Slave descendents in Mali still without freedom

Slavery still exists in the northern regions of Mali. While many still serve directly for their masters there are also other decendannts of slaves that don't have full human rights. The descendants of slaves could live on their own, but are still considered their masters property. The masters could take them or their belongings anytime they feel like it.

From the Guardian, writer Mark Tran talks to a few activists who are working to restore rights to the slaves in Mali.

"The slave population is already defenceless; it will become even more so as the conflict intensifies. We are like the straw that will be trampled underfoot when elephants fight," said Ibrahim Ag Idbaltanat, an activist who received the Anti-Slavery International award in London last Wednesday.

Slavery was formally abolished in Mali in the 1960s, after the country gained independence from France. However, although slavery is not allowed under the constitution, there is no anti-slavery law and descent-based slavery through the maternal bloodline still exists in northern regions.

People descended from slaves remain the "property" of their "masters", either living with them and serving them directly, or living separately but remaining under their control.

In 2006, Ag Idbaltanat set up the anti-slavery group Temedt, which means "solidarity" in the Tamasheq language of the north. Temedt says slavery is still practised in the far north between Berber-descended Tuareg nomads and darker-skinned Bella or black Tamasheq people.

The descendants of slaves – 200,000 of whom are under direct control of their masters – face threats from all sides because of the current conflict, said Ag Idbaltanat, himself a descendant of slaves.

"We are under suspicion from both the government and the rebels," he said. "Old scores are being settled and anti-slavery activists who have created a lot of enemies feel the threat of violence. We challenged the state and slave owners so now we face threats as there are slave masters among the rebel groups."

Ag Idbaltanat said the first cases of punishment under sharia law by Islamists were imposed on slave descendants, while former masters took advantage of the breakdown of order to recapture slaves they had lost.

"They can act with impunity – 18 children of slaves were kidnapped recently by traditional masters of their families," said Ag Idbaltanat. "Before the rebellion, we had 17 anti-slavery cases before the courts in the north, but the courts are no longer there."

 He described as dire conditions in his hometown of Menaka, which was captured by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, a Tuareg rebel group, in January. Public services have been shut down, schools are closed, there is no drinking water as there is no electricity for the filtration system, and people now have to fetch unclean water from natural basins in the desert.

Domestic slaves in Arab world not joining in calls for freedom

The people protesting throughout the Middle East and North Africa want equality and a voice. However, one group of people within these countries are still not being heard despite the calls for more freedom.

Three million domestic slaves are still suffering through the same plight throughout the Arab world. Most of the domestic maids and servants work for little money or even for free. Many are treated to slave like working conditions and are subject to rape or abuse.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Simba Russeau has the story of one such domestic slave.

Before leaving Madagascar, Dima 19, was told she would find good employment and an opportunity to provide much needed money for her family that was struggling with extreme poverty and unemployment. But within a few hours of arriving at the home of her new employer in Lebanon in early April of last year, she confronted a different reality.

"The male employer picked me up from the airport and when we arrived to the home he told me to take a bath," Dima told IPS in an interview.

"He insisted that I leave the door slightly open and while I was in the bath he entered and raped me."

It became worse some weeks later. She says she was tied up and raped by the employer and two of his friends.

Within a month Dima escaped. "While the family was getting into the car I started running. I couldn’t bear living like this any more."

The current financial climate in Africa and Southeast Asia has forced many families to look for desperate ways out of life in extreme poverty.

"Recruitment agencies from our home countries are tricking new domestic employees by telling them that will have a great job, with a high paying salary and the ability to save money and provide for their families," says Aimee, a community leader and freelance domestic worker from Madagascar.

Modern slavery in China

Modern-day slavery is still a problem in China. Every so often Chinese authorities will close down a factory that was caught using slaves. Most often the victims of the slavery are the mentally ill. Advocates say that a lack of laws protecting the mentally ill from being sold into slavery. Sometimes it is their very own caretakers who are doing the selling.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Mitch Moxley tells us more about the practice of slavery in China.

In May 2009, police in Anhui province arrested ten men for allegedly enslaving more than 30 mentally handicapped people who had been forced to work at brick kilns. In 2007, hundreds of brick kiln slaves, many of them children or mentally handicapped, were freed in raids across northern China.

Reports of enslaved mentally ill workers have come from ten provinces since 2007, according to the China Association of Mentally Handicapped People. There have been 20 cases of mentally ill workers being killed, a Legal Daily report said.

Meng Weina, founder of the Beijing Huiling Community Services for People with Learning Disabilities, says mentally ill people are especially vulnerable in China, where the social security net is small and care generally falls into the hands of the family. When parents die, many mentally handicapped people have no one to care for them. In rural areas, where 70 percent of mentally disabled people live, there are virtually no organisations that offer support.

"We have seen so many cases of abduction," Meng tells IPS, "but when they are reported to place, no one really cares."

Liu Kaiming, labour researcher and executive director at the Shenzhen-based Institute of Contemporary Observation, says the root cause is imperfect social safety nets, inadequate laws and regulations protecting mentally ill people, and lack of punishment for officials who neglect their duties.

"I don’t think the central and local governments have done anything to protect mentally ill workers," Liu tells IPS.

Kamlari; the practice of turning daughters into slaves

The practice of kamlari can earn a Nepalesse family $25 to 50 dollars a year. To participate, the family has to sell off a daughter so she can become a bonded servant. Activists are negotiating with families to make them stop the practice and bring their daughters back home. They often bargain with the families by providing them animals that they can use for food or cash. Still the girls who return home have many scars that need healing from the forced servitude.

From this Los Angeles Times article that we found at The Sacramento Bee, writer Mark Magnier describes kamlari to us.

For generations, ethnic Tharu girls as young as 6 have been handed over to landlords and brokers under a bondage system known as kamlari. The legacy of crushing poverty, caste and intergenerational debt has left many of the young victims scarred by sexual and emotional abuse.

"The landlord's son beat me many times," said Bishnu Kumari, 17, who was rescued a few years ago. "I felt dirty, unlucky to be born a girl. I was a slave."

These days, however, former kamlari victims are fighting back with notable success, the result of changing laws, activist pressure and nascent democracy in Nepal.

Charity groups have rescued thousands of girls in the last year, generally during the brief period when the annual agreements are renewed, by convincing parents that the practice is unjust, a daughter's education is worthwhile and that there are far less exploitative ways to earn family income.

Since most deals have traditionally been struck during the winter Maghe Sankranti holiday, rescued girls assisted by aid groups are staging street dramas, anti-exploitation marches and musicals. They also mount rescue missions in which parents and landlords are confronted and embarrassed into releasing the girls during the annual festival and other high-profile events.

The approach has proved so successful that the U.S.-based Nepal Youth Foundation estimates that 1,000 Tharu girls remain indentured, most in remote villages or with powerful families in the capital, Katmandu, compared with about 14,000 a decade ago.

Former victims Sunita Chaudhary, 17, and Anita Chaudhary, 18, who aren't related, sing, act and write scripts for the street plays put on here in this rural part of south-central Nepal, drawing on their experience of dire poverty, alcoholic fathers, exploitative landlords and low female social status.

At the end of the drama about girls forced into bondage, the troupe asks audiences who is to blame and how the play should end, sparking spirited debate. Many villagers are illiterate, have never seen a play and forget that it's not real. "People grab me and threaten to beat me up," said Hom Roka, 23, who plays the landlord.

These are complemented by "girls clubs," composed of former victims who urge new kamlari recruits to resist, backed up by adults in the community who have agreed to help fight the practice.

"Sometimes the landlords try to hit us," said Manjita Chaudhary, 21, Sunita's sister and a former indentured servant. "They lie, saying they educate and help the girls. But we usually wear them down."


Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/03/3295572/activists-in-nepal-make-inroads.html#ixzz19yv5aFzN

Florida tomato workers get a penny per pound raise

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers won a historic agreement with the largest tomato growers in the nation. The CIW has fought for the tomato field workers in Florida, who are paid sub-poverty wages and are sometimes treated no better than slaves.

The Pacific Tomato Growers has agreed to give their workers a penny a pound raise. The raise will bring most workers annual salary from 10,000 to 17,000 dollars. The agreement also makes Pacific agree to a code of conduct in treating their workers.

From this The Nation piece that is hosted at NPR, writer Greg Kaufmann details the history of the CIW battle.

For those who have followed CIW's decade-long fight to raise farmworkers' sub-poverty wages and remedy oppressive working conditions — including slavery — this agreement marks the moment when a wall of denial maintained by the Florida agricultural industry came tumbling down.

When the Department of Labor reported "sub-poverty annual earnings," the growers denied it, claiming tomato harvesters averaged $12-$18 per hour.

When the USDA described farmworkers as "among the most economically disadvantaged groups in the US" with "poverty more than double that of all wage and salary employees," the growers maintained that they were performing a service by providing needed entry-level jobs.

When the Department of Justice worked with CIW to prosecute seven slavery operations in Florida over the last fifteen years, resulting in the liberation of over 1,000 farmworkers, the growers claimed that these were isolated cases and there was no need for systemic reforms.

When a detective with the Collier County Sheriff's Office testified in Congress that human trafficking in Florida agriculture was "probably occurring right now while we sit here" and the growers "isolate themselves from what is occurring, and benefit from what's going on," the growers insisted they were victims of a sophisticated public relations campaign ginned up by CIW.
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A Senate hearing convened by Senator Bernie Sanders and the late Senator Edward Kennedy revealed that the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), representing 90 percent of the state's growers, went so far as to declare that any members who implemented the pay raise would be fined $100,000 for every worker who benefited. So millions of dollars in checks that buyers were cutting directly to the workers languished in escrow. An industry that had profited from 300 hundred years of forced labor in Florida's fields wasn't about to allow its workers — who have no right to organize, no right to overtime, and no right to bargain collectively — to receive a pay raise from its customers, much less win a seat at the food industry table.

Modern-day slavery found on fishing boats near West Africa

An investigation into illegal fishing off the coast of West Africa has instead turned up modern-day slavery. Fishing boats that provide fish for Europe have shocking working conditions according to the Environmental Justice Foundation. The EJF says that the fish are treated better than the workers who catch them.

From the Guardian, writer Felicity Lawrence has the scoop on the EJF discovery. Click to this page to find video footage of the fishing boats.

Forced labour and human rights abuses involving African crews have been uncovered on trawlers fishing illegally for the European market by investigators for an environmental campaign group.

The Environmental Justice Foundation found conditions on board including incarceration, violence, withholding of pay, confiscation of documents, confinement on board for months or even years, and lack of clean water.

The EJF found hi-tech vessels operating without appropriate licences in fishing exclusion zones off the coast of Sierra Leone and Guinea over the last four years. The ships involved all carried EU numbers, indicating that they were licensed to import to Europe having theoretically passed strict hygiene standards.

"We didn't set out to look at human rights but rather to tackle the illegal fishing that's decimating fish stocks, but having been on board we have seen conditions that unquestionably meet the UN official definition of forced labour or modern-day slavery," EJF investigator Duncan Copeland said. A report on the abuses is published by the foundation today.

Coalition of pickers demand a penny more from Publix

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers will begin a three day march today to try to get more money for farm workers. We linked to a story about the CIW recently when they began a moving poverty museum to shed light on the plight of tomato pickers in Florida.

Now the CIW begins the march to demand that Publix supermarkets pay a penny more a pound for tomatoes. Even the small penny per pound will greatly improve the wages of workers. Some of those workers are held captive against their will to keep doing the job. Some stories of mistreatment include feeding the workers drugs instead of paychecks or beating them into staying.

From this Associated Press story that we found at NPR, we hear from both sides on this issue.

Publix spokeswoman Shannon Patten said the group's call to not buy Publix tomatoes could end up hurting Florida residents and farmworkers by lessening demand for an important product. Florida provides most of the nation's domestic winter tomato crop.

Patten added that it wasn't the supermarket chain's role to negotiate tomato prices.

"That price is set by the grower or packer," Patten said in the statement. "We do not intervene in labor disputes between suppliers and their employees. Each store carries more than 35,000 different products and tomatoes are a small part of our product mix."

Coalition spokesman Gerardo Reyes said the march isn't just about the price paid to workers for picking tomatoes. It's also about how the workers are treated in the fields and why corporations should care.

"Forced labor, poverty, and abuse are all too real for Florida farmworkers," Reyes said.

The coalition wants Publix to stop buying produce from growers that don't meet certain standards for workers in the fields. The group claims it took Publix more than a year to stop buying from two Florida tomato farms where four people forced workers to pick crops and were convicted on slavery charges in 2008.

The Modern-Day Slavery Museum

A new museum is making the case that slavery has not ended in America. The Modern-Day Slavery Museum is making stops across Florida to show the story of captive farm-workers in the state. The museum concentrates on the conditions of tomato farms in Florida, where some of the workers are held captive against their will, fed drugs instead of a paycheck and beaten into staying.

From this article from "The Nation" that we found at NPR, writer Katrina Vanden Heuvel describes what is in the museum curated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

The bulk of the museum is housed inside of a 24-foot box truck — a replica of the one used by the Navarrete family in Immokalee to hold twelve farmworkers captive from 2005 to 2007. The workers were beaten, chained and imprisoned inside of the truck, and forced to urinate and defecate in the corners. US Attorney Doug Molloy called the operation "slavery, plain and simple."

Inside of the truck visitors learn about seven cases of farm labor servitude in Florida successfully prosecuted by the US Department of Justice over the past 15 years. Workers were held against their will through threats, drugs, beatings, shootings, and pistol-whippings. These cases meet the high standard of proof and definition of slavery under federal laws and resulted in the liberation of over 1000 farmworkers — CIW worked with federal and local authorities during the investigation and prosecution of six of the seven cases.

Barry Eastabrook described his experience in the truck for The Atlantic: "Inside, the vehicle was stacked high with cardboard tomato cartons. The floor was chipped and scuffed. There was a plywood sorting table — which doubled as a 'bed' for the workers. But what stays with me was the heat. Outside, the day was chilly and overcast, but inside the truck, even with the cargo door all the way open, the temperature became borderline unbearable. The stale air was uncomfortable to breathe. Sweat soaked the back of my shirt. And I was in there for less than five minutes, not two and a half years."

But it's not just the contemporary slavery examples one finds inside the box truck that educates the visitors. The museum is designed to look at the history of slavery and forced labor — the evolution of it — and the fact that there has never been a period in Florida agriculture when there wasn't some form of forced labor. The exhibit was vetted by historians, slavery experts, economists and other academics, including Nation editorial board member Eric Foner who said, "A century and a half after the Civil War, forms of slavery continue to exist in the world, including in the United States. This Mobile Museum brings to light this modern tragedy and should inspire us to take action against it."

Before entering the truck, the museumgoer is given a booklet and sees two large exhibits which provide historical context — examining slavery from Spanish settlement through Edward R. Murrow's acclaimed CBS documentary Harvest of Shame in 1960. Forms of slavery include chattel slavery, the convict-lease system through 1923, and debt peonage.

Another display plays a 1993 60 Minutes piece on Wardell Williams, a former crew leader in Florida who kept workers in debt while also supplying some with drugs and alcohol.

Inside of the truck the seven cases are described powerfully through the use of primary sources — court documents, indictments, criminal complaints, testimony. Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez held 400 workers under the watch of armed guards and assaulted — even shot — those who tried to escape. Abel Cuello held more than 30 tomato workers in two trailers in the isolated swampland west of Immokalee. Once out of prison, Cuello was able to resume supplying labor to Ag-Mart Farms in Florida and North Carolina. Michael Lee recruited homeless US citizens to harvest oranges, creating debt through loans for rent, food, cigarettes, and cocaine. Ramiro and Juan Ramos had a workforce of over 700 farmworkers and threatened with death those who tried to leave. They also pistol-whipped and assaulted at gunpoint van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. Ronald Evans also recruited homeless citizens throughout the southeast with promises of good jobs and housing, then kept them in a labor camp surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. He also made sure they were perpetually indebted to him, deducting money from their pay for food, rent, crack cocaine, and alcohol.
...

"The museum has made it possible to lay out our argument about slavery from A to Z, in a sort of irrefutable package of completely documented and totally unimpeachable facts," says CIW staff member Greg Asbed. "And when you can see the whole history and evolution of four hundred years of forced labor in Florida's fields assembled in one place, then all the false assumptions about what drives modern-day slavery just fall away. It's not workers' immigration status today, or a few rogue bosses, but the fact that farmworkers have always been Florida's poorest, most powerless workers. Poverty and powerlessness is the one constant that runs like a thread through all the history. In short, you see, it's not about who's on the job today. It's about the job itself."

Book Review on "A Crime So Monstrous"

Slavery still persists thought much of the world. From Europe to Haiti to India people still work without freedom. A new book from former Newsweek reporter E. Benjamin Skinner sheds light on the problem. Mary H. Meier of the Boston Globe writes this review of "A Crime So Monstrous"

Of all the unhappy women and men whose paths cross author E. Benjamin Skinner's in his book on present-day slavery, the saddest is undoubtedly the nameless Romanian girl with Down syndrome in a Bucharest brothel. "Mascara ran from pools of tears around deep-set eyes," Skinner writes. "Below her right bicep were no less than ten deep, angry red slashes, raised, some freshly scabbed."

Her image pervades "A Crime So Monstrous," a devastating exposé of the millions of suffering enslaved human beings around the world, including children.

Under threat of brutality, they toil in wealthy Haitian households, European brothels, and Indian quarries. Skinner encountered many such cases as he traveled to these sites with John Miller, the former head of the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Field action to halt slavery is carried out through private groups funded from the office's annual budget of $375 million.
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To document more of the stark horror of slavery in other countries, he traveled widely, from Haiti, to the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, where severe poverty was endemic, to the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, and to India, where peasants and quarry workers who amass even small amounts of debt can remain in virtual slavery to their creditors for generations. In Moldova (part of which was once known as Moldavia and belonged to the former Soviet Union), some 400,000 women have disappeared since independence into slave prostitution.
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The problem of winning emancipation in so many countries is huge, but there are isolated bright lights. In Moldova, psychologist Dr. Lidia Gorceag operates a shelter for former sex slaves, funded by the International Organization for Migration in the United States. Many of these women come to her with physical injuries; their emotional scars are even deeper. Gorceag and the IOM help them to start their own small businesses such as selling sunflower oil or working in hair salons to gain economic independence. And in Washington, D.C., Kevin Bales runs Free the Slaves, an umbrella organization working to halt trafficking.

3 Countries Combine Forces to Investigate Trafficking of Women

India Singapore and Malaysia are all investigating a sex slave trafficking circuit.

Slavery is one of the many social ills caused by poverty. Women from North East India are lured to the big cities with the promise of good jobs. Instead the women are forced to be strippers or prostitutes.

Here is a story about the same sex slave trade that we posted last week.

The Times of India updates the investigation.

The probe comes in the wake of an incident in which five tribal girls from Manipur and Assam, who were taken by an agent to Singapore on the pretext of getting them jobs there, were sent to Malaysia and pushed into flesh trade.

One of the girls managed to escape and alerted a pastor who got help from an NGO.

All the five were housed in the David Pasteur Christian Home for destitutes here, which linked up with social activist Kinderson Panmei.

Minister for Overseas Affairs Vyalar Ravi, currently on an official visit here, has said that his ministry has decided to immediately crack down on dubious recruitment agents and as a first step would suspend the agency on the receipt of any report against them and then start an enquiry against them.

He said his ministry had helped in the repatriation of the women back home last Friday.

One of the agents involved in the incident has been arrested in Manipur in India while one is on the run in Kolkata. Ravi has said that there were plans to amend the existing Immigration Act and recruitment agents duping people would be sentenced to a minimum of five years imprisonment. Manipur police are believed to have made several arrests in connection with the case of agents luring girls to this region, local media reports said.

Singapore and Malaysian police are believed to be hot on the trail of another man, believed to be the mastermind of a Singapore-based "recruiting firm", New Straits Times reported on Monday.

MALAYSIA: Emerging Trend in Trafficking Tribal Women

from IPS News

By Baradan Kuppusamy

KUALA LUMPUR, - An emerging trend in the trafficking of tribal people, mostly young girls, is raising concern among government officials, rights organisations, migration experts and human rights lawyers.

Increasingly, tribal girls in the region are duped and trafficked from their villages to regional capitals like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to work in brothels and massage parlours that attract well-heeled locals as well as tourists.

‘’The trafficking of tribal people is on the rise across the South-east Asian region,’’ said Irene Fernandez, executive director of Tenaganita, a leading Malaysian NGO that tracks trafficking of women to Malaysia from across the Asia Pacific region.

‘’It is a most heinous crime because tribal girls are duped into believing they are getting high-paid office and home jobs, but are forced into prostitution,’’ she told IPS.

Not only are tribal people from the region trafficked to Malaysia, the country’s own Penan, from the interiors of Sarawak state, and the Orang Asli tribal groups in peninsular Malaysia are trafficked internally and exploited.

Outsiders, including workers, miners and others, also visit the villages to sexually exploit young tribal women, researchers told IPS.

‘’It is their poverty, dislocation and vulnerability that makes the tribal easily exploited,’’ said a Malaysian researcher with the Penan people who declined to be named. ‘’The government is totally unresponsive...it is total neglect of indigenous people.’’

‘’They give lip-service whenever the issue makes the headlines, but after that the indigenous people are left to the mercy of the traffickers,’’ Fernandez said.

The case of five young Naga tribal women from India’s north-east, who were trafficked from their village to Singapore and later moved to Malaysia and forced to work as sex slaves, has highlighted the plight of tribal women uprooted from their villages and trapped in Malaysia, a country generally hostile to migrants.

The five women are now housed in a half-way centre and the Indian High Commission here is making arrangements to send them home.

Commission counselor Sudhir Kumar Mehrotra told ‘The New Straits Times’ daily on Sep. 29 that the women from the Zeliangrong Naga tribe were promised lucrative jobs but were duped and forced to work as bar girls and prostitutes in nightclubs in Singapore and Malaysia.

‘’We have information that as many as 150 women from Manipur, Assam and Nagaland have been duped and forced to work immorally in this region,’’ he said. According to Mehrotra, the Indian government is concerned and investigating the people involved and the routes taken to curb the emerging trend in the trafficking of tribal people.

Poverty among the tribal people in places like Manipur state’s backward Tamenglong district, where parents place their hopes on agents to secure jobs for their daughters, is fueling the trade, human rights lawyers said.

According to migration experts, trafficking of tribal girls is widespread within India but because of the great demand in South East Asian capitals traffickers are beginning to traffic them outside India in the hope of making a fortune.

‘’Tribal people are rare in these capitals and there is a rising demand for them in many brothels and massage parlours in the region because of their rarity,’’ said a migration and HIV expert with a regional NGO.

‘’The flesh trade is always looking out for new victims,’’ he said, declining to be identified so as not to annoy regional governments. ‘’Trafficking of tribal people is common in India and blatantly carried out despite all the laws against it. But with the heightened push and pull factor the victims are surfacing outside India.’’

Link to full article. May expire in future.

The hidden costs of being a child bride

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Woman's idea saves thousands of Nepalese girls

from the San Francisco Chronicle

A sort of "micro-piglet" scheme in Nepal. - Kale
by Meredith May,

Olga Murray of Sausalito had been volunteering for five years in Nepal, helping abandoned and disabled children get an education, when she read something in the newspaper that she couldn't believe.

In the southern Dang district, rural Tharu farming families trapped in extreme poverty - earning less than a dollar a day - were making horrible sacrifices: selling their daughters as domestic slaves to wealthy Kathmandu families for $35 to $75.

"These girls are 7, 8, 9 and 10, and no one was checking up on them," said Murray, 83. "I was shocked."

That was in 1989. Her solution to break the practice has since made her a philanthropic legend in the area.

Her ingenious idea? Piglets.

Murray asked the Tharu village fathers to keep their daughters home and send them to school instead of selling them at the annual Maghe Sakranti Festival every January. In exchange, families could raise the pigs and sell them for the same amount they could fetch for their daughters. Murray's nonprofit organization, the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, also would pay for the girls' school expenses. Plus, it would kick in a kerosene lamp and 2 liters of kerosene a month - coveted items in an area without electricity.

It was an experiment based on Murray's understanding of Nepali culture after living there off and on for five years and sponsoring the education of orphans and street children. She knew pork is a prized meat and that for some families, selling a daughter was the only way to afford food for the rest of the family.

Of the 37 families she and her Nepalese counterpart Som Paneru approached that first year, 32 took the deal. Some asked for and received a goat instead of a pig.

Murray and Paneru have since steered 3,000 girls away from slavery and all but eradicated the long-held tradition of indentured servitude in the Tharu village.

Instead of spending their lives washing, baby-sitting, cooking and - in the worst cases - working in brothels, the girls are getting an education. Many have also become vocal about their hardships, unveiling the horrors of domestic slavery on radio programs and in street plays and marches. Some have formed a watchdog committee to visit the Tharu village and monitor the bus stops to make sure girls aren't being sold.

"The local schools are full of former kamlaris (girl slaves), and the size of the classrooms are swollen, and girls are outnumbering boys," Paneru wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. "We've already built over 35 new classrooms, but the need is still not fully met."

It's illegal to employ children younger than 14 outside the home in Nepal, but in Tharu, one of the country's poorest villages, some fathers persist. In those cases, Murray, an attorney who worked for 37 years helping write opinions for two California Supreme Court chief justices in San Francisco, files a lawsuit in Nepal.

Typically, a warning letter persuades the father to keep his daughter home, Murray said. She has had to go to court only a few times, and she has won every time.

Selling girls has become shameful in Dang, and if it's done, it's done in secret now, Murray said.

The girls are resilient and have become fierce activists. The only time their voices quaver, Murray said, is when they talk about their little sisters.

"At rallies, or on the radio, they promise out loud that their little sisters will never, ever go through what they did, and that's when you hear them start to cry."

Murray and Paneru have been so successful in Dang, they have started to bring their pigs-for-girls program to the neighboring district of Bardiya. Since January, they have liberated 500 girls there, Murray said.

Her foundation is putting 1,500 girls through school at an annual cost of $100 per student. The Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation also runs two boarding schools, one for boys and one for girls who are abandoned or disabled. So far they've been able to send 30 of their boarding school graduates to college.

Murray shows no signs of slowing. She spends six months a year in Nepal and the rest of the year in her Sausalito home. Her coffee table books are unique - binders filled with before-and-after pictures of Nepalese children who were severely malnourished before spending two months in the Nutrition Rehabilitation Home she started for starving hospital patients.

Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation 3030 Bridgeway, Suite 123 Sausalito, CA 94965

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Poverty and tradition shackle Mauritania's slaves

from Middle East Online

Slaves in Mauritania show optimism in country’s transition to liberate them, end poverty.

By Daniel Flynn - NOUAKCHOTT

Born a slave, like his entire family, Matalla Mbreik toiled from dawn to dusk selling water and tending his master's flocks on the lonely fringes of the Saharan desert, until he could take no more.

"I still have the scars from my beatings, like my mother and sisters," said the 32-year-old Mauritanian, staring at the floor, dressed in flowing pale-blue embroidered robes. "All they gave us to eat were leftovers."

After years spent dreaming of escape, Mbreik seized his chance two months ago when a Mauritanian army truck passed him searching for an oasis in the desert.

"I told them to shoot me rather than take me back to my master," said Mbreik, red-faced with shame, sitting in the office of anti-slavery group SOS-Slave.

Although banned by law in 1980, slavery in Mauritania has persisted, perpetuated by poverty and rigid customs. Authorities long denied its existence but campaigners estimate there are still hundreds of thousands of slaves among the 3 million population -- the highest ratio in the world.

Chattel slavery, where one person is the property of another, has existed in the impoverished West African country for more than 800 years.

Traditionally, members of the haratin slave caste must marry who their masters’ say and can be given as gifts, bought and sold, or presented to the poor as charity.

Children are often separated from their mothers and sent to work in other homes. Girls frequently suffer sexual abuse.

"Westerners think of slaves as people in chains," said Boubacar Messaoud, head of SOS-Slave. "Slaves here have no need to be chained up because they are educated in submission ... They are chained in their heads."

"If my master had been kind, I would not have left him," said Mbreik, tightly gripping the edge of the sofa.

MILLIONS OF SLAVES

The International Day for the Abolition of Slavery on December 2 marks the landmark 1949 U.N. convention against people trafficking. Anti-slavery campaigners estimate there are still more than 25 million slaves worldwide.

Slavery remains rife in many parts of West Africa's arid Sahel region, such as neighbouring Mali or Niger, ranked among the poorest countries in the world.

"We are a country of castes, like all the other countries in this region," said Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, the head of Mauritania's military junta which seized power last year, vowing a transition to democracy after decades of dictatorship.

"But Mauritania, more than other countries, is addressing this problem of castes and their consequences on post-independence society," he said, pointing to the adoption of international conventions and efforts to educate former slaves.

SOS-Slave's Messaoud says the situation has improved since the junta ousted former president Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya in a bloodless coup. He hopes the transition to presidential elections in March will bring freedom for all Mauritanians.

"We are optimistic because Mauritania's rulers now acknowledge that slavery exists," said Messaoud, who was jailed several times under Taya's regime. "If the elections are transparent that will be a real victory."

With many escaped slaves unwilling or too ashamed to prosecute their former masters, SOS-Slave is campaigning for the right to bring third party prosecutions against slave-owners.

"Mauritania has never convicted anyone for practising slavery. That would mark the start of recognition that slavery is no longer acceptable," he said. "The laws forbid slavery, but they are new and traditions are very old."

POVERTY BREEDS SLAVERY

Former slave owner Mohamed Salem Ould Hamada's family willingly freed all their slaves in 1991. He now condemns slavery as unjust but understands how the ancient practice came to exist.

"In our religion slavery is a bad thing," said Hamada, citing the Koranic story of Yusuf sold into slavery in Egypt. "It exists because there are problems which are worse: poverty."

"In many cases, it is the slaves themselves who want the procedure," said Hamada. "While problems of poverty continue to exist, slavery will continue."

In a poor shanty-town near Nouakchott's airport, where corrugated iron shacks dot the sand dunes and goats nibble at piles of rubbish, SOS-Slave has helped Aichana start a new life.

Children in torn rags play beside the "street", marked by car tyres planted in the sand, outside the small shop which she established with money from the group.

"Before when I worked, it was never for me -- even if I earned money I had to give it to my master," Aichana said, sat inside on a red mat beside shelves stacked with couscous, soap, dry biscuits, pasta, and condensed milk.

"When I was young, I thought life was like that, but as I grew older and saw how other people lived, I felt ashamed," she added, as flies settled on her face in the morning haze.

"Now, all I want is to be able to earn my living honestly ... for my children to go to school, for them to be honest and grow up like normal people."