Slavery

asked Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to efforts to eradicate contemporary slavery. The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who will contribute to this debate. I am also grateful that it takes place today, for it isa fitting advent for next year’s bicentenary ofWilliam Wilberforce’s parliamentary achievement in abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire. However, we cannot celebrate the end of slavery. In 1998, the United Nations established the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery to investigate the nature and extent of slavery today. The High Commissioner for Human Rights stated: "““Slavery continues to be reported in a wide range of forms: traditional chattel slavery, bonded labour, serfdom, child labour, migrant labour, domestic labour, forced labour and slavery for ritual or religious purposes””." Twenty-seven million people are now enslaved. Behind each statistic is a human being, and behind that human being are a family and a community, devastated or destroyed by the horror of slavery. I am grateful to other noble Lords who I know will be addressing the many diverse aspects involving the eradication of slavery. As real-life experiences speak louder than words, I would like to introduce some of the hundreds of people whom I have met who have endured modern slavery. These people are the ““lucky”” ones who have escaped. But, even then, the aftermath of slavery blights their lives. Often their families have perished and their homes have been destroyed. Girls may find it very hard to attract a ““good”” husband if they have been subjected to sexual relationships. And, for all, there is the memory of their ordeals and the stigma of having been a slave. My examples come from three areas: Burma, Uganda and Sudan. First, I turn to Burma, where the military junta with the Orwellian name, the State Peace and Development Council, uses slavery in many ways. Over the past 12 years, I have interviewed scores of men, women and children from Karen, Karenni, Shan, Chin and Kachin states. Their testimonies have a chilling consistency: SPDC troops regularly round up villagers and force them to undertake unpaid labour, carrying 30 kilograms of rice or ammunition from dawn to dusk with little respite for food, water or rest. Elderly people and pregnant women are not exempt. If they fall by the wayside, they are beaten and sometimes killed. Some are used as human minesweepers; many die. A 35 year-old married woman with two children from a village in Karen state told her story: "““My husband died or was killed when acting as a forced porter for the SPDC. He was a rice farmer and he had to work many times as a porter, usually for two to three weeks at a time. Porters would all have to work for nine to 10 hours per day and had to carry loads of 60 kilograms. Those unable to work such hours or to carry such loads were firstly beaten, usually with rifles, then, if they still could not comply, they were shot. I had to do portering duties twice after my husband’s death. There were about 100 porters in my group and about 70 per cent of them were women. We slept on mats on the jungle floor and soldiers would come at night and take any women they chose. My task was to carry rocks and stones to build a road and a railway””." The ILO has confirmed and condemned the Burmese regime’s policy of forced labour, but it continues unabated, as people in both Karen and Shan states told me when I met them last month. The use of sexual slavery by the SPDC as a weapon of war has been widely documented, and 70,000 boy soldiers have been abducted and forced to serve in the army. Escapees describe how they were kidnapped, taken to military camps and then sent into active service. Their parents are never informed of what has happened to them. Those heartbreaking examples of slavery in Burma surely amount to crimes against humanity. Will Her Majesty’s Government urge the UN Security Council to take urgent measures to end slavery in Burma today? Secondly, I turn to Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army has abducted over 25,000 children, brutalising them and forcing them to fight against their own people. One child’s story must speak for countless others, including the many who have perished and will never be able to speak for themselves. Alur Florence, aged 15, from Patongo was abducted in 2002 and taken to Sudan. She was kept bound for one and a half weeks with virtually no food and was then given to an LRA commander as his ““wife””. She was trained to become a soldier, given a gun and taken to Gulu. She had to fight and, on five missions, had to take other children into captivity, treating them as she had been treated. She said: "““I became wild. I didn’t care about killing and I possibly became worse than them. If I had met my mother and father, I would have killed them. I acted like someone who is deranged. I don’t know how many people I have killed””." She has been told that her parents are dead. Four of her siblings were abducted; she is the only one to return, as the others were killed in battle. Many children and young people are still missing. Those who return face grave difficulties, trying to be reintegrated into communities that are themselves displaced by war, and living in camps without adequate healthcare or education. These young people stress that their overriding desire is for education, which is essential to build new lives, but often they cannot afford the fees. Many well qualified teachers live in the camps and are eager to teach but there are no facilities. Will Her Majesty’s Government urge the Ugandan Government to address this issue as a priority? Finally, I turn to Sudan, where traditional practices of slavery, especially of Africans by Arabs, were reinstated, with the use of slavery as a weapon of war by the Islamist National Islamic Front regime. This regime seized power by military coup in 1989 to become the so-called ““Government of Sudan””. It quickly declared military Islamic jihad against all who oppose it: Muslims, Christians and traditional believers. One weapon of jihad is slavery. In a typical raid, men would be killed and women and children would be taken away as concubines and slaves. They were exploited to fulfil the NIF’s objectives: the forced Islamisation of those not already Muslims and the forced Arabisation of Africans. In October 1995, on a visit to Nyamlell and Manyiel in Bahr al Ghazal, we found evidence of widespread, systematic slavery. Manyiel was a place where Arab traders brought back enslaved women and children from the north. They described the Sudanese Government’s policy of encouraging attacks by Arab raiders on African southerners: "““The Government of Sudan arms militias with AK47s to fight the people in the south. The militia raid villages to capture women and children. There have been many raids. Omer al-Bashir and the Government have made public the fact that they are arming these militias. So the militia are certainly armed by the Government of Sudan and encouraged to develop the slave trade””." We interviewed many local Africans who had been enslaved. Adut Wol Ngor was caring for 62 victims of a raid in March 1995. She recalled that day: "““The enemy came early on March 25. About 300 people were killed ... they came on horseback and on foot. We ran with the children to try to hide them in the long grass but they found us and took the older children away. Any who refused to go, they killed … Those who went, were tied with a rope and pulled like cows behind horses. Some children were as little as seven years old. Some died of thirst””." The story of another family is typical. Mr Apin Apin Akot was away from home looking after his cattle when his wife was captured with two of their children, aged four and nine, in March 1995. His wife told us her story: "““The Arabs came at dawn and captured us; on the way they ‘did what they wanted with us’. They tied babies onto horses and our daughter has a paralysed leg as a result. We walked on foot for two days. We were taken to Meyram to a camp, where they built a fence around us … We were beaten every day, any time they felt like it. I was there for three and a half months. They took some of the girls and women to … a place where slaves are traded with a camel-owning tribe. I don’t know what happened to them. Sometimes we had to work as domestic slaves or as water carriers. I had to work in the home of a man called Nuwer Omer … This man had five slave children. He still has one of our children, a daughter aged nine … because my husband did not have enough money—the equivalent of 25 cows””," to pay for her release. Having lost all his possessions, that father could not raise the money to purchase the freedom of their nine year-old daughter, so we gave him the money he needed to rescue her. On a subsequent visit, he greeted us with joy, exclaiming: "““Every morning I wake a happy man, because I was able to redeem my older daughter and now we are together again as a family””." CEAWC—the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children—has been established to rescue slaves, but it is not operating effectively. The NIF regime is abnegating responsibility, claiming that the Government of southern Sudan should be funding the rescue operation. According to James Aguer, a Dinka member of CEAWC, a further 35,000 children are still not free and tens of thousands of missing people are held in territory controlled by the northern regime. This is utterly unacceptable. The Government of Sudan promoted and funded the slave raids. The responsibility for freeing those enslaved lies entirely with that Government, who have massive oil revenues. I ask the Minister whether Her Majesty’s Government will put great pressure on the Government of Sudan to fulfil their obligations to ensure the freedom of all Sudanese citizens enslaved in the previous war, and now in Darfur. In conclusion, I return to this country. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about the efforts of Her Majesty’s Government to eradicate slavery, and the preparations to commemorate the bicentenary of William Wilberforce’s parliamentary achievements. I hope that events will not be so focused on the past that we forget or ignore today’s realties. We should rightly condemn as shameful the undoubted horrors of the slave trade in which Britain played a role, but it is not theologically or morally appropriate to repent or apologise for deeds committed by other people in another age. William Wilberforce would, I am sure, prefer us to focus on our responsibilities to do much more than we are currently doing to try to complete his, as yet, uncompleted mission.