Modern Slavery and Government

by Andre

In continuing with my earlier discussion on modern day slavery, I am now going to focus on what the governments of the world have contributed to the mess.

Not wanting to be all doom and gloom, I’ll start by suggesting that there are indeed pockets of light to be found in the middle of this seemingly unending tunnel of despair. In a future post, I promise to shine some of this light for you. But for the time being, there is solution in understanding that broken policy, broken execution and finally broken government need to be addressed before the possibility of ending slavery can be considered.

Firstly, there is an issue of policy

The creation of an admirably minded policy can be conceived and outlined without too much controversy or concern. Its execution however, is an entirely different monster. Execution regarding the abolition of human trafficking has been fumbled into oblivion with contradiction and missteps for longer than you can possibly remember. 

To put things into perspective, allow me to formally introduce to you the tiered grading system the United States has been using since 2000.

• Tier 1: Countries working hard toward abolition, and succeeding.
• Tier 2: Countries working hard toward abolition, and failing.
• Tier 2 Watch List: Countries on Tier 2 requiring scrutiny because of an increasing number of victims or failure to provide evidence on efforts toward abolition.
• Tier 3: Countries making no effort toward abolition at all.

A country ranked in the first two tiers are treated with anything ranging from a thumbs up to a snarling frown from US officials depending on their apparent success. Once a country is relegated to the third tier however, mandatory nontrade sanctions are placed upon them. Sounds fair enough doesn’t it?

Fair, yes. Properly executed, no.

Part of the problem is being able to convince the powers that be who exactly belongs on the list and where. As usual, powerful trading partners that probably belong on Tier 3 are often placed lower on the list while the typical evil-doers (I can’t really use that term anymore can I? This is no fun without good ol’ W.) are almost certainly placed there. 

Benjamin Skinner writes in his A Crime So Monstrous:

“The only states that regularly faced sanctions read like a rogue’s gallery of reprobate American enemies: North Korea, Sudan, Cuba, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). If a friend of the United States wound up on Tier Three — as did the United Arab Emirates in 2005– it would invariably demonstrate “significant progress,” and the Secretary of State would reassess it as a Tier Two watch list country before the sanctions provisions kicked in.”

The UAE was the only country thanked in the introductory paragraph of the UNGIFT’s initial overview on slavery.”

The UAE has made news fairly consistently throughout the last few years for major infractions (Construction Workers, Camel Jockey, Sex Trade) but they also have a lot of money. Some of this money was used to finance the recently established United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT). The UAE was the only country thanked in the introductory paragraph of the UNGIFT’s initial overview on slavery. (More on this here)

UN.GIFT is days away from releasing their first ever comprehensive report on human trafficking, we will soon find out exactly where the UAE stands.

Further to the political motivations behind the tiered system comes the power of veto that the U.S. President holds. A good example of this veto power took place in 2005 and benefited none other than the good folks in Saudi Arabia. 

Benjamin Skinner writes,

“Miller won a symbolic victory when he convinced Condoleeza Rice to drop Saudi Arabia to Tier Three. The Saudis abolished legal slavery in 1962. But international organizations reported that the malfeasant rulers and other elites countenanced domestic slavery, and often held slaves themselves. Surprising no one, President Bush waived sanctions against the kingdom. With Iraq disintegrating, the United States was increasing reliant on its authoritarian partners in the region. None was bigger than Saudi Arabia, against whom Miller later acknowledged that the sanctions threat was always “purely theoretical.”

It’s the same old story that we’ve been hearing on Saudi Arabia for years. They appear to have a lot of nasty policies regarding human rights but also have a lot of money. Alas.

Similar struggles to relegate countries such as India to Tier 3 have ended in similar ways. It’s just like Pirate Code in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The entire system is based around “more what you’d call “guidelines than actual rules.” (I threw that in there for kids)

Moving on to the actual execution of things

There is an unimaginable number of simultaneous happenings taking place around the world today. Government’s have to deal with a great number of these things and even in the best of times, compromises are made.

George W. Bush did more to free modern-day slaves than any other president yet, as Skinner writes, “on the subject of human bondage, history does not grade on a curve.”

… on average, the Bush administration spent as much money in two days to free Iraqis as it did in six years to free slaves.”

It is true that the Bush years did bring about some good things, but when the Iraq War began in 2003, many of these things were put out to the curb. Quoting Skinner again, “Just as Vietnam undid Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Iraq undid Bush’s war on slavery. On average, the Bush administration spent as much money in two days to free Iraqis as it did in six years to free slaves.”

Still, compared to the UN, the United States remains as the front-runner fighting modern day slavery around the world today.

Until 2007, there was no UN body specifically designed to work toward abolition at all. Partly because of this, a clear focus was never provided to the several under-funded branches of the United Nations that are spread out around the world.

Below is a basket of words that are repeated over and over by Skinner throughout his research:

“UN organizations approached the issue of Haitian slavery as they handled modern slavery in many other countries. Without drama, without creativity, without effectiveness. The UN Human Rights Commission continued, as it had for fifteen years, to “express concern”. From its air-conditioned and heavily fortified headquarters in Port-au-Prince, UNICEF issued lengthy studies on the problem of “children in domesticity,” dancing around the issue of slavery, but explicitly refusing to employ the term.”

Even worse than complacency is when the sworn protectors become part of the problem. John Miller, the anti slavery tsar until his resignation in 2006, had several reports in which the UN Peacekeepers “pressed girls into slavery in the Congo, purchased sex slaves outright in Cambodia and Eritrea, and became-known “less for peace than for rape.””

These cases are surely part of the vast minority of peacekeepers out there. It is worth mentioning nonetheless. In matters of action, the question of urgency is always key. Sadly, more often than not, there simply is none.

Finally, there is the issue of broken government

Regardless of intent, whether genuine or not, a weak or non-existent government doesn’t have the capacity to end any type of slavery that might exist within its borders. Some of the strongest offending countries are either devastatingly poor, corrupt, uninterested or all of the above.

When former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was moved into exile during the 2004 rebellion, “foreign donors recalled millions of dollars in pledged aid. Haiti’s GDP shrank nearly 4 percent while its population grew by 2.3 percent. Parts of Haiti fell out of government control entirely.” It was during this period that the rural Haitian children fell into bondage in greater numbers than ever before.

The 2008 Human Trafficking Report has a number of countries that are in neither of the three tiers and are instead listed as special cases. In nearly all of these cases (Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Somalia to list a few), there is simply not enough information available to adequately rank, the government simply doesn’t exist, or the population at large doesn’t understand or accept a problem even exists.

There is no doubt that government on every level need to provide the proper infrastructure and institutional surroundings to make the battle winnable. And there is much hope that they are doing exactly this.

It can easily be argued that national and international governments have been late in stepping in to win the fight, but at least it appears that they are coming together to make an effort.

It remains a David Vs. Goliath type battle, but at least there is a battle.