The latest violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is expected to reinvigorate child recruitment efforts, IRIN reported this week.
The intensification of fighting in the North Kivu region, which resumed in August between the Congolese government and the rebel Congres National pour la Defense du Peuple (CNDP), is expected to raise the number of children fighting in the region well beyond the estimated 3,000 already abducted.
Children who are forced into armed conflict suffer terrible physical and emotional damage. They are traumatized by being separated from their families and may witness executions, beatings, and torture. Many young girls now have babies.
Hundreds of schools have been forced to close due to the risk of abduction. Troops have been known to attack them, raiding even primary school classrooms for fresh combatants and concubines.
As presidential elections in Cote d’Ivoire approach, IRIN reported that the West African country has seen a spike in child abductions. Only in this case, it’s not just for sex and labor trafficking. IRIN is attributing it to “political hopefuls using traditional myths of human sacrifice to improve their electoral chances will fuel an already significant market for stolen children.”
In this ravaged country, children are already trafficked for their organs, for sex, and for labor. I guess for ole fashioned sacrifice too.
IRIN interviewed a spokesperson for the country’s police:
Organ traffickers, who slice out hearts, kidneys, lungs and other body parts for sale to medical facilities and soothsayers are the main culprits, Bi said. The children are also taken to work in the sex trade, for use by illegal adoption rings, and for work on plantations, he said.
Sometimes freed slaves and their advocates successfully prosecute their former slaveholders. But one woman in Niger is going even further: she’s suing the government.
Last week the BBC reported that Hadijatou Mani, who was sold as a 12-year-old concubine to a master who already had many wives, accuses the Niger government of not enforcing anti-slavery laws throughout the country.
What’s interesting about this case is that it imposes increased accountability on the government. Almost every country in the world outlaws slavery now, and yet there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world.
It is easy to write a law on a piece of paper.
But if governments don’t make a real, substantial effort to enforce such laws, then complex factors like traditions of inequality and organized crime are not going to yield to a piece of paper.
Human rights groups estimate that there are still 43,000 people living in slavery in Niger.
Mauritania has only one railroad that stretches from the middle of the desert to the sea. And some cities are only reachable by driving miles down sandy beaches without roads, Kevin Bales reported in his book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy.
But unlike most systems of slavery today, where people are usually enslaved and forced to work for a certain period of their lives, in Mauritania it is an institution more comparable to slavery of the American South.
While slavery has technically been illegal in the country since 1981, CNSNews.com quoted Anti-Slavery International’s claim that about 40 percent of the population are slaves. Rather than being acquired, sold, trafficked, and eventually discarded, Mauritanian slaves are born into slavery. Much like black Americans in the antebellum South, they are not just forced to work because of unjust economics– there is a deep-seated mentality of OWNERSHIP.
Mauritania elected new leadership in 2007, and in August enacted new anti-slavery legislation, IRIN reported. But it’s going to take more than creating laws, Anti-Slavery International’s Romana Cacchioli said. It’s going to need some active enforcement.
“We don’t eradicate slavery just by introducing a law,” Cacchioli told IRIN. At the very least, the new law acknowledges that slavery does exist in Mauritania.
On March 23, the Mauritanian slave advocacy groups SOS Slaves’ founder Boubacar Messaoud told the Washington Post that it’s going to take more than a political overhaul to change the culture of slavery– it will be a slow and arduous process of transforming the psyches of both slave-owners and slaves themselves.
“Slavery has been perpetuated in Mauritania by the persistence of tradition, distorted notions of religious obligation … Slaves are unaware that they are entitled to equal rights and don’t know how to seek justice,” Nora Boustany wrote in the Washington Post.
