274 - The New Slavery

The New Slavery
By John Deedy

Six years ago, the Sunday Times of London published the startling allegation that young women had been brought from Kerala State, in India, to Italy to do the menial tasks left undone as a result of the steep decline in vocations among European Catholic youths. According to the report in the Times, the young women arrived with promises of special training and educational opportunities, but then soon found themselves scrubbing floors and performing other tasks usually assigned to domestics. Disillusioned and homesick, several of the women reportedly became gravely ill, and a few were said to have suffered nervous breakdowns as a result of their experiences.

Denials from Catholic authorities were immediate and intense, the Vatican charging that it was the victim of distortion and calumny on the part of the press. Nevertheless, the Vatican did concede irregularities and announced that the recruitment of Indian girls as religious novices had been "definitely suspended" pending its investigation. That was in June of 1970. Four years later-in February, 1974-India announced its own suspension of the recruiting of Indian Catholic girls for convents abroad. Lingering was the sting of a Hindu Party official in the Indian Parliament, that the recruitment smacked of "slave trade in the twentieth century."

The dust has settled from that controversy, but not the issue of slavery in its modern manifestations. Within the year, an American Marine Corps general made public a report that "slave children" had been discovered to exist among the 50,000 Southeast Asian refugees cared for at Camp Pendleton, in California, following the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists. According to Brigadier General Paul Graham, those young boys and girls were either orphans of the war or children separated from their families during the evacuation from Saigon. Apparently they were being exploited by wealthier refugee families, who were compelling the children to do menial work.

Similarly, The New York Times reported several months ago on the plight of the peasants of El Salvador, and quoted a Salvadoran priest's condemnation of the country's economic system. "This is an entirely feudal system," the priest said. "The peasants live like serfs in Europe four-hundred years ago."

John Deedy is magazine editor of Commonweal magazine, as well as the author of several books and articles. He is a regular contributor to the "Church in the World" section of THEOLOGY TODAY.

275 - The New Slavery

I

It was simple enough to identify slavery when Arab caravans were trudging centuries ago from interior Africa for the flesh markets of the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean shore areas, and when the slave ships of western Europeans were plying the Atlantic in two directions: with Indian slaves from the Americas for European domestic service, and with blacks from West Africa for the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World.

Today such blatant forms of slavery are things of the past, and the situation for individual freedom is infinitely better for most humans than it was, say, in 1860, when there were 4,441,830 slaves in the United States alone. It is better, too, than it was a little more than a generation ago, when Nazi Germany had reduced upwards of 10 million western and eastern Europeans to the status of slave laborers.

Still, slavery is a persistent institution, and there appears to be considerable mopping up to be done from the war that was thought won in the 1920's, when nations like Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nepal, Transjordania, and Persia set about the legal abolition of slavery within their borders. With slavery having been proscribed during the nineteenth century by most of the so-called advanced countries -Great Britain in 1833, Sweden in 1846, France in 1848, and with the abolitionists having won the great war over slavery in the United States, it appeared that a long and dishonorable chapter in human history had come to a close.

But slavery endures, very likely in the apartheid nations of Southern Africa, where large sections of the population are held under the control of a few through economic forces and repressions by law; very probably in remnant expression in some Persian Gulf states, where the dominant Moslem religion permits slavery; and very probably in new and subtle forms, such as enslavements to narcotics and prostitution in areas as un-alike as France and Hong Kong.

A United Nations working-group on slavery, for instance, drew attention recently to the deceptive recruitment of women in one country for prostitution activities in another. Its source material included a document of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) stating that "approximately" 600 women from Thailand and 100 from the Philippines had been engaged in 1971 for prostitution in Hong Kong under the duplicity of employment as waitresses, barmaids, or masseuses. It also declared that between 1965 and 1973 an unspecified number of French women had been recruited to work as waitresses or ballet dancers in Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Middle East, when in fact they were being shipped for service as prostitutes.

The United Nations is attempting to get a handle on the extent of slavery and slave-like practices-old and new-in today's world, but it is having difficulty coming up with precise figures or accurate classifi-

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cations. To begin with, most countries are quick to protest innocence when questions of slavery are raised, and are generally uncooperative with investigating bodies, including those of the United Nations. The UN working-group on slavery, a subdivision of the Commission on Human Rights and the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, has complained, for instance, about the failure of governments and specialized agencies to provide "more than minimal positive information about slavery throughout the long history of international abolition of slavery."

A second problem is that of definition; current definitions in relevant United Nations' conventions do not cover "the concept of slavery under all its present aspects," according to the UN working-group on slavery.

The standard definition is that of the International Slavery Convention of 1926: "Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." The definition is considered adequate in identifying traditional forms of slavery, such as debt bondage, serfdom, servile marriages, and the sham adoptions of children, especially females from poor households by wealthier persons for purposes of exploitation-a practice widespread even into the twentieth century in China and Southeast Asia.

II

The United Nations working-group on slavery would like to see a broader definition covering "any form of dealing with human beings leading to the forced exploitation of their labor." In addition to prostitution, it specifies such "modern forms of slavery" as the bondage of workers where laborers continue to be unorganized, and the condition of some migrant workers, including, it is presumed, some in the United States.

Others-such as Leonard R. Sussman, executive director of Freedom House, a New York based organization which charts freedom levels around the globe-would like to reach farther and spear the forced labor camps of the USSR, national policies such as in Cambodia, which has lately uprooted its urban population and moved it to the countryside, and China, which snapped off the cultural revolution of 1966-68 by transplanting hundreds of thousands of youths to remote areas of China and settling them there on a presumably permanent basis. In some opinion, the Cambodian and Chinese actions are strikingly similar to some classical applications of slavery, as when the Romans used military victory or political dominance to produce bodies for the building of their society. "Certainly the actions smack of indentured labor at the very least," said Sussman.

The apartheid policies of South Africa and Rhodesia make easy targets for those within the United Nations concerned about slavery or its spin-off practices, but once beyond apartheid a surprising circum-

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spection sets in, with African nations often being the most circumspect. The discretion of many in the African bloc is puzzling to observers, since it was upon Africa that slavery historically laid its heaviest burdens. Altogether probably more than 15-million blacks were transported from Africa to the western Hemisphere for slavery purposes. Yet, documents indicate that some twenty UN states from Africa have yet to ratify the Supplementary Convention of 1956 on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. These include, as of this writing, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Somalia, Senegal, and Togo.

Some of these nations hang back apparently out of concern that they might become refugee havens for people fleeing slavery or slave-like features in neighboring lands. Botswana, for instance, abstained from a 1968 United Nations resolution on the status of women, to which a slavery amendment was attached, because it feared an influx of people fleeing "the slavery of apartheid" of South Africa. The reluctance of other nations is not always understandable.

In 1971, when the count of African states not ratifying the Convention stood at twenty-five, UN Special Rapporteur Mohamed Awad remarked on the "curious" fact that Africa had produced so few ratifications for the Convention. He observed, almost apologetically: "It is true that in some states the machinery for ratification is rather slow. Moreover, some states may be reluctant to accede to a convention in the formulation of which they have not participated."

The reluctance of a Moslem state toward ratification might have a certain rationale. Slavery is recognized as a right by the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, and the Hadith, the traditional account of things said and done by Muhammad and his companions. In 1962, however, Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery, citing the difficulties in guaranteeing Islam's stipulation that kindness ever be shown to slaves. Allegations of involvement in slavery are now generally denied by Saudia Arabia and other Muslim countries.

A common United Nations method for attacking the perpetuation of slavery or slave-like practices is through sanctions, such as that on the importation of chrome and nickel from Rhodesia, a sanction which the United States has chosen to ignore. However, sentiment is growing that favors the carrot as well as the stick. The United Nations working-group on slavery thus urges financial and technical aid to governments in order "to bring about improved economic conditions in which obnoxious institutions would no longer be regarded as inescapable." It also urges educational and informational efforts-through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO)-so that "those who encountered slavery might recognize what they were seeing."

The complication in such recommendations is that they place governments anxious about slavery or its institutions in an awkward political position. For the assistance must first be requested or acqui-

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esced to, and in this request or acquiescence is acknowledgment of sorts that some part of their people are in a servile condition, No country seems willing to do that right now.

III

The voice of the Christian church in all of this is surprisingly muted. True it is that the ecclesiastical record is not exactly unblemished. The early Christian Fathers did not inveigh against slavery. Augustine, for instance, looked on slavery as an expression of the divine order, and St. Paul, in Ephesians 6:5, advised slaves to serve their masters "with fear and trembling." However, the record became so much better, particularly in recent centuries, that one would expect the church to be solidly out front with whatever body or agency that was engaged in the final eradications of slavery and slave-like conditions.

Indeed, the church would seem to be a natural ally of the United Nations working group on slavery-except it isn't, or not so as to make one sit up and take notice. There always seems to be some mitigating consideration that tailors positions. As an example, Bishop James S. Rausch, general secretary of the United States Catholic Conference, pleaded emphatically a year ago for all nations to realize that "their participation in oppression and the denial of human freedom to citizens of other lands is ultimately destructive of peace." Bishop Rausch was speaking in the context of South Africa and the territory Namibia (South West Africa). He acknowledged that South Africa's apartheid policies and its refusal to withdraw from Namibia were not advancing peace and tranquillity in Southern Africa; simultaneously he advised against expulsion of South Africa from the United Nations at this time, on grounds that the action would perhaps isolate South Africa from an "ameliorative influence" of the United Nations General Assembly. His may be a reasonable position. But reasonable positions in this area of human associations seem inevitably to lead to accommodation and delay, and could easily result in more of the embarrassments that have been such a large part of American church history, lingering even into this century. (Remember the segregated churches and segregated congregations? Remember when blacks came to the communion rail only after all white communicants had received?)

Maybe the explanation is that the church cannot be too dogmatic on remnant slavery until it wipes out the last of human inequities in its own house-the inferior status of women, for one. But whatever the explanation, the church should be aware that any and all equivocation diminishes its ethics and theology among those who need still to be convinced of its absolute validity.