Mauritania ignores slavery, but jails those who protest against it

A FEW miles from the green grass of Mauritania’s presidential palace, in a slum where the Sahara washes into the capital, Mbarka shields her five-year-old son’s eyes from the dust. She was his age when her mother gave her away to be a slave.

Mbarka’s mother was herself a freed slave. But when her former master said he needed help at home, tradition dictated that she had to give up her daughter to him. Mbarka did all the chores she could but the family still beat her. She doesn’t remember how old she was when the father and his son started to rape her, but she had her first child at 13.

Mauritania, with its tiny economy and population of just 4.3m, would normally attract little attention. But its vast expanse—it is four times larger than Britain—and its position astride migration and smuggling routes across the Sahara have pushed it to prominence. This month France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, visited it to discuss co-operation in fighting jihadists. Mauritania is a member of the G5 Sahel, a regional counter-terrorist force with troops from five countries. And it is the biggest recipient per head of money from an EU fund for Africa that is aimed at reducing migration.

Yet Europe’s growing relations with Mauritania are accompanied by silence concerning its record on human rights and democracy. Its president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, came to power in a coup in 2008. His government arrests opponents and has sentenced one to death for apostasy. A court has since commuted the sentence and ordered the man’s release.

Perhaps most shameful is its reluctance to curb ethnic discrimination and slavery. Mauritania is deeply divided along lines of caste and ethnicity, and between former slave-owners and ex-slaves. In 2017 the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, noted that two of the main ethnic groups, Haratines and Afro-Mauritanians, which together make up two-thirds of the population, are absent “from almost all positions of real power”; nearly all important positions are filled by the Beydane, or Arab Berbers.

Although slavery was abolished in 1981 and criminalised in 2007, the “spirit of slavery” lives on, says Balla Touré, an anti-slavery activist. People may be legally free, but discrimination, social pressure, poor education and the lack of identity papers mean that thousands still live in de facto slavery, says Mr Touré.

The Global Slavery Index, compiled by the Walk Free Foundation in Australia, said that in 2016 some 43,000 people, or 1% of the population, were slaves. SOS Esclaves, a local anti-slavery organisation, reckons the real figure is much higher.

For its part, the government denies slavery or racial discrimination still exist. Under pressure, it has set up four slavery courts, but these have convicted only five people since 2015 for slaving offences. None of them served more than two years. The government is far more energetic in suppressing anti-slavery protesters, arresting more of them than actual slavers. There have been at least 168 arrests of human-rights campaigners from July 2014 to July 2018, says Amnesty International, a human-rights organisation. Two leading anti-slavery activists, Moussa Biram and Abdallahi Matallah, have been tortured and kept in prison for two years. The government’s reluctance to act against slavery is easy to explain, says Mamadou Sarr, a director of the National Forum of Human Rights Organisations: almost everyone in power has someone in his family who is a former slave-owner.

Campaigning even on other issues is risky. Last year Oumou Kane, the founder of Amam, a women’s-rights group, led a protest asking the government to issue identity documents to poor people. Only 70 people attended the march, but the police still arrested ten of its leaders.

Outside her wooden shack, Mbarka says she eventually escaped with the slaver family’s driver. She had to leave her children behind, and was not reunited with them until years later. “I try not to hate,” she says, staring at her nails, painted a fiery orange, but the pain in her voice is louder than her words.