Freed activists to keep fighting slavery
Two antislavery activists freed from prison in Mauritania vowed to rescue their nation from one of the world’s worst slavery rates, saying jail and torture were no deterrent.
Mauritania was the last nation to abolish slavery, outlawing it in 1981, and more than two in every 100 of its people still live as slaves, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index.
Human rights groups say the government has made no effort to stamp it out and arrests those who speak out against it.
Abdallahi Matallah Saleck and Moussa Biram were jailed for their alleged role in a protest and charged with inciting riots and rebellion. They spent two years in a remote desert prison where they say they suffered horrible abuse.
“They tortured us, they did everything they could so that we would back down. But we will never, ever back down,” Biram told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
Less than a week after being released, the two men were back on the streets of the capital Nouakchott, encouraging fellow members of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) to stay strong.
“The fight has just begun,” Biram said, laughing, although he added he was not in good health and had injuries from torture and beatings. “I can’t even stand up because of my legs which people hit with batons.”
A government spokesman said the allegations of torture were false and that an independent body called the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture had visited the detention site in 2017 and found no human rights violations.
The government has previously said it only prosecutes “unlawful and unregistered organisations that … provoke riots, chaos and insecurity”.
Because the government has refused to register the IRA as an organisation, the men could be thrown back in jail at any moment, said Francois Patuel of Amnesty International.
“We know that we’re not safe, but we are not afraid,” Saleck said. “This is our country no matter what, and we have to fight against discrimination and slavery,” he said.
Slavery in Mauritania follows racial lines, with black descendents of ethnic groups from the country’s south enslaved by lighter-skinned Mauritanians.
Some Mauritanians spend their whole lives as domestic or farm workers.
An estimate by the Walk Free Foundation and the International Labour Organisation says that 90,000 Mauritanians were living in modern slavery and ranked the nation as the fourth worst on the continent, behind Eritrea, Burundi and Central African Republic.