chapter 2 - Stiftung "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft"

Aidan McQuade
hoods, impoverishment, social disruption, and lawlessness which result from widespread violence. Under
these conditions, ordinary people become vulnerable to exploitation for profit. The Balkan conflict of the
1990s facilitated widespread exploitation and trafficking, particularly of women and girls who were forced
into sexual exploitation. These atrocities are not unique. The Angolan conflict also fostered this form of trafficking
and exploitation, as does the conflict in Uganda today.
Descent-Based Slavery
Most people associate the word “slavery” with traditional forms of chattel or ownership slavery. This form
of slavery also exists today, most notably in West Africa, where children are born into slavery by inheriting
their status from their mother. In this way, slavery is passed down through the generations. Anti-Slavery International
describes this form of slavery as descent-based slavery. People enslaved in this way are attached to
a master’s family; they are their master’s property and wholly under their master’s control, forced to perform
unpaid domestic and agricultural work.
One example of this form of decent-based slavery is the case of Hadijatou Mani. Mani was born into an established
slave class. Like all slaves in Niger, her slave status was inherited. She was forced to work without
pay, and was also used as a sexual slave by her master. In October 2008, the Community Court of Justice of
the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) found the Republic of Niger guilty of failing to
protect twenty-four-year-old Mani, a citizen of Niger, from this form of slavery. After the verdict, Hadijatou
Mani said, “We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same. I hope that everybody in slavery today can find
their freedom. No woman should suffer the way I did.” 9 Yet six years after Niger formally criminalized slavery,
at least 43,000 people remained enslaved across the country. Although largely ignored by the rest of the world,
decent-based slavery continues to affect thousands of people across West Africa today.
The Evolution of Slavery in History
The ILO has established six indicators to identify forced labor. According to the ILO criteria, forced labor may
exist under conditions of threat or actual physical harm to the worker; restriction of movement and confinement
to the workplace or to a limited area; debt bondage, including when the employer provides food and lodging at
such inflated prices that the worker cannot escape the debt; withholding of wages or excessive wage reductions
that violate prior agreements; retention of passports and identity documents to prevent escape, or to prevent
the worker from confirming his or her identity or status; and threat of denunciation to the authorities when the
worker has an irregular immigration status.
At Anti-Slavery International, we argue that any one of these indicators is suggestive of forced labor. When
two or more indicators exist, we consider the worker a forced laborer. The ability to identify working conditions
as forced labor is crucial, particularly because the history of slavery shows that sustained abolition campaigns
often cause slavery to mutate in form. As new slavery practices emerge, we need to be able to assess
them against a consistent standard.
The mutability and durability of slavery as an institution is amply demonstrated by the history of its development
across the centuries. In the late 18 th century, British abolitionists believed that ending the Atlantic slave
trade would spell the end of slavery as an institution. This proved a mistaken hope, although the abolition
campaigns may have improved the lives of people in slavery because slave holders found it more difficult to
replace slaves they had tortured and worked to death. However, the campaign to end the Atlantic slave trade
9 The verdict is reprinted in http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/publisher,ECOWAS_CCJ,,,496b41fa2,0.html, accessed Nov. 3, 2009.
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Stiftung EVZ
HUMAN RIGHTS AND HISTORY: A CHALLENGE FOR EDUCATION