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Mauritanie : en finir avec l’esclavage et l’Etat d’apartheid racial – Mauritanie, Sénégal, Mali et Gambie : en finir avec les castes et le féodalisme, ainsi que toutes les formes d’oppression anciennes et modernes

3 avril 2016, 06:43

Boubacar Messaoud, a former slave who became one of the country’s most prominent anti-slavery campaigners, has lost track of how many times he has been arrested by the authorities for his activism – at least five or six, he says, including once when he was imprisoned for more than three months.

Jail is still used as a weapon against the anti-slavery movement. Mauritania’s most famous campaigner, Biram Dah Abeid, and one of his comrades, Brahim Bilal, are currently in the second year of a two-year prison sentence. They were arrested while leading a peaceful protest in a convoy of cars driving across a rural district. Another activist, Mr. Touré, has been arrested several times and once spent 40 days in prison.

Their organization, the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), is considered illegal, and the authorities have closed and padlocked its offices in Nouakchott, the capital city. Diagonal black lines have been painted across its walls to warn away anyone who seeks its help.

“We’re used to this pressure,” Mr. Touré shrugs. “It’s normal. We were a little scared in the past, but now we don’t care.”

Many of the anti-slavery activists are themselves the descendants of slaves, although they have been joined by a few members of the Arab-Berber group and other minorities. Mr. Touré grew up with many Haratin friends and was shocked to see the treatment of the Haratin when he travelled around Mauritania for his job as an agricultural consultant. He visited small oasis towns in the desert where a single Arab-Berber landowner would control all the land, while a hundred Haratin residents would need his permission to get water to drink. It angered him so much that it spurred him into activism.

Mr. Messaoud works with another group, SOS Slaves, and describes Mauritania as an essentially feudal society, dominated by an Arab-Berber elite. Mauritanian religious leaders have often followed a series of ancient Islamic interpretive texts, written from the eighth to 14th centuries, which legitimize the practice of slavery.

Most judges in the country belong to this elite, and many have been influenced by the ancient texts, which anti-slavery activists maintain are illegitimate and outdated. Some even possess slaves, so they are reluctant to take action, Mr. Messaoud says.

The elite’s wealth, too, depends on the unpaid labour of their slaves. Although there are vast mineral resources buried in its desert sands, Mauritania is one of the world’s least-developed and most unequal countries, ranking 161st of the 187 countries on the UN’s human-development index.

While the urban elite are affluent, most of the population lives in poverty, and hunger is widespread among the rural poor. The government is authoritarian and military-dominated, following a 2008 coup and subsequent stage-managed elections. But it benefits from Western military support because it is seen as a reliable bulwark against Islamist radical groups in neighbouring countries.

What is most disturbing, Mr. Messaoud says, is the psychology of slavery that persists across the entire society, including among slaves themselves. Inculcated with such traditional beliefs as seeing slavery as God’s will, they often refuse to leave their “masters” when outsiders try to rescue them. Barred from attending school, usually illiterate, and isolated from society, they know no other life than slavery and often find it shameful to leave their master’s household. Some insist on getting a police document to “prove” that they can leave. “Even the slaves deny the existence of their own slavery, because they don’t want to alienate themselves from their master’s family,” Mr. Messaoud said in an interview in Nouakchott.

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