Freedom

by Freedom- The Overthrow of the Slave Empires (retail) (epub)

  Cardinal Lavigeries greatest impact – prompting the pan-European abolition movement – was unintentional. In British eyes, his work was a reprise of the abolitionist tremors that had periodically shaken the country a century before. Anti-slavery sentiment had, at last, become a genuinely European phenomenon and had shed the suspicions that had clung to Britain’s earlier drives against slavery.

  Abolition was also popular. The people of Europe, increasingly literate and well informed, were learning at first-hand about the nature of slavery in regions recently acquired by their own country. They heard about it from missionaries (most famously Dr Livingstone), from the pulpit (notably Lavigerie) and from popular press reports about the activities of military men, diplomats and businessmen. This late-century drift to popular imperialism was widespread and politically influential, and brought together national self-interest, nationalistic fervour and moralising zeal. And all with the aim of bestowing civilisation and removing the scourge of slavery. As enormous tracts of the world – especially in Africa – fell under European control, it was widely accepted as a moral responsibility to purge those lands of slavery.

  Revelations about King Leopold’s vicious management of what was, effectively, his personal fiefdom in the Congo gave added urgency to European abolition. Under pressure from Britain, the Belgian monarch convened a gathering at Brussels in 1890, which agreed to the first genuinely international treaty against the slave trade and slavery. Though its immediate origins lay in the Congo atrocities, the treaty was the culmination of a diplomatic saga that reached back to Vienna in 1815. The Brussels treaty had its flaws, but it seemed, finally, to be a clear sign that slavery was on the retreat, driven back by the advance of Western nations in regions they now controlled or governed.

  The 1890 General Act of Brussels (a treaty of 100 clauses) declared that all parties were equally animated by the firm intention of putting an end to the crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves’. The same parties also agreed to protect ‘the aboriginal populations of Africa and of assuring to that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization’.[8] All signatories were bound, within the year, to adopt penal laws to punish their own slave traders. The Act also granted the right of search and detention of vessels at sea (though with conditions that avoided friction between the major powers). A major innovation was the establishment of offices in Zanzibar and Brussels (the latter attached to the Belgian Foreign Office), where officials compiled all the available information about slave trading within defined areas.

  The irony in all this is there for everyone to see. Many of the Western powers that had grown fat on Atlantic slavery had evolved into the world’s leading imperial powers and were using their unrivalled military and diplomatic strength to bring slavery to an end. The poachers of the old-world order had become the bellicose gamekeepers of the new. They also set about ensuring that new international organisations would henceforth be wedded to abolition. All this, like so much else, was swept aside by the First World War. In the diplomatic tumult that followed the war, with the major powers at Versailles reordering the maps of Europe and the Middle East, old concerns about slavery seemed marginal. Even so, a new treaty, of St Germain-en-Laye, in early September 1919, revised earlier agreements about slavery. It revoked the old authorisation of search and detention, and failed to reopen the monitoring offices in Zanzibar and Brussels. Most importantly, however, it bound all signatories to secure an end to slavery ‘in all its forms and of the slave trade by land and sea’.[9]

  In a world convulsed by the Great War and its aftermath, slavery was clearly a sideshow, and the main priority of international diplomacy was the maintenance of peace via the new League of Nations. In 1926, the League established a Slavery Convention, which was ultimately to outlaw both slavery and the slave trade. The Convention made slavery illegal internationally and established the principle that slavery was a crime against humanity (though there was no means of enforcement).

  Although the question of slavery was low on the list of pressing priorities after the war, the 1926 Convention marked an astonishing turn of events. Slavery – which had brought untold bounty to the Western world (and many other societies before that) – was now denounced and outlawed. Henceforth, any nation wishing to be taken seriously in global affairs – especially in the new international corridors of power – had to display their anti-slavery credentials. Nations anxious to catch up with the West, to become modern, democratic and industrial, had to display their disavowal of slavery. The Japanese banned slavery as part of their modernisation and Westernisation. Russia – that huge empire which sprawled from the gates of Europe to the edges of China – had already freed its serfs as part of its own hesitant and troubled passage to modernity. And, of course, all Europe’s major powers and the USA proclaimed their civilisation by distancing themselves from their slaving past.

  It was as if the world had turned on its axis. What had once been vital, much sought after and fought over (i.e. a share in the profitable business of slavery) had, by the start of the twentieth century, become a global pariah. Slavery was now universally denounced as unethical and illegal. It even seemed, by the mid-1920s, that under the aegis of the League of Nations, the world had finally rid itself of slavery.

  Then, in an astonishing reversal of fortunes, slavery enjoyed a major comeback. It did so, not in distant colonies or imperial possessions, but in the very heart of Europe itself. The twentieth century was to see a revival of slavery on a scale and with a ferocity that would have shocked eighteenth-century sugar planters.

  11

  Slavery in the Modern Age

  THE SLAVERY CONVENTION, agreed by the League of Nations in September 1926, was the first time both slavery and the slave trade were defined in international law. Although the Convention accepted the existence of forced labour, it denied the right to remove that labour from its home territory. There remained, however, the perennial problem of how to enforce the rules. Britain argued that slave trading should be linked to piracy, thus allowing navies to board and seize offending vessels. Other member states felt this smacked too strongly of Britain’s nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy, and the matter was left to individual states to strike their own bilateral agreements against slave trading. The League asked two committees, in 1933 and 1934, to report further on slavery, but their efforts yielded no real change. Even so, it is generally accepted that the Convention, and the efforts of the League in the 1920s and 1930s, marked an important diplomatic step forward in the global campaign against slavery. That work was to be picked up, after the Second World War, and incorporated into the new United Nations. By then, however, the problem of slavery had been made even more complex, and much more urgent, by the catastrophe of the war and the widespread use of slave labour by the combatants.

  The new Soviet Union had refused to join the League of Nations, had not ratified the Slavery Convention of 1926 and felt no obligation to join the Western condemnation of slavery – not surprisingly, perhaps, because the Soviet regime soon began to use forced labour as an integral feature of the transformation of Russia. The various Soviet economic experiments of the 1930s increasingly relied on forced labour, the most severe, and the most feared, emerging under the supervision of the Soviet secret services. We know of them as the Gulag. From 1928 onwards, the Gulag system’s prison camps filled up with prisoners spawned by the various Five Year Plans. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, for example, uprooted by collectivisation, were driven into camps in remote regions where free labour would never tread, to form a new army of servile labour to tap the enormous economic potential of Russia’s inhospitable expanses. The Gulag swallowed millions of people: displaced peasantry, conquered peoples and those deemed to be political enemies. About five million peasants and one and a half million Muslims were relocated vast distances in this fashion.[1]

  Events in Russia soon attracted outside critics, drawn by the system’s inhumanities – which were well known and wi
dely discussed in the West in the early 1930s. They were debated in legislatures, in the press, and there were even boycotts of Soviet imports produced by unfree labour.[2] Criticisms of the Soviet Union were stilled, however, by the rise of fascism, and finally and effectively silenced by the German onslaught on Russia in 1941. Henceforth the Soviet Union became a vital ally, and the main land-fighting against Germany (with suffering on a staggering scale) was undertaken by Russia.

  All the nations drawn into that war imposed tight control over their labour force, but in Russia the war accentuated a process already underway, with a massive increase of penal labour and an expansion of labour camps to cope with the huge numbers involved. The real numbers remain unknown. The 476 known camps formed a formal tip of a massive network of satellite camps.[3] In 1930, there had been an estimated 179,000 people in the Gulag; by 1941 that had increased to just short of two million. Although about one million prisoners left the camps to join the Red Army during the war, the overall number in penal servitude continued to rise. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 there were almost two and a half million people in the camps. Throughout Stalin’s years in power, forced labour – and the Gulag – remained central to his plans for the Soviet economy, but within three months of his death, 60 per cent of the Gulag’s prisoners had been released. Throughout the years of Stalin’s dominance – years of domestic revolutionary upheavals, ferocious warfare followed by difficult post-war reconstruction – slave labour had been basic to the Soviet economy.

  This story of slave labour in the twentieth century took an even more shocking turn in Germany. A mere decade after the League of Nations had adopted the Slavery Convention, one of Europe’s most sophisticated and advanced societies turned its back on all that. Not only did Nazi Germany repudiate all its prior diplomatic commitments to abolition, but it embarked on a violent process of mass enslavement of conquered foreigners, including many Slavs and Jews. In the process – and very quickly – the numbers of people enslaved by Nazi Germany dwarfed the slave systems in the Americas in the previous three centuries.

  Even before the outbreak of war in 1939, the pronouncements and theories of Nazi leaders had hinted at what might happen, though the reality that unfolded was far beyond the imagination and understanding of an outside world for whom slavery was viewed as the ultimate evil: something from Europe’s distant and forgotten past. Germany’s early conquest of western Europe offered the first clues of what might follow, with tens of thousands of prisoners scooped up and transported to Germany as forced labour. What followed in the east, however, shifted the matter to a different level. The ‘General Plan for the East’ drafted in 1942 was a blueprint for a new and colossal system of enslavement on a scale that far surpassed anything seen before. Alongside schemes for the annihilation of millions, notably Europe’s Jews, the plan proposed the enslavement of fourteen million people, and their transportation to work in Germany.[4] In the First World War, Germany’s use of enemy civilians (notably Poles and Belgians) as forced labour, especially in agriculture, was to cost Germany dear in reparations imposed by the victors after 1918. But all that seemed trivial compared to what Nazi Germany imposed on its conquered territories after 1940.

  Even before the attack on Russia in June 1941, Germany was using 1.2 million French POWs and 1.3 million civilian workers’ (mainly Poles) as labourers. At the height of the war, when eleven million Germans were under arms in conflicts that stretched from Norway to North Africa, the German economy was functioning with the labour of more than thirteen million foreign workers. Without them, the German war effort would have faltered. The Nazi regime had in effect become a modern slave system. This time, it took the largest and mightiest military effort the world had ever seen to bring it down. There is no evidence that the Nazi slave regime would have ended without being crushed by warfare.

  Though the Nazis had devised a hierarchy of inferiorities, which defined the nature of their slave labour gangs and the treatment they received, these grand schemes began to disintegrate as the war advanced. As the allied armies closed in on Germany, captives were driven to ever-greater exertions to maintain the flagging war effort. Finally, the captives found themselves either driven from their camps to flee the advancing allied armies – this was the last and most appalling migration of prisoners and slave labour, especially from the east – or deserted in their camps. The abiding images of the Third Reich in its death throes are of millions of skeletal figures, more dead than alive, liberated by the allied armies. These diseased and tormented masses overwhelmed the relief organisations in 1945 and afterwards: there were millions of enslaved survivors of a regime that had used labour systems that the Western world had abandoned in the previous century.

  The existence of forced labour in Nazi Germany is beyond dispute. But was it slavery? That question continues to nag critics, largely because of our understanding of what constitutes slavery. Slavery has come to mean the institution that evolved in the Americas. Understandably, perhaps, critics have been at pains to illustrate the distinctions between slave labour in the Second World War and African slavery in the Americas. Some regard twentieth-century slave labour as more akin to Roman slavery than American slavery. It is surely important, however, to note that, when peace settled on Europe in 1945, the people most closely involved in securing post-war justice (lawyers, judges, academics) felt comfortable with the label ‘slavery’ for what they encountered in the ruins of Europe. The historian and critic, Gitta Sereny, spoke of her life, for two years after 1945, working with displaced persons, Hitler’s slave workers’ and other victims. One of the major relief agencies (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration – UNRRA) was confronted by five million displaced slave labourers – most of whom simply wanted to go home.[5]

  The shadow of slavery lingered over Europe long after the war had ended. Millions of survivors of Nazi slave labour remained locked for years in dispute with German governments (first in Bonn, then Berlin), and with a large number of German industries, demanding compensation for their time as slave labourers. The problems were immense. For a start, the major German industries – the giants of the economy – were infamous employers of slave labour. By 1943, for example, Auschwitz, in the words of Gitta Sereny, was ‘the largest slave-labour camp the Nazis had’. Its enslaved occupants were put to work building and then operating the synthetic fuel and rubber factory built for I. G. Farben. They also constructed the gas chambers at Birkenau close by.[6] But slave labour in addition, was widely scattered across Nazi Germany, from small local bakeries to farms.

  The post-war legal, moral and personal complexities involved were enormous, often made worse by the fact that large numbers of victims had no material or written proof of their ordeals. In this legal and moral minefield, one central issue stands out. No one doubted that millions of people had been used as slaves. The word itself – slave – was used (though a number of distinctions were drawn between slavery and other forms of penal labour used by the Nazis). Early efforts to agree compensation for the slave labourers failed to resolve the matter and it took a number of class actions in the USA in the 1990s to prompt the German government to establish a foundation and a fund to compensate people forced into slave labour. Billions of dollars were allocated by the German government and by German industries: some 6,500 businesses contributed, though many refused. Even by the early twenty-first century – more than half a century after the end of the war – there were 2.5 million survivors of Nazi slave labour, and many were still pressing their case for compensation. Both at the time and since, the imagery and vocabulary of slavery were widely used to describe these events – although it tended to go unnoticed that in the space of a mere five years the Nazis had enslaved more people than were ever enslaved in the Americas. When the surviving Nazi leadership was called to account at Nuremberg, their actions were deemed to have been crimes against humanity’. The term had been inserted into the trials at the suggestion of Professor Hersch Lauterpacht of Cambrid
ge University. After much debate between law officers from all four allied powers, the final charter drafted to govern the trials adopted Article 6(c). This granted the judges of the impending tribunal the power to punish people who had committed crimes against humanity. Those crimes included murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war’. In the words of Philippe Sands, this clause formed a major shift in legal opinion. It was a professional and intellectual leap’ that laid the basis for much of the debate not only at the Nuremberg trials, but also, in the years since those trials, about modern slavery.[7]

  A major refrain running throughout the trials at Nuremberg was that the Third Reich had imposed a slave system, however complex and inefficient, across its vast, conquered lands. The European heartlands had, in effect, become the site of unparalleled enslavement, all marked by levels of savagery and killings that far surpassed anything we might find in the enslaved Americas.

  The widespread revulsion at the atrocities of the Nazi regime was paralleled by horror at the Japanese terror across Asia. There, an estimated 700,000 Koreans and 40,000 Chinese were enslaved by Japan, and perhaps 300,000 Asians died working as slave labourers. This was in addition to the enslaved labour of POWs captured by the Japanese.[8]