American cities are currently experiencing continuous outbreaks of violence and arson in the wake of disputed police shootings by white officers of African-Americans. The violent protests purport to be inspired by the desire to save black lives, but, in the end, as history has well taught us, these destructive uprisings will take the lives of more blacks than those they allegedly seek to save.
Meanwhile, in the West African country of Mauritania, a fearless but unknown anti-slavery activist, Biram Dah Ould Obeid, is going to prison for the next three years. A black African, he has saved more black lives than all the rioters and race hucksters in America put together. But Dah Obeid has never destroyed any property, started any fires or assaulted anyone for his cause. So what is his “crime”? He peacefully protested against the obscenity of Islamic slavery and Arab racism that scar his nation.
Dah Obeid, whose father was a slave, had his appeal to dismiss his three-year prison sentence turned down earlier this month by a Mauritanian court. He was arrested with two aides last November for holding an anti-slavery demonstration. Convicted on spurious charges in January, he received a three-year prison sentence. The two aides also received jail terms and had their appeals turned down as well.
“The intensification of the crackdown on anti-slavery activists has no legal justification in a country which ironically just this month adopted a new law indicating slavery is a crime against humanity,” said Alouine Tine, an Amnesty International official, about the unsuccessful appeals.
Mauritania’s black African population has great need for such dauntless and courageous human rights fighters like Dah Obeid. In 2013, the Global Slavery Index ranked Mauritania the number one slave state in the world, the West African nation having been the last country to outlaw slavery in 1981. Slave ownership was criminalized only in 2007 and declared a crime against humanity just this month.
But Mauritanian and foreign human rights NGOs have called these decrees simply “window-dressing,” adopted for foreign consumption. Since 2007, for example, only one slave owner has been successfully prosecuted.
Mauritania’s slaves are all black Africans and their owners are Arabs or Berbers, called “whites,” who constitute about 20 percent of the population. Both slaves and masters are Muslim.
The “whites,” like Mauritania’s president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, make up almost all of Mauritania’s political, business and military elite class that controls the country. And therein lays the problem. It is very difficult to get the elite class that makes the laws to take any meaningful action against slavery when many of them are reported to own slaves themselves. But this inaction is also based on a pronounced, anti-black racism that African-American writer Samuel Cotton noticed when he travelled to Mauritania in the 1990s to explore the slavery issue.
“The problem is that Mauritania’s Arabs sincerely believe that blacks are born to be slaves,” wrote Samuel Cotton in his book Silent Terror: A Contemporary Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery. “They believe that a black man, woman or child’s place in life is to serve an Arab, and does not matter whether that black is a Christian, or a fellow Muslim.”
Another problem is that slave owners also believe they are doing nothing illegal. The Prophet Muhammad owned slaves and Islam’s legal code, Sharia law, justifies the practice. The eminent scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, wrote that “…the institution of slavery is not only recognized but is elaborately regulated by Sharia law.”
“This is state racism that has become institutionalized, that has caused pogroms, purges, murdering of the black population…,” Dah Obeid said in a speech at the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Summit in Geneva last year. (The Mauritanian abolitionist was a recipient of the UN’s Human Rights Prize in New York in 2013.)
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