingers in the memories of everyone here. On the streets of the city, a pro-secession poster proclaims: “The final walk to freedom; 2.5 million lives paid for our freedom.”
Yet the grim reality is that the bloodshed is not over, and the deaths have not ended. Tribal clashes and clan battles killed about 2,500 people in 2009 and nearly 1,000 more in 2010. Cattle-rustling frequently sparks violence. It’s partly a legacy of the civil war: Everyone has weapons, and nomads carry guns to protect their herds from the cattle-raiders.
Then there is the Lord’s Resistance Army, the mysterious militia that has been covertly supported by Khartoum as it launches raids across the border from Congo into Southern Sudan. Just two weeks ago, the LRA attacked a village in Southern Sudan, killing two villagers and kidnapping 50 of them. More than 40,000 Southern Sudanese have fled from their homes in the past year to escape LRA attacks.
To defend themselves from the LRA, the southern villages have created primitive militias of young men called the “Arrow Boys.” They are armed with spears, kitchen knives, bows and arrows, poison darts, and even nests of bees.
It’s almost as if the ragtag rebels of 1993 have simply shifted to a new battlefront in the wars of this newborn nation.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/africa-mideast/south-sudan-countdown-to-the-worlds-unlikeliest-state/article1862268/

POVERTY: MAURITANIA: Activists’ trial puts spotlight on anti-slavery law

NOUAKCHOTT, 4 January 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Contributor/IRIN : Former slave in Mauritania

Six anti-slavery activists are in prison in Mauritania in a case rights experts say points to the challenges of ensuring a 2007 law criminalizing slavery is more than just words on paper.
The six men, members of the Mauritanian anti-slavery group Initiative pour la résurgence du mouvement abolitioniste (IRA), are set to go on trial in the capital, Nouakchott, on 5 January after two postponements. The authorities reportedly said the IRA members attacked security forces; the activists said they were simply demonstrating against slavery.
“We suspected that the 2007 law would not be put into effect,” Romana Cacchioli, Africa expert with Anti-Slavery International, told IRIN. “And indeed its application is not yet a reality. Cases that have been brought are either still in process but taking a long time or have not been pursued.”
The law makes keeping slaves a crime in Mauritania, but the practice continues. The NGO SOS Esclaves says nearly a fifth of Mauritania’s 3.1 million people were slaves as of 2009.
On 13 December the six activists were arrested while protesting in front of a Nouakchott police station; the activists were calling for the group’s leader to attend the questioning of two girls - aged nine and 13 - allegedly kept as slaves.
“Each time a slave is questioned, the police don’t want [IRA president] Biram Oula Dah Ould Abeid to attend,” IRA member Hamady Lehbouss told IRIN. “This way the police are able to manipulate the slaves.”
Leïla Ahmed, IRA member and Ould Abeid’s wife, was at the police station; she said she felt teargas and saw policemen beating IRA members, including her husband.
The Mauritanian authorities have declined to comment on the arrests or the protest in front of the Nouakchott police station.
Ineffective law?
The 2007 law - adopted unanimously by Mauritania’s National Assembly - criminalized slavery. But to date, according to IRA and SOS Esclaves, no one has been prosecuted for keeping slaves.
Human rights and anti-slavery activists expressed concern in 2007 that the law alone was insufficient, saying the government must adopt measures to ensure the law would be effective.
The law says slaveholders could be given 10-year prison sentences and fines ranging from US$2,000 to $4,000. Anyone facilitating slavery can be imprisoned for two years. The law also provides for financial compensation to former victims.
The law does not allow representatives of civil society groups to attend trials.
“No legal measures exist for slaves to claim their rights,” IRA secretary-general Boubacar Ould Mohammed told IRIN.
The deputy head of SOS Esclaves in Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Khalifa, said the authorities generally classify such cases simply as disputes between an employer and his or her employees.

Widely practised
Activists said part of the difficulty in criminalizing slavery is that it is so widely practised. “The authorities themselves keep slaves,” Khalifa said.
But also, former slave Haby Rabah told IRIN, many people in slavery do not know their rights or are afraid to leave.
“My masters told me: ‘The slave depends on his owner and in order to go to paradise he must obey his owner. Otherwise he will go to hell’,” said Rabah who, with IRA’s help, was liberated "three years and four months" ago.
“I knew no one but my masters. I belonged to them and that seemed normal to me. When I was young my owners beat me; when I got older they threatened to take me to the police if I disobeyed them.”
Local experts say slavery continues in cities as well as in rural areas in this Sahelian country which lies geographically and culturally between Arab North Africa and black sub-Saharan Africa. Most affected are the Harratin – black Moors, descendants of slaves – who are generally owned by upper class white Moors, the minority ruling elite of Arab-Berber descent, according to SOS Esclaves. Slaves generally do household work or attend to livestock; they are not allowed to own land.
A common saying among Mauritanians is: “The ground is the slave’s bed, fire his clothing.”
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91528