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| Africa: North |
| Slavery: Mauritania's best kept secret |
| 2004-12-20 |
| The BBC has actually done a good job covering this for the past few years. ...Mohamed could not tell me his surname or his age. As a slave he didn't own the right to either. But in a candlelit shack in the sandy outskirts of the capital, Nouakchott, he told me the story of his life. "I don't know how I became a slave," he told me. "I was just born one. My family were slaves. We did all the hard work for our master and all we received in return was beatings." After three attempts at making slavery illegal, the latest as recently as 1981, Mauritania has finally enacted a law which goes further than ever before, making slave ownership punishable with a fine or prison sentence. But a year on, and no-one has yet been prosecuted under the new law. "We enacted it just to meet international standards," says Bamariam Koita, director of the government's Human Rights Commission. Meanwhile the WaPo had an article yesterday that the real problem is institutional racism in America because the black middle class doesn't feel secure enough. |
| Posted by:mhw |
| #1 They must be really, really bad at keeping secrets... |
| Posted by: mojo 2004-12-20 1:54:24 PM |