Bin Laden Buys Child Slaves for His Drug Farms
in Africa
The world's most wanted terrorist pays Ugandan rebels one Kalashnikov rifle for every youngster they supply. The children are then used as forced labour on the Sudan marijuana fields that fund his terror network.
Ram across something interesting not long ago about bin Ladin's activities in the Sudan, where he lived prior to moving to Afghanistan.
iabolish.com.
africana.com
. . . activists say there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. They can be found over much of the world. Slaves mine gold in South America, cut sugar cane in the Caribbean, tend cattle in West Africa, weave carpets in India and populate brothels in East Asia, and most are women and children.
Although the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, AASG, opposes all forms of slavery, it is concentrating on two countries where activists say the situation is widespread and serious - the African nations of the Sudan and Mauritania. ";They are really the only places with chattel slavery," said Jesse Sage, associate director of AASG. Derived from the French word for cattle, chattel slavery refers to a practice in which "people are bought and sold like livestock." Children born of slave parents automatically enter bondage themselves.
Sage said that abuses in other parts of the world, such as the Asian sex trade, have been widely reported in the international media, but that slavery in Sudan and Mauritania has received little coverage until recently. "This has attracted almost no attention from the human rights community," he said. "Our group was founded to fill in that void. There is not a lot of academic interest in this. Whatever the reasons, it's a serious failing. There has been a little bit of a conspiracy of silence." Sage estimated that there are some 50,000 slaves in Sudan, Africa's largest nation. Most of them are believed to be Christian or followers of traditional religion from the southern part of the country, which has been fighting for an independent state periodically since the British departed in 1955. The Islamic government in the north has been accused of using slavery to terrorize the south.
In 1996 Gregory Kane, a writer for The Baltimore Sun, traveled to Sudan and purchased two young boys, returning them to their father. The organization Christian Solidarity International has reportedly also bought the freedom of some 11,000 slaves in the past four years. But many activists feel that this does little to change things. "Buying slaves is not the solution," Sage said. "This is just a fraction of the slaves."
Sage said slavery in Sudan is part of a wider campaign of genocide, which has killed some two million southerners, and displaced another four million, especially members of the Dinka ethnic group, who have been particularly resistant to northern domination. He also said the national government wants to drive people from sections of the Dinka homeland to make way for oil exploration. To pressure the government to stop such practices, AASG is calling for an international economic boycott of the Sudan. "Sudan needs to be isolated," Sage said. "It is unconscionable for western companies to do business there. They are fueling human rights violations. The money is being used to wage genocide."
The AASG bulletin, The Anti-Slavery Report, quotes The London Sunday Telegraph as stating that Osama bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind behind bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania last year, uses slave children captured in Uganda to work in Sudanese marijuana fields, or to serve as soldiers or concubines. Across the continent in the West African nation of Mauritania, slavery is practiced on "a massive scale," according to Sage. Some one million Mauritanians, more than one third of the country's total population, live in servitude, which was legal until the 1980's. Most Mauritanian slaves are blacks from the southern part of the country, owned by members of the lighter-skinned Berber ethnic group.
Moctar Teyeb, an escaped Mauritanian slave, is AASG's outreach director. Writing in The Anti-Slavery Report, Teyeb said that Islam has been incorrectly used to justify slavery. "They [slave owners] said, 'Listen, this is a religion that comes from God. This is how God created you - black. The important thing for you is to get a reward in paradise. To do this, you have to obey your master in the present,' " he writes. "In Mauritania, there is a saying, 'The path to heaven is under your master's foot.' " Despite the distortions of some slave owners, the Islamic Koran stresses that servants should be well treated, and the prophet Muhammad is said to have condemned slave traders as "the wickedest people." |
