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….
Archive for June, 2011
Arab Spring Gusher
Northumberland Today – Wally Keeler – [June 28, 2011]
Arabs take to the streets in the hundreds of thousands. They have suffered suppression, oppression, repression, for generations of family dictatorships. Security forces machine-gun the ‘flowering popular movement.’ Tanks and howitzers shell the residences of the ‘flowering popular movement.’ Mourners are gunned down, children are tortured and murdered, dissidents decapitated or mutilated. Women are gang raped. Refugees by the thousands flee. Tens of thousands are homeless. Islamist buzzards circle over the political chaos. The Arab apartheid system is exposing itself.
Face the facts – Syria is an apartheid state
The west is conniving in Bashar Assad’s brutal suppression of opposition
Nick Cohen The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011
The UN will never tell you this, but Syria is an apartheid-style state. Members of Assad’s Alawite sect make up only 14% of the population, but they control government, much of business and all the forces of coercion. Even the underworld is segregated on confessional lines. The shabbiha crime gangs that run the prostitution and smuggling rackets, and whose members the Assads are letting loose on the civilian population, are Alawite mafias.
I hope that liberals of my generation who beat their chests as they protested against racial apartheid in southern Africa will soon feel as outraged by religious apartheid in the Middle East. The Syrian opposition has as much right to our support as the African National Congress did because it has not targeted Alawites because of their religion. Indeed, it places its hopes on the Alawite-led army mutinying.
Human Rights Org. on Arab Apartheid in Yemen
Alternative report submitted to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights when reviewing the second periodic report of Yemen: HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION OF THE AL-AKHDAM IN YEMEN
The All Youth Network for Society Development in association with the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) is pleased to submit this parallel report on the occasion of the review of Yemen to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) at its 46th session.
The report focuses specifically on the human rights situation of the Al-Akhdam community inYemen, a situation which has been addressed by the Committee in the List of Issues For centuries the Al-Akhdam has suffered perpetual discrimination, persecution and ensuing crimesat Yemens most marginal social, economic, and political spaces where they are violently excluded from mainstream society as an untouchable ethnic outcaste.
Social discrimination faced by the Al-Akhdam
Local folklore proverbs, inherited over generations, have helped isolating the Akhdam socially andhave enhanced enhanced apartheid-like differences. Such proverbs indicate that the Akhdam are unclean and dirty, e.g. Never be lured by Akhdam, who are dirty even in bones or: If a dog eats in your saucer, clean it; but if a khadem eats in your saucer, break it. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/ngos/AYNSD_IDSN_Yemen46.pdf http://www.scribd.com/doc/56712005
This Syrian tinderbox could set fire to the region
The Guardian – Jun 7, 2011
Assad’s regime threatens dire consequences for the bloodshed in Jisr al-Shughour. … security men – Syria’s equivalent of Iran’s notorious basij militia. …
Syria remains dangerous regime
Posted on Friday, 06.10.11
BY FRIDA GHITIS
The Syrian people have good reason to feel let down by those around the world who claim to believe passionately in human rights and democracy. The international community has shown misguided restraint in condemning Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s slaughter of his own people. In trying to prove he should be allowed to stay in power, Assad has shown exactly the opposite.
This is not just about Assad. Syrian demonstrators have been chanting “No to Assad,” but also “No to Iran, No to Hezbollah!” The protests threaten the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas bloc. There is much at stake here not just for the regime in Damascus but for the entire region. Syria and Iran have kept Hamas and Hezbollah stockpiled with weapons. Without Damascus, the structure would wobble; perhaps fall.
The lesson from the border protests is that Assad leads an exceedingly dangerous regime. If his brutality against the Syrian people was not enough, his willingness to trigger another regional war — with the support of his allies in Tehran, Beirut and Gaza — should convince the international community to impose stern sanctions, and work for his removal.
The West’s helplessness in Syria
The Week Magazine – Daniel Larison – 4 days ago
The world’s response to the bloodshed in Syria, or rather, … will be empowered, and a reliable ally of Iran and patron of Hezbollah will be overthrown.
Syria Update: “The regime is prepared to massacre everyone …Jun 12, 2011 … Syria Update: “The regime is prepared to massacre everyone” … reports are emerging that Iranians and Hezbollah members are assisting them. …
Syria: Where Massacre Is a Family Tradition
[June 13, 2011]
The mask of the Assad regime finally falls, and the world is forced to confront its illusions about Iran’s ally and Hezbollah’s patron.
By FOUAD AJAMI
Pity the Syrians as they face the Assad regime’s tanks and artillery and snipers. Unlike in Libya, there is no Arab or international “mandate” to protect them. Grant Syria’s rulers their due: Their country rides with the Iranian theocracy and provides it access to the Mediterranean. It is a patron of Hamas and Hezbollah. And still they managed to sell the outside world on the legend of their moderation.
A new Hama on the Turkish border Asia Times Online
By Victor Kotsev
June 15, 2011
TEL AVIV – In 1982, on orders by current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, the Syrian army destroyed much of the city of Hama and killed somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people. The memory of that Muslim Brotherhood uprising and the government massacre is so strong in Syria that arguably it was a crucial factor in rekindling the current unrest after some 70 demonstrators were killed in Hama 10 days ago.
Now, the town of Jisr al-Shoughour seems set on becoming the new Hama – “a” new Hama, if we believe much of what is being written and said about the situation in Syria, with other cities to follow. It does not mean that the comparison is realistic – all other discrepancies aside, the town with its approximately 50,000 inhabitants is no comparison to Hama, the fourth-largest city in Syria – but then again, leading Western ethicists of the past few decades have taught us not to compare numbers of victims.
Sky News: Clinton accuses Iran of backing Syria
Updated: 03:32, Wednesday June 15, 2011
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday accused Iran of backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ‘vicious assaults’ on pro-democracy protesters after crushing its own 2009 uprising.
‘Iran is supporting the Assad regime’s vicious assaults on peaceful protesters and military actions against its own cities,’ Clinton said, comparing its response to Iran’s crackdown on pro-reform demonstrations.
‘Two years ago this week, Iranian citizens went to the polls in the hopes of expressing their democratic rights,’ she said.
‘When the people reached for their aspirations, the government responded with brutal repression. Two years later, that repression continues.’
Syria’s uprising was triggered in mid-March by the arrest and torture of 15 children and adolescents accused of spraying anti-regime graffiti in the southern town of Daraa, which then became the epicentre of the revolt.
The UN children’s agency UNICEF has since said that at least 30 children have been shot dead in the revolt against the Assad family’s 40-year rule…
Clinton: Iran Helps Syrian Brutality; Tehran Warns US
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday accused Iran of physically aiding Syrian forces using brutal violence to put down the country’s protest movement. Hours earlier, Iran warned the United States, “Americans are not allowed to launch a military intervention in any country of the region, including Syria.”
The Guardian Dubai’s skyscrapers, stained by the blood of migrant workers
The Guardian – May 27, 2011
It seems to me a place where the worst of western capitalism and the worst of Gulf Arab racism meet in a horrible vortex. The most pervasive feeling is of a lack of compassion, where the commoditisation of everything and the disdain for certain …
Another Tack: No Jews in Judea
Jerusalem Post – Sarah Honig – Jun 10, 2011
The international community relishes reviling ultra-tolerant Israel while it ignores and even justifies crude Arab racism. Just try to imagine what would have happened had Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stood before some Jewish forum and exclaimed that “from now on we won’t allow the presence of one Arab in our independent Israel with Jerusalem as its capital.”
…Addressing a recent emergency session of Arab League foreign ministers in Doha, Qatar, Mahmoud Abbas unabashedly declared that “when an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is established, we won’t allow the presence of one Israeli in it.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the Arabic version of the German-minted Judenrein – “clean of Jews.” Yet no Arab diplomat was discomfited or shocked. Abbas consistently accentuates the same sentence with only trivial verbal variations. In December 2010, for instance, he put us on notice that “I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.”
The Dark World of the Arab Child Slave Trade
AINA (press release) – Stephen Brown – [June 12, 2011]
Arab racism is at the roots of Islamic slavery that has seen 14 million black Africans enslaved and sold around the Islamic world from the seventh to the twentieth century. Unfortunately for its victims, the abolition of Arab slavery will be difficult …
‘Arab Spring,’ Christian Winter [Islamic apartheid]
Investor’s Business Daily – May 20, 2011
Islamofascism: Obama wants to reward “democratic Egypt” with $1 billion in debt relief. Only, “democratic” Egypt is torching churches and slaughtering Christians left and right. There’s a howling disconnect between the president’s Pollyannaish …