New slave trade rife as Britain marks abolition
A woman walks next to a wall covered by posters in Sofia, Bulgaria promoting a campaign to prevent women from becoming sex slaves abroad in a file photo. Two hundred years after Britain abolished the slave trade, it is home to thousands of men, women and children who have been tricked, coerced or intimidated into prostitution or forced labor. (Alexei Dityakin/Reuters) March 20, 2007
By Paul Hughes
LONDON (Reuters) -Two hundred years after Britain abolished the slave trade, it is home to thousands of men, women and children who have been tricked, coerced or intimidated into prostitution or forced labor.
Many are bought and sold several times over and pushed into the sex industry to repay "debts" demanded by their traffickers. Others are trapped in inhumane conditions working for little or no pay in hotels and restaurants, on farms or in private homes.
The government -- once again trying to halt the trade -- estimates at least 4,000 women and children were in Britain in 2003 as a result of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Rights activists say many more are in all forms of forced labor.
They are victims of what is now the third largest illicit trade in the world after narcotics and weapons, with an estimated annual value of $32 billion.
"In the last 200 years we haven't come that far," Klara Skrivankova, trafficking program coordinator at Anti-Slavery International, said ahead of the March 25 bicentenary of the parliament act that made Britain's slave trade illegal.
"Slavery is pretty much universally abolished ... but in reality it flourishes and a lot of people profit from it."
Today's victims are no longer overwhelmingly Africans. At the Poppy Project, a London safe house scheme for women trafficked into sex work, the top four source countries are Lithuania, Albania, Nigeria and Thailand.
Detective Superintendent Mark Ponting, who heads a new 11-strong London Metropolitan Police unit to target the human traders, said women were being brought into the country and sold for up to 8,000 pounds ($15,570).
"This is a commodity as far as these criminal networks are concerned and they're making huge money from it," he said.
DANIELA AND FAISAL
Daniela's is the kind of story Britons hear often. She was 16 when a friend of her father's convinced her to leave home in Romania to work as a hotel maid in Britain.
"When I got here I realized I'd been tricked," said the 19 year old who like other victims wanted her identity concealed.
Told she owed 1,500 pounds for passage and papers, she was taken to a flat where she was raped and beaten by her minders and forced to have sex with men to pay off her "debts."
"They threatened me with a knife and told me they would kill my mother and sister if I behaved badly, if I refused to see men or tried to ask for help," she said.
Daniela escaped when police raided the flat. They took her to the government-funded Poppy Project.
Daniela entered Britain illegally, hidden under a truck by her traffickers, but most victims hold EU passports or valid work visas.
"Most ... enter the UK legally but become subject to forced labor through a mix of enforced debt, intimidation, the removal of documents and an inadequate understanding of their rights," said a report by researchers at Hull University last month.
Faisal, a chef from Morocco, was lured by promises of good pay and housing to a restaurant in southern England.
"Once I arrived, I saw the reality was very different," he said. "I had to live in the stockroom: no toilet, running water. Even so, 100 pounds was deducted each week for this ... and I was (often) denied wages. The employer threatened me with deportation if I complained."
"NEED TO ACT"
Growing official awareness of the problem has led to a number of initiatives in the last year.
By Paul Hughes
LONDON (Reuters) -Two hundred years after Britain abolished the slave trade, it is home to thousands of men, women and children who have been tricked, coerced or intimidated into prostitution or forced labor.
Many are bought and sold several times over and pushed into the sex industry to repay "debts" demanded by their traffickers. Others are trapped in inhumane conditions working for little or no pay in hotels and restaurants, on farms or in private homes.
The government -- once again trying to halt the trade -- estimates at least 4,000 women and children were in Britain in 2003 as a result of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Rights activists say many more are in all forms of forced labor.
They are victims of what is now the third largest illicit trade in the world after narcotics and weapons, with an estimated annual value of $32 billion.
"In the last 200 years we haven't come that far," Klara Skrivankova, trafficking program coordinator at Anti-Slavery International, said ahead of the March 25 bicentenary of the parliament act that made Britain's slave trade illegal.
"Slavery is pretty much universally abolished ... but in reality it flourishes and a lot of people profit from it."
Today's victims are no longer overwhelmingly Africans. At the Poppy Project, a London safe house scheme for women trafficked into sex work, the top four source countries are Lithuania, Albania, Nigeria and Thailand.Detective Superintendent Mark Ponting, who heads a new 11-strong London Metropolitan Police unit to target the human traders, said women were being brought into the country and sold for up to 8,000 pounds ($15,570).
"This is a commodity as far as these criminal networks are concerned and they're making huge money from it," he said.
DANIELA AND FAISAL
Daniela's is the kind of story Britons hear often. She was 16 when a friend of her father's convinced her to leave home in Romania to work as a hotel maid in Britain.
"When I got here I realized I'd been tricked," said the 19 year old who like other victims wanted her identity concealed.
Told she owed 1,500 pounds for passage and papers, she was taken to a flat where she was raped and beaten by her minders and forced to have sex with men to pay off her "debts."
"They threatened me with a knife and told me they would kill my mother and sister if I behaved badly, if I refused to see men or tried to ask for help," she said.
Daniela escaped when police raided the flat. They took her to the government-funded Poppy Project.
Daniela entered Britain illegally, hidden under a truck by her traffickers, but most victims hold EU passports or valid work visas.
"Most ... enter the UK legally but become subject to forced labor through a mix of enforced debt, intimidation, the removal of documents and an inadequate understanding of their rights," said a report by researchers at Hull University last month.
Faisal, a chef from Morocco, was lured by promises of good pay and housing to a restaurant in southern England.
"Once I arrived, I saw the reality was very different," he said. "I had to live in the stockroom: no toilet, running water. Even so, 100 pounds was deducted each week for this ... and I was (often) denied wages. The employer threatened me with deportation if I complained."
"NEED TO ACT"
Growing official awareness of the problem has led to a number of initiatives in the last year.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in January Britain would sign the Council of Europe convention on human trafficking.
"There are still modern examples of slavery and people trafficking that we need to act against," he said last week. In March 2006 the government tightened legislation on gangmasters after 23 Chinese laborers drowned while collecting shellfish in a northwest England estuary in 2004.
The UK Human Trafficking Center, a police-led body dedicated to understanding and tackling the issue, was set up in October.
A nationwide police blitz on brothels and massage parlors last year uncovered 84 people trafficked into the sex trade, including 12 children.
Rights groups say the police have been too narrowly focused.
"There have been no anti-trafficking operations in the area of forced labor, all have been into sexual exploitation," said Beth Hertzfeld, a spokeswoman for Anti-Slavery International.
"There's been a law against trafficking for forced labor since 2004 and not a single prosecution."
Particularly vulnerable are domestic workers like Teresa, 37, from Mumbai, who worked 18 hours a day for 20 pounds a month from an employer who made her sleep on the floor and beat her, until she escaped thanks to a concerned neighbor.
"My madam was very cruel," said Teresa. "She hit me on my stomach. She regularly tried to strangle me."
Labels: Slave Trade
posted by HRM Deborah of Israel and the Messenger of Peace at 8:23 PM
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Proletarian issue 17 (April 2007)
Slave trade abolition bicentennial: an exercise in whitewashing
Two centuries after the slave trade was formally abolished in the British Empire, the true extent of British involvement and reliance on that trade is less widely understood than ever; as are the real reasons for its abolition.
On 25 March 1807, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed, prohibiting slave relations within the British Empire. The bicentennial of this event has been greeted by a great deal of fanfare, with leading politicians queuing up to issue half-hearted ‘apologies’ for Britain’s role in the slave trade. The great insight and moral loftiness of the likes of Tory MP William Wilberforce (the most prominent British parliamentary abolitionist) have been lauded, and the marvel of 21st century ‘free labour’ has been counterposed to the insufferable cruelty of slavery.
Abolition was not a ‘moral’ issue for the capitalist class
The question of the abolition of slavery has long been treated in history books as an act of benevolence and dedication by a few white liberal campaigners, driven by their humanitarianism and lofty moral values. This treatment of the subject is not just superficial - it is pernicious.
It is perfectly true that a significant number of whites campaigned and lobbied for abolition; some of them even contributed to the underground railroad and took part in military raids against slaveowners (John Brown being a notable example). However, the white abolitionists were by no means the main contributing body towards the abolition of slavery. Furthermore, the motivations of the white abolitionist movement – in Britain and America - were not humanitarian: although many individuals within this movement were undoubtedly motivated by a sense of humanity and equality, the movement as a whole reflected changing economic conditions.
The simple agricultural labour of the slave was increasingly being rendered inefficient by the introduction of large-scale industrial machines. It just wasn’t feasible for these machines to be operated on the basis of slave labour – the operation of such machinery requires a certain level of education and training that is not consistent with the shackles of slavery. As Tristram Hunt wrote recently: “Profits from the bloody trade secured the imperial hegemony of Georgian England. It was only brought to an end in 1807 because of the move from a colonial sugar trade to industrial capitalism. There was nothing noble about abolition …” (‘Easy on the euphoria’, guardian.co.uk, 25 March 2006)
An ‘added bonus’ of treating abolition as an act of kindness by ‘good’ people is that it leads very naturally to treating slavery as an act of meanness by ‘bad’ people, thereby allowing us to ignore the important fact that capitalism will stop at nothing in the pursuit of profit. The industrial revolution, the great cities of Britain, the rapid development of western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries – all these were built on the slave trade, on the intensive and inhuman exploitation of African slave labour. Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean were considered to be “the fundamental prop and support” of the British Empire. (Eric Williams, Capital and Slavery, cited in WEB DuBois, The World and Africa)
In the poetic words of Karl Marx:
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, etc …
“With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation …
“If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek’, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” ( Capital Vol 1)
Slave revolts
Aside from the economic question, one of the principal driving factors in bringing down slavery in the Americas was the increasingly well-organised and militant revolts by the slaves, who far outnumbered the white population in the southern states and in the Caribbean. As is (at the time of writing) noted on the Wikipedia entry for the Atlantic slave trade, “Virtually every major reform pertaining to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery took place in the immediate aftermath of a major armed rebellion and/or victory by enslaved or formerly enslaved Africans.”
These revolts were a highly significant factor in rendering slavery untenable. But the history of slave revolt is largely ignored, or at least features only as a footnote, in bourgeois accounts of abolition. Bourgeois academics have settled on a version of history that emphasises the benevolence of white colonialists, ignores the economic basis upon which political acts rest, and downplays any thirst of the oppressed for freedom. Perhaps one day Mo Mowlam, Peter Mandelson and David Trimble will be remembered in secondary schools as the bearers of Irish freedom!
It is criminal that the version of history taught to schoolchildren does not include, for example, the heroic uprising of the African slaves along with the Seminole American natives, in which hundreds of slaves fled their plantations to join the rebel forces in the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). In this revolt, the largest slave rebellion in US history, more than 20 sugar plantations in Florida were destroyed. (See www.johnhorse.com)
The names of slave leaders like Nat Turner, Samuel Sharpe and Zumbi are rarely heard when the press talks about slavery. Nobody mentions Haiti, where the slaves overthrew the colonisers and set up their own independent state. Such memories are clearly too painful for the ruling class (and potentially too inspiring for the oppressed masses of the world). As WEB DuBois put it in his excellent book The World and Africa, “The slave revolts were the beginnings of the revolutionary struggle for the uplift of the labouring masses in the modern world. They have been minimised in extent because of the propaganda in favour of slavery and the feeling that the knowledge of slave revolt would hurt the system.”
The legacy of slavery lives on
Britain, the US, Belgium, France and other imperialist countries continue to treat Africa simply as a source of profit. Two hundred years ago, they stole human beings and took them across the Atlantic Ocean to work them in the sugar plantations; today, they are happy to exploit Africans on African soil. The colonial and neo-colonial history of Africa, most of which occurs after Britain suddenly discovered the importance of freedom and thus abolished slavery, is a story of relentless exploitation, subjugation, oppression and repression. Still today imperialism does not hesitate to murder, rape and steal in the interests of getting control of Africa’s mineral resources, labour and markets. What are we to make of Tony Blair’s ‘apology’ for Britain’s role in the slave trade when his government and the British ruling class he represents are doing everything they can to keep Africa in neo-colonial chains?
What’s more, the ideological legacy of slavery, ie, the idea of the superiority of the white ‘race’, is still perpetuated today, albeit in far more sophisticated fashion than it was two hundred years ago. This racism is still used to divide working people and to provide a subconscious justification for the actions of the imperialist states in the third world.
Finally, we should point out that, while formal slavery relations are these days very unusual, the actual conditions under which the poorer sections of the world’s population labour are not all that different to conditions of slavery. Labourers in Asia, Africa and South America are very often literally worked to death by the multinationals that employ them. They are nominally ‘free’, but in reality they have no means of survival other than submitting themselves to the ruthless exploitation of the corporations.
It’s up to us to finish the job started by the likes of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Frederick Douglass.
No to slavery and no to wage slavery! Forward to communism!
www.cpgb-ml.org
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