Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  China

  Sam Lu practiced Falun Gong, a spiritual system the Chinese government banned in 1999, and he was imprisoned for his beliefs. By some estimates, a hundred thousand followers of Falun Gong are now locked up in Chinese forced-labor camps, known as laogai.

  Sometime after being released from prison, Sam Lu moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been a graduate student in 1996. In the freedom of the United States, he could tell his story without fear. He said he wanted “to let [people] know how some products from China are made and why they are so cheap.”

  On June 7, 2000, I was arrested in China only because I handed in a letter at the State Appeal Bureau in Beijing to express my opinion about Falun Gong, which is … based on “Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance” and which is being persecuted in China. I was put in a jail in Guangdong Province for almost two months.… In prison I was forced to work on export products such as toys and shopping bags without pay.… The cell was only about three hundred square feet [28 sq. m.] in size, with twenty prisoners and one toilet inside. They slept and worked in the cell. Sometimes we were forced to work until two a.m. to keep up with the schedule. They only provided two meals a day (only once a week you have meat in your food). In other words, being hungry, you still need to work more than fifteen hours per day. The police used a wire whip to beat you if you did not do a good job or you could not keep up with the schedule.

  Lu was also worried about his wife, who had been sentenced to a forced-labor camp for three years for handing out Falun Gong flyers. Her job was to embroider textiles for export. “The hard work, malnutrition and torture made my wife almost lose her eyesight,” he said.

  Today there are over a thousand laogai camps throughout China. The Chinese government imprisons not just Falun Gong practitioners but also Christians and political dissidents – anyone it sees as a threat to its hold on power. The labor camps manufacture products like Christmas lights, stuffed animals, knitted sweaters, and gloves that are sold throughout the world, at low prices, to people who are happy to get a “bargain.”

  North Korea and Cuba

  North Korea and Cuba are also Communist dictatorships that try to stifle anyone who disagrees with them. In one case, a woman was arrested for singing a South Korean pop song in a private home in North Korea. Since South Korea is a free country and North Korea is a totalitarian state, this must have been considered threatening by the authorities; she was imprisoned for her “crime.” In North Korea, political prisoners are sent to live in penal labor colonies in remote, mountainous parts of the country, with up to three generations of their families. They are usually given life sentences of forced work in mines, on farms, or in factories.

  In Cuba, anti-government activists are assigned to forced labor. Luis Alberto Ferrándiz Alfaro was sentenced to work designing jewelry and furniture for a prison factory for the “crime” of creating anti-government stamps and flyers.

  Child Slavery and Children at War

  Military groups in some war-torn countries enslave children to work or to fight. If those children survive, the horrors they have experienced often haunt them long after they escape slavery.

  Susan was sixteen years old when she was captured by the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and made to fight for them. Later, she told the organization Human Rights Watch:

  One boy tried to escape [from the rebels], but he was caught.… His hands were tied, and then they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I felt sick. I knew this boy from before. We were from the same village. I refused to kill him and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it. The boy was asking me, “Why are you doing this?” I said I had no choice.… I still dream about the boy from my village who I killed. I see him in my dreams, and he is talking to me and saying I killed him for nothing, and I am crying.

  Some children enlist in military groups voluntarily because they see no other way to survive. Ishmael Beah was thirteen when he became a soldier in Sierra Leone. He thought that if he refused, he would be killed by enemy soldiers, or die of starvation. He and the other child soldiers took drugs to escape from the realities of their lives as fighters. Years later, Beah said his soul felt “corrupted” by what he had done. He has written a book about his ordeal, and travels widely to make people aware of the issue of child soldiers.

  More than 250,000 children were enslaved in military groups in 2009, according to the United Nations. In Africa, there were 100,000 child soldiers, some as young as seven. Other areas of conflict using children as soldiers include Burma, Chechnya, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, Peru, and Sri Lanka.

  The United Nations General Assembly took a strong stand against this by unanimously passing the Child Soldiers Protocol on May 25, 2000. This rule prohibits governments, armies, or other armed groups from recruiting soldiers under the age of eighteen. Unfortunately, the United Nations decree has not stopped the practice.

  OUT OF THE WATER AND INTO SCHOOL

  Poverty is so severe in Ghana that many parents lease their children to fishermen to raise a little money, sometimes only twenty dollars a year. The children live with a fisherman far from home, and often spend as many as fifteen hours a day on a canoe, doing laborious and sometimes dangerous jobs.

  Young children bail water from their boats to keep them afloat. When they are older, they take on the more dangerous task of diving down to untangle fishing nets. Some of them drown.

  James Kofi Annan understands what these children are going through. He was six years old when his parents sold him. For seven years he was a slave. When he was thirteen, he managed to escape back to his parents’ home.

  He decided that he wanted to learn English and enrolled in school. He earned a university degree and found a good job in a bank. His passion, though, was to help children so they would not have to suffer the misery he had known. In 2003, he created the organization Challenging Heights, which is supported by the American organization Free the Slaves, and educates children so that they will know their rights and have the skills to escape poverty. Annan talks to parents about the importance of school and about the lasting damage caused by child labor. About 250 children aged four to fifteen are enrolled at his school. Some are former slaves, and others might have been sold into slavery if Challenging Heights hadn’t reached them first.

  Mark Kwadwo was five when his parents sold him to this fisherman. He was rescued by a woman from Missouri who read about him in a newspaper in the United States.

  Photo Credit 12.4

  On Cocoa Farms

  Poverty drives some children into backbreaking unpaid labor. Amadou was a young boy when a man promised him a good job in the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire). The work turned out to be on a plantation growing cocoa and other crops, hundreds of miles from his family in Mali, a poor country in West Africa. There, from the crack of dawn until sundown, Amadou collected cocoa pods and hauled great sacks of them. Flies buzzed around his head, he had to watch for snakes at his feet, and he slept locked in a shack with eighteen other boys, with only a can for a toilet. He was always hungry, and he was beaten if he didn’t work quickly enough for the farmer. Some of the boys he worked with died.

  Amadou had been a slave for over five years when one boy from his farm managed to escape. He got word to a Malian government official, Abdul Makho, and with police help, Makho freed the boys and took them to his home. After they were clean, fed, and clothed, he allowed a British film crew to interview them. That was when Amadou learned that the cocoa beans he harvested made chocolate, a treat he had never tasted. Here is Amadou’s message to those who ate that chocolate: “If I had to say something to them, it would not be nice words. They enjoy something I suffered to make; I worked hard for them, but saw no benefit. They are eating my flesh.” The film, first broadcast on British television, opened the world’s eyes to conditions on many cocoa plantations.

  The idea that chocolate Easter bunnies, Santas
, and candy bars could depend on slave labor is shocking, and many people think the solution is simple: don’t buy chocolate from the Ivory Coast or any other country where slave labor is used to harvest it. But experts in modern slavery tell us that the answer isn’t that easy.

  Almost half the world’s chocolate comes from 600,000 small farms in the Ivory Coast. Some of the farmers employ slaves, but many do not. All the harvested cocoa beans are mixed together when they go to chocolate factories. If we boycott all Ivory Coast chocolate, we hurt the honest farmers who pay their workers. If they lose their farms because no one will buy their chocolate, they and their children will sink into poverty, and perhaps into slavery.

  The world’s biggest chocolate companies insisted that the child slavery shown in the film was not typical. But two American congressmen, Eliot Engel and Tom Harkin, believed the abuses were common enough that all chocolate products should have a label stating that they were made without slave labor. In 2001, the chocolate companies and congressmen came out with the Cocoa Protocol. It required that the major chocolate companies, antislavery groups, and governments work together to stop the worst forms of child labor and to develop a way to inspect the cocoa plantations. For the first time in history, members of an industry had cooperated to eliminate slavery from their product.

  They created the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), whose programs alert people to the dangers children face on cocoa plantations and train police to spot traffickers. (Traffickers are people who use deceit or coercion to pressure victims into performing work without payment, often in a new location.) The ICI also provides shelters for children rescued from slavery.

  Many communities have passed laws to outlaw abuses on cocoa farms, and the governments of Ghana, Mali, and the Ivory Coast have rescued some child slaves. In spite of these positive signs, much work remains. Some experts think thousands more children – and adults – remain as slaves on cocoa farms.

  The Fight to End Slavery Today

  People fight slavery today because they have been slaves themselves or because they have heard the stories of slaves. They are all united by a sense of outrage at the injustice of slavery.

  CHILDREN HELPING CHILDREN

  One morning in 1995, in Toronto, Canada, twelve-year-old Craig Kielburger was in the kitchen eating cereal when a front-page headline in the newspaper caught his eye: “Battled Child Labour, Boy, 12, Murdered. Defied members of ‘carpet mafia.’ ”

  A Pakistani boy his own age, Iqbal Masih, had worked unpaid at a loom for six long years, tying tiny knots to make carpets. Iqbal had been shot to death while riding his bike in the outskirts of the city of Lahore. The article ended, “Some believe his murder was carried out by angry members of the carpet industry who had made repeated threats to silence the young activist.”

  Who were the “carpet mafia,” and why would they want to kill a twelve-year-old boy, Craig wondered. His curiosity opened his eyes to a whole new world, the world of child labor.

  IQBAL’S STORY

  Iqbal’s family was poor and owed so much money that when their son was only four years old, they bonded him to the owner of a carpet factory for sixteen dollars. He slaved over a loom twelve or more hours a day, six days a week, to pay off his parents’ debts. He was poorly fed. Sometimes his boss chained him to the loom, and frequently he beat him.

  One day Iqbal ran away and came upon a rally where he heard members of an antislavery group explain that the Pakistani government had passed a law against debt labor, and had canceled all the debts that slave laborers owed their masters. The factory owners did not want anyone to know, because they wanted to continue paying low wages, and besides, nobody enforced the laws. The antislavery group helped to free Iqbal, and he began to speak publicly about his experiences.

  Iqbal Masih, who was murdered in 1995 for opening the world’s eyes to child slavery, received the first World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child after his death. At his funeral a young girl named Shenaz, who had worked in bonded labor making bricks, said, “The day Iqbal died, a thousand new Iqbals were born.”

  Photo Credit 12.5

  Iqbal was only four feet two inches (under 130 cm) tall because of his years without good food, sunshine, and exercise. The sight of this tiny boy, almost hidden by a microphone, speaking out courageously for children’s rights helped rouse public outrage throughout the world, and Iqbal won the Reebok Human Rights Youth in Action Award. When he went to the United States to receive his award in 1994, he held up a carpet tool. This was what his owner had used to beat children who did something wrong, he explained.

  Unfortunately, the owner of the business where I worked told us that it is America who asks us to enslave the children. American people like the cheap carpets, the rugs, and the towels that we make. So they want bonded labor to go on. I appeal to you that you stop people from using children as bonded laborers because the children need to use a pen rather than the instruments of child labor.

  Many people suspect that Iqbal was killed by the “carpet mafia” – thugs

  employed by Pakistani carpet factories – because his message was getting through, and turning people’s hearts against manufacturers who abused children in their factories.

  CRAIG’S STORY

  Iqbal’s story enraged Craig Kielburger. The more he learned about child labor and child slavery, the more determined he became to fight it.

  Craig started a club at his school, and it quickly grew into an organization named Free the Children. First, he and his friends set out to learn as much as they could about child labor. From the International Labor Organization, for example, they learned that there were about 250 million working children in the world. The next step was to educate other children, so they made presentations in schools and encouraged children to write to companies or government leaders about the issue.

  Free the Children (FTC) has grown, but its focus remains the same: getting young people in the richest countries in the world to support young people in the poorest. Its young volunteers speak in schools and encourage children to raise money to help free other children overseas. FTC’s volunteers also spend time in poor villages, and they have figured out practical ways of wiping out child slavery. For example, in Leiwing, China, FTC got fathers involved in building a school. When parents felt they needed their children to work in the fields, FTC gave the families piglets, which could be raised for more income. Now, with the prospect of more money for the families, 98 percent of the village’s children go to school.

  Mauritania

  Abdel Nasser Ould Yessa was born into a ruling class family in Mauritania, where his father was president of the Supreme Court. At the age of sixteen, Abdel already knew something was wrong in his country.

  In high school I read about the French Revolution.… The ideal … that “all men are born free and equal” captivated me. I began to see that what was happening in my country was not normal. I would come home from school and slaves would care for me. They would bring me drinks, wash my hands, massage my feet, and cook for me.… And one day I just said, “No!” If a slave came to care for me, I would refuse them. I started to do things myself. My mother was not happy, because, as she told me, “This is not noble.” The slaves did not know how to react. They had never heard what I was saying: that all men are born free.

  For more than eight hundred years, people have been born into slavery in Mauritania, a northwest African country with a population of only 3.1 million. The ruling class is made up of Arab-Berbers known as bidanes, “whites.” The slaves are descended from the native black Africans. According to some estimates, over half a million people (a sixth of the population) live as slaves.

  The bidanes believe that most forms of physical labor are degrading to them, and demand that slaves perform all the menial work. The economy of Mauritania rests entirely on the work of slaves like Bilal, who at age twenty works seven days a week. He rises before sunrise, eats a breakfast of rice or leftovers prepared by a slave wo
man, and drives his master’s donkey cart to a well. There he fills two giant barrels of water by hand from a metal can and starts his rounds, delivering water to his master’s customers. Working even when the sun is beating down at noon, he returns to the well seven or eight times every day, bringing about two hundred gallons (800 liters) of water to people who do not have running water. When the last of the water is delivered, he turns over the money to his master, and performs other exhausting chores until midnight.

  Slave women clean, cook, and raise their masters’ children. Their own children are sold away from them, and they themselves live in fear of being sexually abused.

  In 1995, when Abdel Nasser Ould Yessa was living in Paris, he decided to change the lives of the slaves he had seen every day in his country. He joined with Mauritanian antislavery activist Boubacar Messaoud, the son of slaves, to form SOS Esclaves (SOS Slaves), an illegal organization that had to operate in secret.

  Mauritania has passed antislavery laws four times since 1901, but none has been effective. In 2007, SOS Esclaves helped draft a law to penalize slaveholders. Anyone convicted of practicing slavery would serve up to ten years in jail, and anyone who promoted or defended it would also be punished. But the government has still not prosecuted any offenders, and the law does not permit human rights organizations to go to court on behalf of uneducated slaves to free them. Although much work remains to be done, SOS Esclaves won the 2009 Anti-Slavery Award from Anti-Slavery International for its groundbreaking efforts to wipe out slavery in Mauritania.