With U.S. attention focused on Pakistan's security issues, will Hillary Clinton be able to press Islamabad's rulers to address a controversy involving rural poverty and modern-day slavery?

E. Benjamin Skinner
Time

As Hillary Clinton pays her first visit to Pakistan as Secretary of State, an unfolding hostage crisis will test the Obama Administration's rhetoric on human rights in the region. Officials at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad say at least three landlords have held as many as 170 bonded farmworkers at gunpoint on their estates in the country's southeast Sindh province since late September. With U.S. attention focused on getting Pakistan to deal with huge security issues to Washington's satisfaction, will Clinton be able to press Islamabad's rulers to address a controversy involving rural poverty and modern-day slavery?

The crisis began after the workers' advocates successfully petitioned three district courts to declare as illegal the debts that the landlords were using to compel the workers into indentured servitude. Those debts average around 1,000 Pakistani rupees — roughly $12. The hostages, a third of whom are children, some as young as 4 months old, are landless peasants, known as haari in Urdu. According to Ghulam Hyder, a spokesman for Pakistan's Green Rural Development Organization, the landlords have killed one hostage already and are threatening to kill the others unless they drop the cases and return to work. The landlords also abducted Amarchand Bheel, an advocate for the laborers, as he traveled to court to plead their cause.

A 2004 study by the International Labour Office (ILO) estimated that there are up to a million haari families in Sindh alone, the majority living in conditions of debt bondage, which the U.N. defines as modern-day slavery. Last fall, Pakistan's Daily Times newspaper quoted the labor minister of neighboring Punjab province as saying that landlords hold millions of forced laborers in "private prisons" across the country.

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E. Benjamin Skinner

Author

For Bill Clinton, it was a characteristically unscripted moment during an uncharacteristically low-profile press conference.

On June 15, Clinton sat next to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and decried the plight of child domestic slaves in Haiti, a country to which the former president had just agreed to serve as UN Special Envoy.

Known as restavèks, a Creole euphemism meaning “stay-withs,” the children are lured from desperately impoverished rural parents with the promise of a better life. Instead, most endure unpaid household labor, compelled through unchecked violence. UN bureaucrats typically tiptoe around words like “slavery,” but Clinton didn’t hold back: “I’m sad to say we’ve even had examples of restavèk children that have been found in Haitian communities in the United States.”

Estimates for the total number of restavèks range around 300,000: a staggering demographic, but just a sliver of those forced to work under threat of violence worldwide. The global slave population may reach 27 million. The vast majority labor in some form of hereditary debt bondage on the Asian subcontinent; criminals traffic hundreds of thousands across international borders annually. The Justice Department estimates that, on average, a person becomes a slave on U.S. soil every half hour.

A 2006 picture of poor housing conditions in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Four years ago, and less than five hours from the UN conference room where Clinton and Ban sat, I haggled with a trafficker to buy one of those slaves, a 12-year-old girl. In broad daylight on a street in Port-au-Prince, the trafficker leaned in: “This is a rather delicate question. Is this someone you want as just a worker? Or also someone who will be a ‘partner.’ You understand what I mean? Or is it someone you just really want to work?” The negotiated price for this domestic and sexual slave: $50.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight for an exclusive AC360º dispatch to watch Anderson Cooper's full report on the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The United Nations estimates that 200,000 women and girls have been raped in the Congo.

from Oxfam International

The five-year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which involved the armies of five other countries, officially ended in 2003 and democratic elections were held in 2006. However, fighting involving a plethora of armed groups continues, especially in the east of this mineral-rich country. Throughout all this conflict it is the civilians who continue to suffer the most.

The DRC has the world's largest peacekeeping force, totaling some 17,000 personnel. But they struggle to maintain security in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of 60 million.

Fighting was fuelled by the DRC’s tremendous mineral resources and by the flow of small arms into the country.

- Humanitarian crisis -

Since the war started in 1997, an estimated 4 million people have died from violence, hunger and disease as a result of the conflict, and 2.5 million have been made homeless – 1.5 million displaced within the DRC’s borders and one million forced to flee to neighboring countries.

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The young girl on the right says she was raped by Congolese soldiers. She was just 9 when it happened.

Wayne Drash
CNN

The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school.

"These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year.

Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist, traveled to the war-torn region of eastern Congo after being awarded the ShootQ Grant, a $10,000 award to free photographers from everyday life to pursue a project that raises awareness of an important global issue.

Borkgren pauses when she speaks of meeting the girl. "She was obviously very traumatized to repeat this out loud, and I don't think she had repeated it to anyone." The young girl lied to her about her age when they first spoke.

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After Congo, the secretary of state will travel to Nigeria, Liberia and Cape Verde.

CNN

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought an offer of help Tuesday for victims, especially victims of sexual violence, of Africa's longest war, a regional conflict that's dragged on for more than a decade.

Clinton on Monday delivered a blunt message to Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito of the Democratic Republic of Congo when he hosted a dinner in her honor.

"There must be an end to widespread financial corruption and abuses of human rights and women's rights," she said. "There must be an improvement in governance and the respect for the rule of law."

She also called for "changes in the business climate, changes in the rules and regulations that involve contracts and the protection of property" to promote foreign investment.

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E. Benjamin Skinner
World Policy Journal

Human trafficking may be just the latest topic du jour among U.S. foreign policy elites and UN humanitarian types, but mention the underlying crime—slavery—to foreign officials and the reaction is often
confused and explosive.

“For God’s sake, don’t go talking about brutal slavery here,” says Jay Kumar, the Social Secretary of Araria, one of the poorest districts in Bihar, the poorest state in India. Waving his finger, speaking from his one-room office building, Kumar, whose position required him to respond to allegations of child labor, is instead categorically denying that the two dozen recently freed child slaves that I had met in his district were ever in bondage. Kumar explains: “You see, poor people are not rational, so I compare them to monkeys.”

He then told me a story. On a sweltering day, a mother monkey left her baby on the hot earth in order to climb a tree and keep from scalding her own feet. This, he said, is why parents give their children to human traffickers.

Since 2001, when I began investigating modern-day slavery worldwide, I found that while public officials always condemned slavery as an abomination, few acknowledged that it actually existed in their jurisdictions.

Instead, “traditional caste relationships” were omnipresent, as were “intertribal abductions,” “underage sex workers,” mere “child laborers” or “backward poor people.” But slavery, universally-recognized as a crime against humanity, was a chimera, a relic of a bygone era.

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Visit the World Policy Institute online to read more on issues like this one.

Neda Agha-Soltan was gunned down on a Tehran street on June 20.

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

Support and solidarity for Iran's opposition continues to be expressed in many ways and forms around the world. In cities such as New York, Stockholm, Istanbul, Vancouver and Rome, supporters of the Iranian opposition movement have been organizing concerts, demonstrations and hunger strikes.

Iranian enthusiasts have been turning street corners of the world’s major cities into activism centers where people gather and show support for Iranians who continue to dispute results of their presidential elections.

In Tehran today, Iranian police cracked down and dispersed thousands of protesters as they tried to commemorate the 40th day of mourning the death of Iran's icon, Neda Agha Sultan. Neda captured the world when her last moment of life and her death were recorded on a mobile phone camera. For Shiite Islam, the 40th day after death marks the final day of mourning.

Outside Iran, in Los Angeles, around the U.S. and across the world, people followed the news on anti-government radio stations where callers shared their eyewitness accounts of today's developments.

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A woman wears traditionnal Muslim dress in Venissieux, near Lyon, France.

Arsalan Iftikhar
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

First of all, I am no fan of the burqa…

Secondly, I am no fan of French President Nicholas Sarkozy…

I love France…Sarkozy, not so much…

Third (and most importantly), as an international human rights lawyer, I am no fan of any government in the world (whether it is France or Afghanistan) mandating what a person can (or cannot) wear as a free member of their society.

According to a media report in Reuters, a recent French study found that only 367 women in the entire nation of France wear Islamic veils (better known as a burqa) that completely cover their faces and bodies. This report severely undermines the position of right-wing politicians who are pushing for a ban on the garments.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has stopped short of backing a ban, but has recently said the veils were “not welcome” in France. The influential French newspaper Le Monde said that in light of the tiny number of women concerned, the idea of a ban should be dropped.

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Human rights groups say Iranian authorities violated international human rights law.

Golnaz Esfandiari
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

24-year-old Amir Javadifar was detained during a July 9 peaceful protest in Tehran. About two weeks later, the Iranian authorities informed Amir's family about his death.

A friend who saw Amir's body told RFE/RL's Radio Farda that he had been tortured: "He had a fractured skull, one of his eyes was almost crushed, all the nails on his toes had been extracted, and all of his body was bruised.”

Amir’s friend added that some of his teeth and jaw were also broken.

Amir's death in custody is one example of the many cases of violence committed in Iran in recent weeks, which some legal experts have said are violations under international law.

Payam Akhavan, a former UN war crimes prosecutor and cofounder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, says his rights center has been inundated with videos, images, and documents from Iran via encrypted e-mail.

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Police brutality in China killed two ethnic Uighurs earlier this week.

Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

The recent violence in China’s western Xinjiang province has been called the ““worst civil turmoil since 1989.” This human rights catastrophe has led to the deaths of nearly 200 Uighur ethnic Muslims in the region.

But what if rather than cracking down on the Uighurs, China had drawn sophomorically offensive cartoons (a la Danish newspapers circa December 2005) instead? This different approach probably (and sadly) may have inspired a more global outcry from the greater Muslim world.

Not since the now infamous Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989 has the world seen such civil turmoil inside China. The tension revolves around the fulcrum of ethnic identity, societal discrimination and flat-out racism between the predominant ethnic majority Han Chinese (from the eastern parts of China) and minority ethnic Uighur Muslim populations indigenous to Xinjiang province along China’s western frontier.

Xinjiang is a massive western region that accounts for nearly one-sixth of China’s total land area. And it is home to the majority of the Uighurs in China. At its height in the 9th century, the Uighur empire stretched from the Caspian Sea into eastern China. The Uighurs also managed to establish independent republics twice during the 20th century before being annexed by the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Since then, the Chinese government has actively promoted the migration of the dominant Han Chinese to Xinjiang, and since the 1950’s the region's ethnic Han community has grown from 5 to 40 percent of the region's total population.

Although the region has seen enormous economic growth in recent years, local Uighurs have become increasingly resentful of Beijing’s political and economic control. After an Uighur uprising in 1990, for example, the Communist Party took steps to accelerate the integration of Xinjiang into China by stepping up migration into the area and increasing the security presence of baton-wielding police forces. It took control over freedom of religion in the region as well.

According to BBC World News,, Chinese authorities say more than 140 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded in riots in the mainly Muslim region since protests erupted last month. According to a recent article in Newsweek magazine in June, a resentful laborer spread rumors that Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women, leading a vengeful Han mob to attack Uighur workers. When authorities were slow to the arrest the attackers, Uighurs in Xinjiang took to the streets in protest.

Moises Naim recently noted in Foreign Policy, that “…In different countries, mullahs, imams, and assorted [Muslim] clerics have found the time to issue fatwas [religious decrees] condemning among other practices, Pokémon cartoons, total nudity during sex for married couples, and the use of vaccines against polio, not to mention Salman Rushdie. They have yet to find the time to say anything about China's practices toward Uighurs…”

Prominent Uighur Muslims like Rebiya Kadeer (who was once celebrated by the Chinese government as the richest woman in China) have been vocal against the Chinese government’s policies of what they consider to be discrimination for years, saying that its policies “keep many Uighurs poor and badly educated.”

Outside of China’s borders, however, there has been scant coverage of the violence. And the greater Muslim world has been largely silent on the human-rights abuses taking place in the region.

One reason for this large silence may be that most people have never heard of Uighurs before. Since they are not Arab, it is not surprising that their plight is not within the current zeitgeist radar of the greater Muslim and Arab world.

Furthermore, an even more sobering thought occurs when one thinks that perhaps if the Uighurs were not Muslim we may have seen more media coverage of their situation. What would the American evangelical Republican apparatchik do if the Uighurs were Christians? We can assume that they might be indignant towards China and their continued human-rights abuses against the Uighurs.

Either way, sadly, if the Chinese government had drawn some moronic newspaper cartoons instead, we might have heard some more global condemnations (from all sides of the global political velvet rope) on these blatant human-rights violations occurring on our global watch today in China.

Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, contributor for True/Slant, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.