There are 27 Million Slaves: Where are the Abolitionists?
Part of General Assembly 2003 Event 2051By Charles Jacobs, President, American Anti-Slavery Group
View the slideshow (PDF, 18 pages) that accompanies this speech.
American abolitionists in the 1800’s often began their talks with an apology. They felt bad, bringing dark and sad reports to sunny American people.
And I too apologize for coming with the news that slavery is not history. Indeed it is flourishing. There may be more slaves today than in any time in human history. 27 million by conservative estimate. There are about as many slaves in the world today as there are Canadians.
People think human bondage is a thing of the past. And if that is what you thought, then you may be shaken today, because we have not only picture-slides, but a former slave.
We came to tell you, Francis Bok and I, of slavery—and abolitionism—in this, our millennium.
And we’ve come also to challenge you …
You see, Slavery is the stepchild of the human rights movement.
The American Anti-Slavery Group is a little band of Boston abolitionists that has been fighting against slavery for 11 years. Mostly, the “civilized world” sits by. No major human rights organization has placed on its mandate the freeing of today’s slaves. Our support has come from the grass roots.
In our experience, three groups have been our biggest supporters. We jocularly refer to this abolitionist trio as “Blacks, Jews and UU’s [Unitarian Universalists].”
Blacks respond when they see blacks today enslaved. They know their history. Jews became a people at a moment of Divine Abolitionism in Egypt. We know about Pharaohs. The UU’s? You are an abolitionist church.
[SLIDE OF THEODORE PARKER]
Your roots are in the fight to free slaves here.
And you are the sons and daughters of some of the great American abolitionists.
Your Theodore Parker was driven to fight the evil of slavery. He not only preached against human bondage, and was vilified for it, he was an activist, and defended fugitive slaves against slave catchers.
Do you know the story of what Reverend Parker did when the Southern slave-catchers came to Boston? He took a group of Universalist men to the hotel where the slave-catchers were staying. And he surrounded them, jostled them, intimidated them, told them they had better, for their own safety, go back home and leave these slaves free. And they looked into Parker’s eyes and at the Universalists with him AND -/THEY/- WENT/- BACK/-HOME!
I like that story.
Francis and I are glad to be among you!
As we sit here in freedom, there are, by conservative estimate, 27 million slaves around the globe. . I do not mean people with hard jobs, low pay and nasty bosses. I mean people who are forced to work for no pay under the threat of violence. Slaves!
Hidden at the underbelly or our thriving global markets, contributing to our general wealth and well-being, there are slaves.
From Calcutta to Khartoum, from Brazil to Bangladesh, there are slaves. And there are even slaves in the United States. According to the CIA, there are 50,000 people brought to our shores each year who become slave labor. Not exploited, underpaid workers—that’s bad enough—but I mean slaves, people who cannot quit their work.
You may know some about modern day slavery: there is much, likely, you do not know.
[SLIDE - CARPET WEAVING CHILDREN]
You probably know about the rug weaving child slaves of Pakistan, India and Nepal who make the oriental carpets we have in our living rooms.
These children are shackled to the looms, from dawn to dusk, from toddlerhood to adolescence. They work with sharp knives. If they cut their fingers and bleed on the carpets, the master cauterizes the wound, to save the carpet from stain. He does this with a burning match. The “civilized” world sits by.
You may not know of the Trokosi slaves in Ghana. How many ever heard of the Trokosi slaves? In rural areas in Ghana, fathers wishing to expiate their sins—to cleanse themselves spiritually—give their virgin daughters to the village shaman, priest, as sex slaves. These poor girls live at the shrine with the shaman and other women for much of their whole lives. This is hard to talk about. Remember that I said that.
You may know of the sex trafficked little girls—and boys—in India and Asia. Bought, sold, and used. By the tens of thousands, as the world sits by.
[SLIDE - BROTHEL]
Here is a hidden camera photo of a brothel in India. Girls are forced to service up to 20 men a night. Many contract fatal disease. Slavers seek out younger and younger girls to guard customers against AIDS. People who try to rehabilitate these girls say they are more difficult to reach than children who are victims of war. The world sits by.
You likely did not know that the high rate of sex slavery in some Asian countries is linked to versions of Bhuddism which give women an almost less than human status. Women are identified with pleasure, and physical pleasure is to be despised, and so, women too. This is hard to talk about. Culture and religion are hard to talk about. So people don’t. Remember that I said that.
[SLIDE - (Camel racing kid)]
The world sits by as little boys from Bangladesh, coveted for their light weight are trafficked to the Persian Gulf to become camel jockeys.
[SLIDE - (Another Camel racing kid)]
Camel racing is a national pastime in the Gulf states. A man on our Board, Abdul Momen, didn’t sit by. He has saved dozens of children from this fate. He will be speaking this fall across the US.
How did these people become slaves?
I can’t give here the entire typology. But in brief: Today’s slaves might be born into debt bondage, as inheritors of a debt that long-deceased relatives incurred—and is passed down through the generations—and will likely never be retired.
Or they might have been knowingly sold by a parent who needed food for the rest of the family, or yes, who wanted a color TV, a motor bike, or drugs. THIS IS HARD TO TALK ABOUT. POOR PEOPLE DOING BAD THINGS. VERY HARD. SO WE DON’T.
Or they might be lured with the promise of a job or a better life.
Look at what happens.
[SLIDE: to girls in India. They are making matches.]
It is a stunning irony: modernism and globalization help and hurt at the same time:
Western medicine lowers infant mortality rates. Now maybe all 8 of a woman’s children survive and she can’t feed them.
So, in Bangladesh, men come to the village and promise an overburdened mother to take one of her sons to the Persian Gulf to do construction work—and send back money to feed the others. And she sends him. And sometimes, it is legitimate—and sometimes the boy is sold as a camel jockey slave.
And modernism created the internet which bridges worlds, and so a working class European or Japanese man can buy a village girl from Asia for his pleasure. This is the darkest side of globalization.
But chattel slavery is the worst case and until we came along, the most ignored. In chattel slavery, one person is the wholly owned property of another for life, inheritable from his estate.
For this you have to go where we went: to North Africa, to Sudan and Mauritania…
Here slave children belong to the masters, and the slaves are bred like farm animals.
[Slide: Mauritania: girl slaves]
[Slide Mauritania: girl washes her
master’s hands.]
In Mauritania, as across all North Africa, black African villages were historically raided for slaves by Arabs to the north. We in the West study how blacks were taken across the seas to work in the Americas. We don’t have in our minds that as least as many were taken across the desserts to work in Arabia. And they still are. AND THAT IS HARD TO TALK ABOUT.
Starting 600 years ago, slaves were taken, converted to Islam, and made into a slave caste, the haratin. Even though it is not permitted in Islam to enslave another Muslim, racism trumps religion. Just like it did in the West.
So there are hundreds of thousands of Black Muslim slaves in Mauritania, who may not marry without their masters’ permission, who may not touch the Koran with their slave hands, who may not go to mosque to pray. And who are taught that the way to Heaven is under their master’s foot. And tragically this has mentally enslaved most of them, for they believe it. That G-d wants them to be slaves. THAT IS HARD TO TALK ABOUT.
If you EVER wanted to understand the idea of “cultural relativism” really, answer for yourself the question I got at Tufts University last year: “Well, Dr. Jacobs, if they believe they should be slaves, who are we to tell them different.?”
A great test question for anyone’s philosophy class—or kitchen table. Is
anything “Universal” anymore? Is everything relative???
Hold that thought,
while I introduce you to a hero who has strong opinions on this matter.
[Slide Mauritania: Yessa]
Abdel Yessa was born into a slave-holding family and turned himself into a sort of Muslim Theodore Parker. His story is wondrous. You can read about it on our website. He now helps to free slaves. It is very dangerous. He is on our board. He is coming to the United States this fall.
In Sudan, the slave trade has been rekindled by a religious war. In 1989, a Taliban-like regime took power and declared a Jihad, to impose Koranic Law on all Sudanese. The South, mostly Christian and believers in tribal faiths, resisted.
Here is a brief NBC Dateline clip on Sudan that says it all.
No, we can’t count on the UN. Libya, which imports Sudanese slaves, has just been named to head the UN’s HR Commission. HARD TO TALK ABOUT.
UNICEF, to appease Khartoum, has taken to referring to the slaves as “abductees.” Who wants to take on UNICEF? Hard to talk about that. And the Arab League, with many votes at the UN declared a fatwa on those who claim there is slavery in Sudan. VERY HARD TO TALK ABOUT.
[SLIDE: Line of slaves being redeemed.]
So not being able to count on the international community, we took the matter into our own hands. In a way, we went to the slave-catcher’s hotel. We joined an indigenous African-Arab effort, part of a local peace treaty—to redeem slaves for cash. This caused a storm of controversy, which we can address in the question period.
I am going to show you some of what happens to people in slavery if you DON’T liberate them, if you wait for the peace processes to work….. like some in the establishment say we should have done.
The boys they take don’t usually survive to manhood. Muscular men can cause trouble. Adolescents often have their throats cut.
And even before that…..
I am going to show you 3 rather gruesome slides.
[SLIDE: FINGER cut off for losing master’s goat]
[SLIDE: ARM cut off
trying to escape]
[SLIDE: FACE: nose hacked off.]
[SLIDE: FRANCIS BOK,
BOOK COVER]
Francis Bok is a miracle. By all accounts he should have been dead.
Francis is a modern day Frederick Douglass. He escaped from slavery and uses
his freedom to help free his people. This is not without risk. They are those
who do not wish you to hear his story and these are not peaceful men. It is my
honor to introduce to you Francis Bok
Thank you Francis. Francis will be
at our table tomorrow from ______________. I will be at our table after this and
on Sunday, noon to three.
I have to say some hard truths.
Where is the power to set the slaves free?
Slavery is the stepchild of the human rights community. The liberation of today’s slaves is not the burning concern of any powerful human rights group. Not Amnesty International. Not Human Rights Watch, not UNICEF.
Most slaves today are women, yet there is no outcry from the major woman’s groups to liberate slaves in Africa or Asia. (Though there is a developing focus on European trafficking.)
In 1994, I asked for and received pounds of reports from what I now call the Human Rights Establishment. So they always knew.
Why don’t they act? It’s a problem. Why are only a few of us working on this fundamental problem?
I’ve published a theory of “human rights selectivity” in the Boston Globe and it became a focus of controversy. I called it “the human rights complex.” It is deeply disturbing to some people. I almost decided not to say it to you today. Easier not to.
But: Quote: “Truth stood on one side, Ease on the other; it has often been so.” Theodore Parker
Friends, if you want to know what the human rights community and the media will attend to, do not look at the identity of the victim. Look instead at the identity of the oppressor.
Why don’t we fight to liberate the slaves of Sudan? Do we not care about blacks? Of course we do. The human rights community fought tooth and nail against apartheid. So why is freedom in Johannesburg more compelling than in Khartoum?
The human rights community consists mostly of compassionate white people. When such folks, and I include myself, see evil done by people like ourselves, we feel especially animated to act. “Not in my name!” is the slogan for that feeling. We are embarrassed to be identified with evil. We want to clear our name. This part of the human rights impulse is all about expiation.
That is not bad—as a starting place. But we seem stuck in this posture.
It is easy to understand: We in the West feel bad about our history of colonialism and slaving. We have done harm. And so we do not like to criticize other cultures—even when they devalue women, even when they devalue life because they live for the next life, even when they devalue their own daughters, even when they sell their children for drugs and televisions, even when they devalue infidels. And so we avert our eyes. It is hard to talk about.
When we see evil done by people NOT like ourselves, we are paralyzed. We think we don’t have a moral standing to criticize “them.” We fear the charge of hypocrisy: We Westerners after all, had slaves. We napalmed Viet-nam. We live on Native American land. Who are we to judge “others?” And so we don’t stand for all of humanity. Though we say we subscribe to the principle of universal standards of human rights, we don’t act on that principle.
We are not really Universalists.
The victims of this “human rights complex” are many, every group that has the very bad luck of having non Western oppressors. The black Muslim slaves of Mauritania, the Kurds, the Berbers, the Christians of Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, the Tibetans, the Trokosi slaves of Ghana. And more. Most slaves in this world are enslaved by non-Westerners, so if we want to get serious about helping them, we had better face up to our “complexes.”
Yes, we owned slaves. Yes we exploited people. But are we to stay our hand because we can never be pure? If so, we consign the slaves to their bondage. If expiation is our game, the freeing of black slaves from Arabs or Asian slaves from Asians, is besides the point.
Seeking expiation instead of universal justice means ignoring the suffering of victims of non-Western aggression. But it ALSO means devaluing their oppressors. Parker wrote a letter to a slaver. A respectful letter. He told him that slavery damaged HIS soul. Parker cared for the soul of EVERY person created by G-d, every victim, every victimizer. My work over these years convinces me that we have come to a place where we do not.
Universalism can only have one meaning: that every man, woman and child on this Earth is fashioned in the image of G-d, Btzelem Ha-Shem in the Hebrew, and we are required, as it says in the Bible, not to stand by his blood.
The human rights complex takes us away from universalism. It confines us in a bourgeiose corner of self concern. It averts our eyes from the face of the victims, it focuses our stare instead only at our own heart. Just a few inches, mind you, from our bellybuttons.
It is as though we stand forever accused… of capitalist greed, of colonialism, of racism. If being caught in those headlights is the only posture we have, then we will be blind to so many we could be helping. Yes, we were colonialists and there were Americans who owned slaves, but only we also, through the values that drove people like Theodore Parker, has there been an abolitionist movement. It happened only in the West. Shall we stay our hands because they were not, and will never be, pure?
I believe seeking expiation instead of universal justice is a sin. It is moral selfishness, the other side of material greed.
Abolitionists today MUST be UNIVERSALISTS. When we are, look what we can do:
- We helped to free tens of thousands of slaves in Sudan.
- We pressed President Bush to start a peace process in Sudan—and you know what? The ceasefire in some parts is holding and some slaves are being let go free.
- We are helping educate slaves in captivity in Mauritania.
- We helped get the Congress to pass a bill that allows slaves who are in America illegally some relief, NOT to be immediately deported so they can find a way out of their plight.
- We led a divestment campaign against Canada’s largest oil company—Talisman—for doing business with the slavers in Sudan. A lawyer on our Board heads up an international lawsuit against them.
- We educate tens of thousands of school children through our web-based curriculum on modern day slavery.
- We got the May Company out of Burma.
- We built the broadest political movement imaginable—we have Pat Robertson and Barney Frank as friends. We don’t put them in the same room. And the CBC and white evangelicals, and UU’s and Jews and Muslims.
- We provide platforms for Christian and Muslim slaves and abolitionist heros.
- We broke the media silence on modern day human bondage.
And so we ask you today, Francis and I, to think of your roots and come help us free the slaves. When you make that decision, you can say, along with Harriet Tubman, the great black abolitionist:
I have seen their tears and I have heard their cries and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.!!
Charles Jacobs, President
AASG
Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
