Wednesday, June 29, 2011

 

The Dark World of the Arab Child Slave Trade‎ - AINA

The Dark World of the Arab Child Slave Trade‎
AINA (press release) - Stephen Brown - Jun 11, 2011

While tens of thousands of adults are also victims of Arab slavers, many people only first took notice of the Arab slave trade in children when reports of enslaved child camel jockeys emerged from Persian Gulf countries. A 2004 HBO documentary on the subject was especially responsible for making Americans aware of this modern-day barbarism. These boys, who were sold by poor parents hoping their offspring would some day experience a better life, were primarily from South Asia. But instead of a life of dignity and meaningful work, they wound up in the Middle East where they were made to race camels for their Arab masters. Beaten and often sexually abused, they were all kept undernourished, so that the camels would have less weight to carry.

"As many as 6,000 child camel jockeys…languished in hidden slavery on ozbah farms, where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down," wrote E. Benjamin Skinner in his book, A Crime So Monstrous.

[...]

When investigating in the 1990s the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of black Africans in Mauritania by Arab-Berber masters, African-American author Samuel Cotton was stunned to discover that African children were still being kidnapped by Arabs traveling with camels carrying big baskets. The child, usually playing alone, would suddenly be snatched from its play and placed in one such basket, after which its new owners hurried away. The children, he was told, are sometimes found later "hundreds of miles away as slaves."

Also during his investigation, which was summarized in his highly informative book Silent Terror: A Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery, Cotton was told there was "still a huge trafficking in slaves going on between Mauritania and the United Arab Emirates."

Black African children are also not always stolen so surreptitiously. Until recently in the southern Sudan, the old-fashioned slave raid witnessed villages being burned down, the men killed and the women and children captured. This was the Arab slavers' main harvesting tool of humans. Thousands of children were captured by this murderous method and forcibly taken as agricultural, domestic and sex slaves to Arab northern Sudan — where many still languish today. Darfur has also seen many children disappear from both refugee camps and towns subjected to central government attack. They are suspected victims of Arab slave hunters.

But it is not only non-Arab children who are Arab child slave trade victims. An Egyptian newspaper, referring to a 2008 UNICEF report, stated Egyptian children are being bought and sold for about $3,000 for "domestic work and farming, among other things." This trade in children is so extensive in Egypt, organizations are "employing brokers, and even operating their own web sites.

"Many are also sent to the Gulf States, with orphanages being a major supplier," the story further reports....

http://www.aina.org/news/20110611201620.htm

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Labels: ,


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?