Of human bondage

A REPORT in this newspaper told us a few weeks ago that in the summer of 2001 a young woman was seized in Nowshera, taken to Punjab, sold to a brothel in Rawalpindi, and forced into prostitution. The devastating humiliation imposed upon her is one facet of the horrible activity currently called “human trafficking”, which is essentially one of the forms of slavery.

One should have thought that, having been forbidden by both domestic and international law, slavery had gone out of existence. Actually, it is alive and kicking; indeed more so now than it was, let us say, thirty years ago. Next to illicit drugs and weapons, human trafficking is said to be the most profitable business worldwide. Virtually every country is involved either as a source or as a destination for the young people being traded.

Slavery has existed probably since before the dawn of history. So have murder, theft, and numerous other corruptions. These, however, were forbidden. The astonishing fact about slavery is that it was not condemned as something particularly vicious. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam accepted it even if a trifle reluctantly. Other traditions held that its emergence was both natural and just.

In one of his great works, Politics, Aristotle takes up the question of whether anyone is intended by nature to be a slave. The answer, he says, is simple affirmative. That some persons should rule, and others obey, is not only necessary but also expedient. From the hour of their birth, “some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.... Some men are by nature free, and others slave, and for the latter slavery is both expedient and right”.

Aristotle stands tall among western political philosophers. But there is no reason to think that he was able to, or even wanted to, transcend all of the norms and practices with which he had grown up. Slavery was an integral part of the Greek social order in his time. While many of his findings and insights continue to merit attention, we will do well to reject his view that slavery is inherent in human nature and therefore just.

In the ancient world, persons became slaves in one of several ways: captured as prisoners of war (both fighting men and non-combatants); bought at auction in the open market or privately from traders or existing owners; forced to be slaves because of their indebtedness and kept as such until the debt was discharged which might not happen for generations; born to slave parents; sold into slavery by parents who were too poor to raise them; sold themselves in return for money they needed; volunteered to be slaves in a temple or some other religious establishment.

Some of the slaves in ancient Egypt were natives, but many had been brought in from Asia. The number of foreign slaves increased greatly when the pharaohs embarked upon conquests in Nubia, Canaan, and Syria. Prices were not inordinately high: a good-looking Syrian girl could be had for 370 grams of silver, and a young man for half as much. Slaves who worked as domestic servants or as shop assistants had an easier time than the ones who worked on agricultural farms, as crew in ships, in mines or construction. They were not necessarily limited to menial jobs; some of them even became government administrators.

For about 400 years (200 BC to 200 AD), one fourth of the population of Rome, and that of Italy as a whole, consisted of slaves. They had no rights under the law; technically, they were the owner’s property, and he could do with them as he might wish. Physical and sexual abuse of slaves was common. This is not to say that all of them were treated cruelly. Some of them, depending on their physical appearance and/or wits, lived reasonably well.

According to some estimates, there were as many slaves as free men in ancient Greece. Mothers abandoned their babies for one reason or another, and they ended up as slaves. Others too poor to raise them sold some of their children. Then there were those who had been captured in war or bought at auctions. Wealthy households kept as many as ten to twenty slaves to work as domestic servants, and they were generally well treated as compared to those who worked on farms or in mines. But how very interesting that some of them got to be employed as policemen and as clerical workers.

There were plenty of slaves, both men and women, in ancient Persia. That slavery existed in ancient India is open to controversy. Since I cannot be sure what to say, I shall leave this matter alone.

Let us now turn to our own time. Slavery is officially outlawed worldwide except allegedly in Sudan. In actual practice it exists almost everywhere in one form or another. From Himalayan villages to eastern Europe, from Southeast Asia to Africa, young girls are kidnapped, or lured away with promises of well-paying jobs and an exciting life, to large cities, both in their own countries and abroad, held for all intents and purposes as slaves, and forced to work as domestic servants or in massage parlours, bars, brothels, garment factories and sweat shops. Their passports and travel documents, if they have any, are taken away and they are threatened with dire consequences if they were to approach the police or seek help from any other agency. Many of them do not speak the local language or know their way around and, moreover, they depend on their captors for food, clothing, and shelter.

At present, 27 million persons worldwide are reportedly held in some kind of bondage. Officials at the UN Human Rights Commission stated as recently as August 30, 2005 that trafficking in humans had reached horrendous proportions. Spokesmen at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimate that two million persons are trafficked every year. According to a CIA estimate, about 50,000 persons are annually brought to America for prostitution or some form of bonded labour. Some 250,000 persons from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are transported to other places, including the United States. One report has it that nearly 200,000 Nepalese women under the age of eighteen work in brothels in India. The better-looking girls from Nepal and Bangladesh fetch as much as $1,000 each.

Pakistan is the source, transit area, and destination of persons being trafficked. Over a ten-year period (1985-95) more than 200,000 women from Bangladesh were said to have been trafficked to Karachi. In subsequent years nearly three hundred were reportedly brought to that city every month. Young women from Myanmar, India, Afghanistan (and Afghan refugee camps within Pakistan), the Central Asian states, and Africa are also trafficked to Pakistan for sexual exploitation and bonded labour. Pakistan’s own girls from rural areas are procured and placed in cities for sex and involuntary domestic service.

Indebtedness leads to bondage in Pakistan, India, and elsewhere. A needy man borrows money and, unable to pay it back, he and his family end up as bonded workers on the lender’s farm, mill, or brick kiln at miserably low wages, lower than the subsistence wage, that force him to borrow more just to survive. His obligation to serve goes on from one generation to the next. There are about 20,000 brick factories in Pakistan, each employing nearly a hundred families (not individuals) that live in isolated villages attached to the factory in each case. They are not free to move out.

Many of the governments concerned pretend that the problem of human trafficking and bondage within their jurisdictions is grossly exaggerated, and that it is being tackled effectively to the extent that it does exist. They cite their constitutional provisions and laws that forbid these practices, and they name the administrative agencies that are in place to implement them. Actually, they are right with reference to the laws, but they are wrong about their implementation.

So far as the numbers involved are concerned, one runs into widely varying figures. In 1999 Human Rights Watch placed the number of bonded labourers in India at 40 million. A survey by the Gandhi Peace Foundation and the National Labour Institute estimated that in 1978-79 ten of the agricultural states in the country had over 2.6 million such workers.

A more recent report submitted by the Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamil Nadu (October 1995) came up with an estimate of 1.25 million in that state alone. The government of India, on the other hand, told the ILO in June 1998 that India had no more than 251,000 bonded workers of whom 231,000 had already been “rehabilitated.” In other words, there was no problem here to worry about.

An ILO-sponsored survey done by the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research in October 2000 reported that 6.8 million persons were living in conditions of bondage in rural Sindh alone, inasmuch as they were forced to do unpaid work for their landlords. It found also that nearly 700,000 persons worked in debt bondage in some 4,000 brick kilns in Pakistan, and that over one half of them were women and children.

But the government of Pakistan, like that of India, does not concede that there is a problem. In a letter of May 11, 2000 to the European Union ambassador in Islamabad the ministry of labour stated that “stringent” measures had been taken to implement the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1992, that vigilance committees in districts had been constituted to ensure its implementation, and that field reports indicated that labour in bondage hardly existed in the country. Another government statement placed the number of bonded labourers somewhere between five and seven thousand.

It is clear that even though the problem of human bondage in Pakistan is huge the government, dismissing it as “just talk,” does not intend to do anything about it. General Musharraf and his associates would rather devote their time and energies to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and generally setting the world right, than to eradicating the abominations at home.

E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

How India has forged ahead

INDIA has negotiated to buy nuclear equipment from America Pakistan is negotiating to buy fighter aircraft because its prime minister believes that the “geopolitical realities” are such that “peace can be attained only through strength” — speech at PAF command exercise reported in Dawn of September 11.

The geopolitical realities are the same for the two countries but the thinking of their prime ministers seems to be worlds apart. To Shaukat Aziz strength lies in firepower, to Manmohan Singh it lies in a sound economy.

This difference in the thinking of the leadership of India and Pakistan, alongwith mutual mistrust, has been the hallmark of the relationship between the two countries since their independence. In the years following the first Kashmir conflict Pakistan started receiving arms from America. India, instead, asked for help to establish its own technical institutes on the lines of America’s celebrated MIT. Those institutes provided the foundation on which India’s large and innovative software industry rests today.

In the three wars (four if Kargil is counted) that India and Pakistan have fought over 53 years neither emerged victorious nor has been able to subdue the other. But India’s educational and technological base has become much stronger than Pakistan’s and continues to get stronger. Let this difference be illustrated by some recent examples.

The UNDP’s human development index (HDI) devised by our own late economist Mahbubul Haq ranks all countries of the world according to their national incomes combined with life expectancy, (implying health) and educational standards of the people. In the 1997 ranking (published in UNDP’s 1999 report) among the 174 countries surveyed Pakistan stood at 138 and India at 132. Five years later in 2002 (published in 2004) Pakistan fell to 142nd position while India rose to 127th.

Humiliatingly, Pakistan was overtaken even by Bangladesh by rising from a ranking at 150 to 138 showing that it had made up for lower income by providing better health and education facilities to its people. Thus both India and Bangladesh three years ago climbed out of low human development to medium bracket while Pakistan fell from medium to low bracket. All other nine countries in this wretched league were African. (Mercifully Pakistan has now climbed out of the pit and is ranked 135th).

Second example: In national income alone, according to the World Bank reports, Pakistan in 1999 had a per head income of 1,759 dollars in purchasing, power party) while India’s was 2,149 dollars. In 2003 in Pakistan this income rose to 2,060 dollars but in India it rose faster to 2,880 dollars.

The gap thus has widened. And just imagine a till 1994 Pakistan was well ahead of India. Our chief managers Mr. Shaukat Aziz and Dr lshrat Hussain will be hard put to prove that in the last two years of high growth Pakistan has caught up with India. Indian rupees purchasing power today is around 30 per cent more than Pakistan’s rupee.

The third example comes from the index of economic freedom determined jointly by America’s Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal. In their survey of 155 countries conducted in 2004, Pakistan ranks 133 and India higher at 118. Ironically, Pakistan’s ranking fell in 2004 than it was in the previous year despite the government’s claims that it had freed the economy, stepped up privatization and lowered the tariff and physical barriers.

The fourth, and most recent, example is of The Economist survey (published in its September 10-16 issue) that measures “how far a country’s policies support property rights, personal choice and competition”. Among the 127 countries surveyed Pakistan ranks 98th, India is well above at 66. Among the countries below Pakistan are Columbia of drug lords, oil rich hence unconcerned Venezuela and Aung San Su Ky’s Burma, otherwise known as Myanmar of the generals.

Finally, and most shamefully, in the Transparency International’s latest corruption index Norway tops the list as the least corrupt, India comes at 90 and Pakistan down the list at 129.

Pakistan’s economy is indeed growing but India’s is growing faster. The same is more true of India’s educated middle class. It now nearly equals Pakistan’s total population. In this picture the fact that the poor of India are poorer than Pakistan’s poor is hardly a consolation. Yet, while India. is bidding for nuclear technology to power its industry and infrastructure, Pakistan is buying fighter aircraft (to quote the prime minister) “to enhance its firepower and its defensive and offensive capabilities” and, ironically enough, also “for self reliance”.

The aircraft deal, in fact, would increase our reliance on America. If Pakistan stands a chance of beating India it is in the economic field and, riot on the battle-field. That is a lesson from the past and what the future holds for us as far as one can see. It might get even worse as our northern neighbours — China, Afghanistan, Iran - and the Central Asian Republics get increasingly wary of our intruding extremists and drift closer to India.

All of them would be further alienated if President Musharraf were to keep Insisting, as he did before his own National Security Council the other day (Dawn of Sept 9), that Pakistan being an ideological state must blaze the path for the Islamic countries. Neither Musharraf nor this government nor Pakistan’s civil society is qualified for that role. In any case no other Islamic country would let us.

Pakistan should he content with guarding its own independence and serve every citizen within its frontiers without distinction of race arid religion. It should follow the same rule in its relations with foreign countries. India, does it cleverly - it is a friend of Israel and, at the same time, has more friends among the Arab and Muslim nations than Pakistan has.

Pakistan needs its nuclear and conventional deterrents only against India and no other neighbouring or distant country. India may still need these deterrents but Pakistan wouldn’t once the Kashmir dispute is resolved. Then all of Pakistan’s resources and energy would be freed for human and economic development. The people of Pakistan would judge the skill and sincerity of their leaders not in negotiating arms deals with America but in negotiating an honourable settlement of Kashmir with India and freedom fighters of the valley.

Profits, not democracy

‘SEVERAL of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head.” Thus Gulliver describes his first encounter with the Yahoos. Something similar seems to have happened to democracy.

In April, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “providing state secrets to foreign entities”. He had passed details of a censorship order to the Asia Democracy Forum and the website Democracy News.

The pressure group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was mystified by the ease with which Mr Tao had been caught. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo! account. But the police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. How did they know who he was?

Last week RSF obtained a translation of the verdict, and there they found the answer. Mr Tao’s account information was “furnished by Yahoo! Holdings”. Yahoo!, the document says, gave the government his telephone number and the address of his office.

So much for the promise that the internet would liberate the oppressed. This theory was most clearly formulated in 1999 by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argues that two great democratizing forces — global communications and global finance — will sweep away any regime which is not open, transparent and democratic.

“Thanks to satellite dishes, the internet and television,” he asserts, “we can now see through, hear through and look through almost every conceivable wall. ... no one owns the internet, it is totally decentralised, no one can turn it off ... China’s going to have a free press ... Oh, China’s leaders don’t know it yet, but they are being pushed straight in that direction.” The same thing, he claims, is happening all over the world.

In Iran he saw people ogling Baywatch on illegal satellite dishes. As a result, he claims, “within a few years, every citizen of the world will be able to comparison shop between his own ... government and the one next door”.

He is partly right. The internet at least has helped to promote revolutions of varying degrees of authenticity in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Argentina and Bolivia. But the flaw in Friedman’s theory is that he forgets the intermediaries. The technology which runs the internet did not sprout from the ground. It is provided by people with a commercial interest in its development. Their interest will favour freedom in some places and control in others. And they can and do turn it off.

In 2002 Yahoo! signed the Chinese government’s pledge of “self-regulation”: it promised not to allow “pernicious information that may jeopardise state security” to be posted. Last year Google published a statement admitting that it would not be showing links to material banned by the authorities on computers stationed in China. If Chinese users of Microsoft’s internet service MSN try to send a message containing the words “democracy”, “liberty” or “human rights”, they are warned that “This message includes forbidden language. Please delete the prohibited expression.”

A study earlier this year by a group of scholars called the OpenNet Initiative revealed what no one had thought possible: that the Chinese government is succeeding in censoring the net. Its most powerful tool is its control of the routers.

—Dawn/Guardian Service