Slavery - the sadistic trade

This a horror story, have your favourite tranquilliser handy.

It’s ironic that as we celebrate William Wilberforce’s campaign to end slavery by Britain 200 years ago there are now 27 million slaves worldwide, more than at any time in history, including some in Australia.

Caroline Cox, former deputy speaker of the British House of Lords, and human rights campaigner John Marks recount details of modern slavery in This Immoral Trade, paying particular attention to Uganda, Sudan and Burma. The confronting stories raise questions about why the United Nations and countries wealthy enough to wage expensive wars seem powerless to control these excesses of human cruelty.

Northern Uganda has been subject to the relentless campaign of the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony since 1987. Olara Otunnu, United Nations Under-Secretary-General, delivering the 2005 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, said this humanitarian catastrophe “is a methodical and comprehensive genocide, conceived and carried out by the government. An entire society is being systematically destroyed - physically, culturally, emotionally, socially and economically - in full view of the international community”.

Villages have been systematically sacked, property destroyed, people slaughtered, over a million herded into densely overcrowded concentration camps lacking water, sanitation, food, health care, education, with a death rate of 1,000 a week.

Most horrifying is the LRA’s systematic abduction of 20,000 to 40,000 children who are brutalised, terrorised, and forced to abduct and maltreat other children, including their own people.

“Florence”, 15, was fed little for 10 days while having to carry food on her head, given a gun, trained as the soldier “wife” of an LRA commander, and was going on missions to take other children.

She later reported “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.” However, despite all the brainwashing she wanted to escape and did so during an operation. Her parents and four abducted siblings are dead.

A girl of 15 was with the LRA for 19 months. She became the “wife” of two commanders, drank blood as part of her training, was taught to kill by knife or beating and used these methods on other prisoners. One day when the food she was cooking burned she was beaten unconscious. Eventually she escaped but has been afflicted with nightmares since.

In Sudan an old tradition of slavery re-emerged following independence and in the 1980s and 1990s Arabs again set about capturing Africans. Following raids on communities, young women became concubines, young boys - killers, older women - domestic servants, and older men and women were often killed. In one raid 82 men died and 282 women and children became slaves.

One woman, 26, captured in 1995, reported government soldiers killed her husband and gouged out one of her eyes before tying her to a horse. She was not fed and thorns cut her bare feet. “I was taken to stay with a slave owner and his two wives who beat me if I refused to do anything and had to work whenever they told me. For three years the owner forced me to have sex with him whenever he wanted. If I tried to refuse, he would beat me. I have an eight-month-old baby from him.”

A 42-year-old man had his home destroyed three times, his livestock repeatedly stolen, his daughter, then ten-years-old, taken away. On a later raid his sons, aged ten, eight and five were taken. Later again his wife was beaten, two children, 15 and eight, killed. The father was chained to other captives, attached to a horse, and beaten regularly.

A six-year-old boy’s parents were killed, he was taken away, beaten if he didn’t speak Arabic, forced to tend cattle and only given scraps of food. “I was very lonely and cried every day, sometimes for my parents and sometimes because they beat me. I know I am going to die”, he said.

In Burma military authorities force captured civilians to walk across minefields to locate explosives. Rape of women is an official strategy.

The country has been ruled by a military regime since 1962, the current administration, The State Peace and Development Council, renaming the country Myanmar in 1989. The 1990 national election was won easily by the National League for Democracy, but the regime rejected the result and NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest ever since.

The country’s indigenous groups, 35 per cent of the population, have been ruthlessly oppressed. The UN Commission on Human Rights ratified a statement in 2004 which referred to extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, forced relocation, confiscation of land, child labour, and human trafficking. A 2002 report by The Shan State Human Rights Foundation detailed 173 sexual assault incidents involving 625 girls and women committed by Burmese soldiers between 1996 and 2001.

Rape is officially condoned as a weapon of war against the civilian population as part of their anti-insurgency activities. Eighty-three per cent of the assaults were committed by officers, usually in front of their own troops, involving extreme brutality such as “beating, mutilation and suffocation ... 25 per cent of the rapes resulted in death”. In some cases women were detained and assaulted repeatedly for as long as four months, any who complained tortured or killed.

Ishmael Beah of Sierra Leone spent three years as a child soldier before being rescued by UNICEF. He wrote about his experiences in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and talked about them on Washington television’s Lehrer Newshour. Introducing him Jeffrey Brown said “the face of modern conflict is often a child's face: preteens and teenagers with AK-47s and machetes, often high on drugs, killing and being killed … the United Nations estimates there are 300,000 child soldiers in 19 countries around the world”.

Beah was 12 when civil war came to his village in 1993. Separated from his family he joined a group of boys wandering a country characterised by violence and hunger, before being picked up by government troops and pressed into the army.

To make a boy a killer, Beah explained, you first destroy everything he knows. With his own family gone, the army became his family. “In the beginning it's difficult. But as time goes on the squad becomes your reality, your surrogate family.”

It was kill or be killed. If the squad came across a stranger and the lieutenant told one of them to “shoot this guy” - if he stopped to ask why then he’d get shot himself. The first time they went into battle “it was very apparent you were descending into hell”. They were traumatised by constant violence and use of drugs, this became their world, “you believed in the rhetoric … no remorse, no compassion, it just became what you did”.

After three years he was taken to a UNICEF rehabilitation centre. When someone said to him “None of this [the experiences he had endured] is your fault” he didn’t find it easy to understand or accept.

He explained how you’d lost your original family, then were pressed into conflict as part of a new group in which your reality was to be a soldier. Now, in the rehabilitation centre, he is removed again, so when told “none of this is your fault” he experiences it as “belittling you as a soldier, as a combatant. You wanted to be taken seriously because this is what you've been doing for years, it's become part of your psychological make-up. It takes a while for you to undo that and realise that [what happened] actually was not your fault.”

Beah had to learn how to sleep again, how not to be in a constant state of violence. “There's a lot of undoing that had to happen to return to whatever little of our childhood was left.”

According to The Coalition Against Trafficking of Women, 300 Thai women a year were trafficked into Australia during the 1990s and “indentured” by a large debt they had to work off before they could be freed, mostly in the sex industry. Australian recruiters also went to Russia to hire women for “table top dancing”.

The Courier-Mail ran a story in March 2006 about “Chantina” who, when her Thai grandmother became very sick, was desperate for money and applied for a kitchen job in the Australian hospitality industry.

On arrival she was told the contract conditions had changed and she would need to pay off a debt of $45,000 by working in a brothel six or seven days a week, regardless of sickness or other incapacity, until she’d seen 700 men.

Suzanna Clarke wrote “Human trafficking is a modern form of slavery … Globally each year, two million young women begin work in the sex market and 700,000 of these have been trafficked. A 2003 Government issues paper put the illicit trade in Australia at one million dollars a week.”