Rafia Zakaria

ON Oct 17, 2013, the Australian organisation, Walk Free issued its first annual Global Slavery Index report. The index ranked 162 countries on how prevalent slavery was in a particular country.

It also counted the number of people in each country known to be living in conditions of slavery. The results were unsurprising: Mauritania, in Africa, emerged as the country where slavery was most prevalent, followed by Haiti, Pakistan, India and Nepal. Half the 10 countries with the highest levels of slavery were in Africa.

On the scale of actual numbers, India topped the list, followed by China, Pakistan and Nigeria. The top 10 countries in terms of the numbers of slaves were found to be home to 76pc of the global figure. European countries—Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, and Norway—had, according to the index, barely any slaves at all. At number 134 is the United States with an estimated 57,000 to 63,000 slaves. Walk Free aims to draw attention to those countries most responsible for allowing slavery to persist. This includes identifying countries that do not enforce laws against indentured servitude, human trafficking, and similar abuses. Once such violations are identified, it is believed legislative interventions and grass-roots campaigns can be built around the data to hopefully end slavery worldwide.

The definition of slavery used in the report has combined the terms used in international treaties to ban trafficking and forced labour: “the condition of treating another person as if they were property—something to be bought, sold, traded or even destroyed”.

No sooner was the report released than it was gobbled up by international media outlets, their eager television anchors reporting the dastardly conditions in which the enslaved portion of the world lives. The figures were repeated with the television head-nodding that is taken for sympathy; the idea that slaves still exist duly lamented by whichever resident expert on the gross inequities of poor countries happened to be around.

In one interview that appeared on an American media outlet, the introduction to the story used the fortunate coincidence of a recently released movie to talk about the report. The movie in question was Twelve Years a Slave, a historical drama set in a milieu one century ago and focusing on the enslavement of a free African man in antebellum America.

The message was clear: the US and most Western industrialised nations have overcome the subjugation of human by human; it is the post-colonial world, the brown and black people of the world, that continue to live the moral ignominy of slavery.

The chronological slight is not the only problem with the slavery report and its tut-tutting of poor countries unable to lift their citizens out of indentured exploitation. In using the nation-state model to rank countries, the report glosses over the fact that the dimensions of slavery in a globalised world are no longer constructed by the policies of single states within their borders.

While it is undoubtedly true that countries like Pakistan, India, and undoubtedly Mauritania fail to enforce laws against egregious labour conditions, leaving millions bound to inherited servitude, the picture of slavery as a country-specific problem is a misleading one.

Global labour flows and the construction of competitive corporate markets that reward the cheapest and most unregulated forums for manufacturing are crucial portions of where slavery exists and why it persists.

The local sweatshop worker toiling away in a factory in an urban slum does not enjoy markedly better conditions or future prospects than the teenager toiling over a brick kiln in a scraggly rural community. Simply put, the global poor are indentured in today’s world, owing to smug collusion between global and local exploiters.

In this sense, transnational organisations, their lack of oversight of global corporate wrongdoing, and their habitual championing of the interests of the industrialised West are just as

responsible for the persistence of slavery in the world as the individual apathy of countries unwilling to free their citizens.

The invisibility of international mechanisms is not the only problem in construing the idea of contemporary slavery as a country-specific issue amenable to localised legislation. The other problem lies in the obfuscation of the historical ingredients of present conditions.

India and Pakistan, which as the report notes, include large swathes of the world’s ‘enslaved’ populations, are also former colonies. Their two centuries of colonial rule, which capitalised on and even promoted such mechanisms of exploitation and thrived on the subjugation of one brown man by another, are complicit in the current conditions of vast inequality.

Yet Great Britain, the architect of colonial slavery and subjugation, is deemed in the language of the Global Slavery Index to have risen above the base and exploitative constructions it imposed on others. Great Britain is not in the top 10 list of notorious nations with captive humans; for the British of now, slavery was the problem of another age.

It is incontrovertible that the subjugation of one human by another, the reduction of a human life to a commodity, its sale, its exchange, and its indentured servitude is a moral, ethical, and legal wrong. It is also true that all possible mechanisms of advocacy and research need to be employed to ensure an end to the crime of slavery.

None of these efforts, however, will be successful if they rest their arguments on a decontextualised history of exploitation and draw its parameters as narrowly as national borders. The instruments of contemporary slavery are as transnational as they are national; they rely as much on the imposition of visa regimes and prevention of workers from accessing the global markets as they do on local inequities.

Any serious effort for the eradication of slavery in the world must thus go beyond absolving former colonists, and contemporary corporations must consider history and complicity and do more than simply scoff at the result of their cruelty.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy

Published on: 31 October 2013 | The Kathmandu Post