By Adam Nossiter/New York Times
BOUTILIMIT,
Mauritania — The protesters gathered in front of the low-slung police station,
yelling “No to Slavery” and “Freedom.” They had come from across the country to
demand the arrest of a family accused of holding a slave since childhood, but
they elicited little more than dispassionate stares from the police officers
sitting silently before them. The subprefect of the district went to take a nap
in the afternoon heat.
This
year, the government gingerly acknowledged that an age-old scourge still
haunted this nation, creating a new agency to wipe out the “vestiges of
slavery” here. In a nation where the authorities have long denied the
persistence of the problem, the willingness to emblazon the word “slavery” on a
government agency — with a gleaming sign announcing it on a prominent street in
the capital, no less — was a significant turning point and a step in the right
direction, experts say.
But
to the Mauritanian activists who have pressed for action for years, sometimes
at their own peril, the change is an ambiguous one: Is the government really
committed to ending the centuries-old practice? Or is it trying to project a
newfound resolve that it does not truly have?
“Vestiges,
they are talking about ‘vestiges,’ when people are still in chains,” said Balla
Touré, a member of the Initiative for the Resurgence of Abolitionism, an
antislavery group here, dismissing the new agency as “nothing but smoke and
mirrors.”
Slavery
has been abolished in Mauritania for decades, and the director of the new government
agency — called “The National Solidarity Agency for the Fight Against the
Vestiges of Slavery, for Integration, and for the Fight Against Poverty” — says
that no instances of the practice have turned up since he started work in
April.
“The
government has not been fully engaged with this matter since independence,”
said the director, Hamdi Ould Mahjoub, vowing to do better. Still, in the
months he has run the antislavery agency, he insists, “We have not found any
cases of constraint.”
By
some measures, this West African nation has the highest prevalence of slavery
in the world, with estimates that as many as 140,000 or more of the nation’s
3.8 million people are enslaved, primarily by “masters who exercise total
ownership over them and their descendants,” according to the 2013 Global Slavery Index, which
tracks the phenomenon around the globe.
“Objectively
speaking, they are slaves,” Zekeria Denn, an expert at the University of
Nouakchott, said of Mauritania’s intricate web of servile relationships. He
pointed out that master-slave dynamics varied widely in Mauritania, but that
often the most pressing element of coercion was extreme poverty or a belief
that Islam forbids breaking out of bondage.
In
the sandy courtyard of an activist’s compound in Nouakchott, the capital, young
women and men quietly spoke of being beaten and forced to work menial tasks
from childhood in the households of lighter-skinned elites — often a mixture of
Berber and Arab people locally called the Moors — for no pay.
“I
was born in slavery,” said Said Ould Ali, a rail-thin teenager of 15. “I grew
up in the Moor family in which my mother was born, and my grandmother.”
M’Barka
Mint Essetim said she was taken from her mother by a Moorish woman at the age
of 5, at first merely to fetch things from the store. As she grew up in the
household of “a very high, well-connected family” in the capital, she said, her
duties expanded: taking the goats into the bush, fetching wood, sweeping,
cooking.
“This
was a miserable life,” said Ms. M’Barka, now about 25.
The
activist hosting her, Biram Dah Abeid, himself the son of a slave, added that
Ms. M’Barka was first raped at 9 and had her first child by her Moorish master
at 14. The man’s son also raped her, Ms. M’Barka said as her 11-year-old
daughter, unacknowledged by her former master, sat next to her under the tent.
For
years, the government dominated by Arabs, white Moors as they are known here,
refused to admit that slavery persisted in Mauritania — that thousands of its
black citizens, often women, were still forced to work as domestic servants, as
camel and goat herders, from early childhood, in the same families that mothers
and grandmothers had worked in. In 2007, a law criminalizing slavery was
passed. But three years later, nobody had been prosecuted under it, according
to a 2010 report by a United Nations investigator.
Then,
the antislavery movement in Mauritania took a radical turn, forcing the issue
more into the open. Last year, Mr. Dah Abeid publicly burned venerated Islamic
legal texts that justified slavery. His actions provoked furious mobs demanding
vengeance, fatwas against him and swift retribution — imprisonment and a raid
on his house — from the authorities in a Muslim country where Shariah law
reigns.
Nonetheless,
Mr. Dah Abeid’s actions increased pressure on the government to act, activists
and observers say.
“We
were making a lot of noise,” Mr. Touré said. “We were mobilizing the haratins,”
he said, using the term for freed slaves.
But
even with the new agency, antislavery activists say, punishment has been
minimal or nonexistent in many of the cases they bring to light. Often, they
say, family members accused of holding slaves are quickly released or not
troubled at all by Mauritanian authorities.
The
protesters gathering in front of the police station in Boutilimit, about 125
miles southeast of Nouakchott, said that a local family had held, and sometimes
beaten, an 18-year-old girl, Noura Mint Mourada, since the age of 4. Her mother
had worked in the same family, they said.
“The
lady said, ‘A slave doesn’t reply, it only obeys,’ ” recalled Noura in a
separate interview.
The
authorities briefly detained several members of the family accused of enslaving
Noura, but the prosecutor then released them, saying there was no evidence of a
crime, activists said. As the protests continued for weeks, activists said that
demonstrators were arrested and beaten.
The
man accused of being Ms. M’Barka’s former master and attacker, known among
local residents as Brahim, remains undisturbed by the authorities. A prosperous
store owner in Nouakchott — his store occupies a city block — his family
reacted uneasily when asked about the young woman’s relationship to him.
“He
doesn’t have slaves,” said a teenage girl who came to the door of their
sprawling whitewashed compound on a tree-lined street in the capital’s most
fashionable neighborhood. She said her father was away in their fields. “She
wasn’t the slave of Mr. Brahim,” the girl said. “M’Barka is not a slave.”
She
gave a short laugh: “Slavery is something from the past.”
M’Barka
and the antislavery activists who have helped her said she escaped the
household when she was allowed to visit her sick mother one day, and simply did
not go back. Later, she married the family’s chauffeur, and now lives with him
in a rudimentary, leaky wooden shack at the capital’s desolate outskirts. The
chauffeur said the authorities had swept aside his wife’s accusations, because
of the former master’s connections.
“I
live in peace now,” Ms. M’Barka said. “Nobody beats me now.”
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