The horrors of
classical slavery are been revisited here and it is clearly a symptom of the
erosion of the societies. I cannot help
but feel that much of the Islamic world is eroding away before our eyes into
some pre modern society that is progressively failing. They visibly fail to modernize in any way at
all. Core to modernization is women’s
rights and aggressive suppression of slavery.
Both release huge amounts of critical human energy which is precisely
why the West works so well.
In the long
term, modernism will wash all this away.
Ending poverty will do this much faster than anything else. The only likely holdouts will be in the
Islamic world and we can wait. We still
need to focus on the willing. Capital
and time will do the rest for us.
Yet this
hugely populated sector screams for massive investment in modernization and all
we get is resource extraction and ongoing endemic warfare and slaving. What fool convinced the British to leave? Oh yes, they decided that it was too expensive
and no use anyway. They still left the
semblance of government but I am sure that is now a distant memory.
Geoffrey
Clarfield: The slaves of Sinai
Geoffrey Clarfield, National Post | April 14, 2014
On Monday, April 14, Jews around the world will
invite their family and friends to join them for the feast of Passover, a
holiday that celebrates the Biblical story of the Israelites, who were enslaved
in Egypt under Pharaoh, and who fled from their cruel Egyptian masters across
the Sinai desert to gain their freedom in the land of Israel. As celebrants
drink wine and eat the unleavened bread that was once prepared in the desert,
they sing an ancient song, “We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt, but now we
are free.”
As a young anthropologist, I was so enamored
by the story of Passover that I spent a year among the nomadic Bedouin Arabs of
the Sinai peninsula to get a taste of that ancient wandering way of life that
must have been temporarily adopted by the Children of Israel during their
sojourn in that “terrible wilderness” on their way to freedom in the Promised
Land. One day, to my shock and surprise, I came across a settlement of Africans
who told me that they were the descendants of the slaves that the Bedouin used
to keep until the British outlawed slavery in the Sinai after the First World
War. I got to know them rather well (as one of them was a fine musician). When
I asked an elder what slavery was like, he told me, “Horrible. You worked all
day, every day and you had no freedom.”
These former slaves were the northernmost
expression of a slave trade that was as old as the Islamic conquest of Egypt
and the land of Israel in the 7th century AD, and which reached its zenith
during the 19th century. When European travellers and adventurers began to
explore Ethiopia, the Sudan and Egypt during the 19th century, they
described an active Nile valley and Red Sea slave trade dominated by Sudanese
and Egyptian Muslim traders, facilitated by Bedouin tribes who still range from
the borders of Ethiopia to the Mediterranean Sea. In the traders’ eyes, the
ideal slaves were Christian and Pagan Ethiopians who were snatched from their
homes in what is now Ethiopia and highland Eritrea.
These slave traders were not
19th century utilitarians. The Red Sea slave trade was characterized by
extreme cruelty and deprivation that included, castration, rape, torture,
murder and abandonment of the weak in the wilderness. By the 1830s, 10-12,000
of these slaves were traded annually up the Nile and Red Sea coast through the Sudan
into Egypt. Although the British eventually made slavery illegal in Egypt and
the Sudan during their occupation of these two countries, as late as the 1920s,
Sudanese religious and political leaders were petitioning the British to allow
them to keep their slaves. Clearly, the practice of slavery in this part of the
world had not disappeared.
During the last few years, a new version
of this slave trade has re-emerged in the area. The persecutors and the victims
are almost the same, but the style of the trade has changed. In some ways
it has become even more brutal than its 19th century forerunner.
Researchers for the UN, the U.S. government and various NGOs who study this
tragedy call it “Sinai trafficking,” a euphemism describing a revived Red Sea
slave trade.
Between 2009-2013, it is estimated that
25,000-30,000 people were victims of Sinai trafficking and that they and their
relatives overseas have paid ransoms to their Sinai Bedouin captors of at least
$622-million. Of those who were kidnapped, anywhere from 25-50% of those
captured die in captivity, usually from torture. The majority of the victims
are Eritreans and almost all of them are Christians.
In 1993, after many decades of a heroically
disciplined resistance struggle that was the envy of all Africans, a newly
liberated Eritrea voted to secede from Ethiopia and finally became an
independent state, recognized by countries around the world. After a short
democratic honeymoon and a pointless border war with Ethiopia, instead of
developing their war-torn society, Eritrea’s new leaders have turned the
country into a totalitarian nightmare. The constitution has never been
implemented, the government has put the head of the Eritrean Orthodox church
under house arrest and it has drafted all teenagers into the army for
indefinite service. The state then forces them to labour without pay on state
farms, like bonded medieval serfs. In today’s Eritrea, arbitrary arrest is
common, and thousands languish in prison without legal representation. Citizens
do not have an automatic right to a passport and will be shot on sight if they
try and cross the border to the Sudan or Ethiopia.
And so, there has arisen a black market that
offers to smuggle Eritreans to the Sudan where they can find temporary refuge
in UN-run refugee camps. This is where the trouble begins, as the demand to
escape Eritrea is huge. The UN estimates that 5,000 people try to leave every
month. In revenge, the Eritrean government has been illegally taxing its
émigrés in Europe and the West 2% of their annual incomes. In 2013 a high
level Eritrean minister fled the country. The government then arrested his
85-year father and 15-year-old daughter in retaliation.
As most Eritreans who want to leave their
country cannot get passports, they know that there are corrupt members of the
Eritrean Border Surveillance Unit who have close ties with businessman on the
Sudanese side of the border. Desperate Eritreans often pay these middlemen up
to $3,000 to be smuggled across the border to refugee camps such as Shagarab in
the Sudan, with the help of Rashaida Bedouin traffickers who live on both sides
of the border. If the refugees are lucky, they languish in camps like Shagarab,
where the UN can almost protect them (many are kidnapped by traffickers from within
the camp itself).
If they are unlucky, as so many are, they
are directly and forcibly transferred to warehouses under armed guard by
Rashaida Bedouin tribesmen. They are then smuggled across the Egyptian border
with assistance from related Bedouin tribes who sell them on to the Bedouin of
the Sinai Peninsula. The involvement of the Bedouin of the Sudan up and into
the Sinai is similar in nature to that of 19th century Red Sea slave trade,
except that now the transfer of human captives is done by truck on desert
roads. If these captive Eritreans have survived thus far, this is where their
hell begins.
The Sinai is now a haven for tribally based
Al-Qaeda operatives as well as Bedouin smugglers and extortionists, who have a
free hand in this revived slave trade. There are about 50 tribally based
trafficking gangs working in the Sinai. Once the incoming groups of captive
Eritreans are divvied up among the gangs, the poor victims are asked if they
have relatives abroad with cellphones. If they do, and most do, then they are
asked to call their relatives and arrange for ransoms of up to $50,000 per
person which will then be sent to middle men in Egypt, or until recently,
extorted from the many thousands of traumatized Eritrean refugees who the
Bedouin already tortured and smuggled into Israel, before the Israelis finally
tightened their border security with Egypt. In the meantime they wait.
Captives are specifically tortured when they
are on the phone with overseas relatives, so that their screams will motivate
them to send money to the Bedouin captors
But while they wait, their Sinai Bedouin
captors torture them, regularly. Captives are beaten with whips and sticks,
often four to five times a day. Men, women and children are regularly beaten
with iron bars and hammers, often breaking limbs. Pregnant women are kicked and
jumped upon, people are hung upside down for days, electrocuted and burnt, held
in chains and assaulted sexually. Children are raped in front of their parents
and women in front of their husbands. Young men are also raped. They are given
little food and water and suffer from disease. Captives are specifically
tortured when they are on the phone with overseas relatives, so that their
screams will motivate them to send money to the Bedouin agents through
international wire transfers. If a captive has already died, the Bedouin often
threaten the deceased’s still captive relatives with even more violence, and so
they often receive ransom payments for people that they have already tortured
and killed.
Those captives who survive are often held
for up to 18 months before they are ransomed and dropped off in Cairo. Having
turned a complete blind eye to what their own citizens did to them in Sinai,
the Egyptian authorities then arrest them and arrange for their eventual
deportation. On one occasion a group of Eritrean captives overpowered their
captors, escaped and reported their persecutor’s whereabouts to the Egyptian
police in the Sinai. The police jailed the escapees and allowed the torturers to
go free. The one Egyptian journalist who reported from the Sinai, Ahmad Abu
Draa, was arrested by the government and put in solitary confinement for
writing about the slave trade. The Egyptian government has done nothing to stop
this new Bedouin slave trade, and deport most of those refugees who make it to
Cairo to Ethiopia, which is marginally better than Eritrea, where they can be
shot or imprisoned for having left “illegally.”
Many of those who make it to Egypt try and
get smuggled to Libya in the hope that they can enter Europe by sea. In Libya
they are often captured, put in prison and sometimes tortured. As one survivor
pointed out, “There is much to be afraid of given our skin colour and religion
… over 400 Eritreans are here, the women held in a separate location. The
Muslims of other countries are taken care of, but we Eritreans do not get such
an option.”
The Egypt and Sudan are leading members of
the Arab League. If the Egyptian government or its military wanted to end Sinai
trafficking tomorrow, they could easily seal their border with Sudan and this
slave trade would be over in 24 hours. But they are far too busy weaving
conspiracy theories about how Israel and the West are responsible for the
recent social, political and economic implosion of their own failed state. The
UN and the European Union also seem remarkably uninterested in this major human
rights disaster unfolding in the southern Mediterranean.
Highland Eritreans are the bearers of an
ancient, sophisticated cultural tradition. As they trace their descent from the
union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, they deserve a far better fate
than that which now awaits so many of them in the Sinai desert. The Egyptian
and Sudanese governments clearly take their cue from Pharaoh.
National Post
Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at
large.
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