U.N. Agency Assails Sudan, Mauritania on Use of Slavery

The International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, chastised the African nations of Mauritania and Sudan on Monday for continuing to practice the centuries-old scourge of slavery and accused nine other countries in Asia and Latin America of tolerating something that could be even worse--other forms of forced labor.

In its annual report, the ILO acknowledged that Mauritania is trying, though somewhat feebly, to deal with the traditional problem. But the U.N. agency denounced the Sudanese government for encouraging slavery as a weapon in its war against the country’s rebellious south.

“At the end of the 20th Century many people assume that slavery has been eradicated,” the ILO said. “Not so. Millions of people, even in 1993, are forced to work under harrowing conditions for little or no reward. The forms which forced labor takes on today may be more diverse, and better disguised, than those of earlier times. But they can be no less shocking.”

The ILO found that entrepreneurs in Pakistan, India and Peru entrap millions of workers by driving them into debt; that landowners of Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Myanmar (formerly Burma) lure or coerce migrant workers to distant, guard-patrolled plantations from which escape is nearly impossible, and that shopkeepers and householders of Haiti, Sri Lanka and Thailand force children to work like slaves.

Max R. Kern of Germany, the chief of the ILO’s Freedom of Workers Section, described these forms of forced labor as “equal to slavery or even worse.”

Although Sudan is regarded as a land of traditional slavery, the ILO found an increase in the practice because of the civil war there. The ILO accused the Khartoum government of arming Arab-speaking, Islamic residents so they could raid villages of the animist and Christian Dinka groups along the border between southern and northern Sudan. The government, according to the ILO report, wants to depopulate this area and thus weaken a base of support for the rebels.

Kern acknowledged that the ILO has no other weapon except the glare of publicity to try to embarrass governments into trying to squelch these practices. But even when governments cooperate, he said, the practices are too deeply rooted to end easily.

In India, for example, “the problem is getting the action done at the local level where the exploiters are, and where the local authorities are very much linked to the exploiters,” Kern said.