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| 2004 has been designated by the U.N. as ‘The International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and Its Abolition’. For well over three thousand years, people the world over have been held in bondage as slaves and exploited for their labour by more powerful forces. Mankind has been in a constant struggle to overcome the evils of slavery for most of this time with some of the more successful campaigns coming from the slaves themselves, for example Haiti. I was reminded of this recently whilst visiting Prague where I had the very great pleasure of attending a performance of the opera Nabucco by Verdi. It was a wonderful experience. It is the story of the Old Testament biblical king Nebuchadnezzar who overcomes and enslaves the Hebrews and it tells of their struggle for freedom. In Part 3 of the Opera, the chained Hebrew slaves, on the banks of the Euphrates sing a beautiful, haunting, evocative and very poignant, chorus about their sadness of being away from and their longing for their homeland. Eventually, Nebuchadnezzar frees the slaves, to return to their homeland and told to build a Temple to the Lord. Of course the reality of slavery is that for many, things do not always have such a happy conclusion and the fact remains that slavery is with us even in the 21st century albeit a different form of slavery. One estimate gives the figure as 27 million people worldwide held in slavery. The history of slavery has been well documented, especially that of the Transatlantic slave trade between Africa, the Americas and the U.K. etc. For most of us the slave trade is part of school history lessons, or TV docu-dramas such as ‘Roots’ or American films and seems to be lost in the mists of time, having nothing to do with the here and now. The idea that people were abducted from their own regions by tribal hunters from their own country didn’t seem to come into the equation but this was probably the biggest source for slavery into Europe and the America’s. In 18th century Britain the slave trade generated an enormous amount of wealth, and families involved in it became some of the richest people in the world. The ports of Liverpool and Bristol built up their fame largely through the slave trade. In 1863 slavery was abolished in America by President Lincoln and in the latter half of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century laws have been in place in various parts of the world banning the practice. In 1948 the U.N. adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also in 1956 by a U.N. Convention. The year 1989 saw the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Despite all this legislation the fact remains that slavery exists today in various forms and not only in Africa, the Sudan or Haiti etc. but here in Britain, people are also exploited for their labour. It may not be called slavery, but nonetheless, the men, women and children who live, in fear, poverty and degradation, who work and suffer in appalling conditions physically, mentally, financially and sexually, are just as much victims of exploitation, as were the slaves of earlier times. Amongst the dictionary definitions of slave/slavery are ‘a bond servant, a person wholly subject to the will of another, one under the dominion of any power (either fear or passion), to be at the mercy of another’. Therefore anyone being exploited and used by another for economic gain whether it be the men being used as cheap slave labour in the cocoa plantations of Brazil and the Gold Coast of Africa, women at the mercy of pimps and masters, female children being trafficked from places such as the Sudan by Arab tribesmen and sold into slavery then forced into prostitution or pornography in the U.S., Britain and other countries of the Western World, or children forced to weave the hand-knitted carpets in India, whose lives are put at risk by working over-long hours and those children in war-torn areas held in risky conditions including armed conflict, are slaves. They are slaves to the people who traffick them and are often bound by debt or threats to themselves or their families in their home country and have little choice but to comply. (The International Labour Organisation estimated that 100 million children worldwide exploited for their labour). The problem is made worse because those who suffer this kind of abuse are for the most part too afraid to speak out and very often too poor to take action against their abusers, especially the children who are seen as a source of cheap labour and are more easily manipulated than adults. Measures are already in place in such countries as Brazil where government inspectors freed 2000 workers held in conditions of slavery, who were then paid monies owing them and returned to their own regions. Various charities have been instrumental in buying back the freedom of slaves in the Sudan and in 1999 the country began the process of setting up a committee stop the practise of human trafficking for slavery. At the International Conference of 21st Century Slavery the Vatican described the practise as plague’ and the Pope said the sexual exploitation was ‘particularly repugnant’. The laws are in place to end slavery, what is needed is for the world’s Governments to make sure the laws are administered and adhered to and corruption dealt with, by the full force of the law. Of course there are far more complicated issues at stake such as poverty, violence and fear and world governments need to tackle these issues on a global scale. In March of this year a team of cyclists who had started out on the 23rd August 2003 and spent months cycling across two continents to raise funds for Anti-Slavery International returned to London. One of the team said ‘ten thousand miles is a long way to cycle, but the road to the abolition of modern slavery is much longer’. Many of us will never be able to achieve anything like this great marathon, but in some small way we can try. Perhaps for most of us the only thing we can do is pray for the success of the United Nations initiative to make 2004 the year when slavery was finally abolished. |
