Slavery Disappears Never to Be Known Again

Nouakchott, Mauritania (CNN)

1000oulkheir Mint Yarba returned from a day of tending her principal's goats out on the Sahara Desert to find something unimaginable: Her baby girl, barely old enough to crawl, had been left outdoors to dice.

The usually stoic mother — whose jet-black eyes and cardboard hands acquit decades of sadness — wept when she saw her child's lifeless face, eyes open and covered in ants, resting in the orange sands of the Mauritanian desert. The principal who raped Moulkheir to produce the kid wanted to punish his slave. He told her she would piece of work faster without the child on her back.

Trying to pull herself together, Moulkheir asked if she could take a intermission to give her daughter a proper burying. Her primary's reply: Get back to work.

"Her soul is a domestic dog's soul," she recalls him proverb.

Later that day, at the cemetery, "We dug a shallow grave and buried her in her apparel, without washing her or giving her burial rites."

"I only had my tears to console me," she would later on tell anti-slavery activists, according to a written testimony. "I cried a lot for my girl and for the situation I was in. Instead of understanding, they ordered me to shut up. Otherwise, they would brand things worse for me — so bad that I wouldn't be able to suffer it."

Moulkheir told her story to CNN in December, when a reporter and videographer visited Mauritania — a vast, bone-dry nation on the western fringe of the Sahara — to document slavery in the place where the do is arguably more common, more readily accepted and more intractable than anywhere else on Earth.

An estimated 10% to 20% of Mauritania'southward 3.iv one thousand thousand people are enslaved — in "real slavery," according to the United Nations' special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Gulnara Shahinian. If that'south not unbelievable enough, consider that Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery. That happened in 1981, nearly 120 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the U.s.. Information technology wasn't until five years ago, in 2007, that Mauritania passed a constabulary that criminalized the act of owning another person. So far, only one instance has been successfully prosecuted.

The country is slavery's terminal stronghold.

Fifty-fifty knowing those facts before we departed, what we found on the ground in W Africa astonished usa. Mauritania feels stuck in time in ways both quaint and sinister. Information technology's a identify where camels and goats roam the streets alongside dented French sedans; where silky sand dunes give the country the look of a meringue pie topping; where desert winds play with the cloaks of nomadic herdsmen, making their silhouettes await like dancing flames on the horizon; and where, incredibly, the nuances of a person's skin colour and family history make up one's mind whether he or she will be complimentary or enslaved.

That reality permeates every attribute of Mauritanian life — from the night-skinned boys who serve mint-flavored tea at restaurants to the clothes people vesture. A human being wearing a powder-blue garment that billows at the arms and has fancy gold embroidery on the chest is almost certainly complimentary and comes from the traditional slave-owning course of White Moors, who are lighter-skinned Arabs. A adult female in a loud necktie-dye print that covers her pilus, but not her arms, is likely a slave. Her arms are exposed, confronting custom, so she can piece of work.

It's a maddening, complicated place — one made all the more difficult for outsiders to understand because no ane is allowed to talk about slavery. When nosotros confronted the country's government minister of rural development about slavery's existence, Brahim Ould M'Bareck Ould Med El Moctar told us his land is amidst the freest in the globe. "All people are free in Mauritania and this phenomenon (of slavery) no longer exists," he said.

The consequence is and so sensitive here that nosotros had to conduct well-nigh of our interviews in secret, frequently in the center of the night and in covert locations. The only other selection was to exercise them in the presence of a government minder, who was assigned to our grouping by the Ministry of Communications to ensure we didn't mention the topic. Our official reason for entering the country was to report on the science of locust swarms; our contacts for that story were unaware of our plan to enquiry slavery.

If we were caught talking with an escaped slave like Moulkheir, we could have been arrested or thrown out of the country without our notebooks and footage. That signal was made clear to united states of america in a coming together with the national managing director of audiovisual communications, Mohamed Yahya Ould Haye, who told us journalists who attempted to report on such topics were jailed or ejected from the country.

More than important, getting caught talking nearly slavery could have put our sources at risk. Anti-slavery activists say they take been arrested and tortured for their work.

When nosotros met Moulkheir in a gray, open-air function in Nouakchott, Islamic republic of mauritania's seaside capital metropolis where concrete buildings are scattered on the Sahara similar Legos in a sandbox, our hired security guard stood watch at the door to brand sure no government representatives were following us, as they had during other parts of our visit.

Moulkheir, who is in her 40s, wore a bright blueish headscarf and matching dress. She was brave enough to tell her tale with poise and unflinching resolve. She did so in hopes her former masters would be brought to justice. She was aware that telling her story could put her in danger just asked to exist named and to have her photograph shown. "I am non afraid of anyone," she said.

As she recounted her torture, imprisonment and escape, her hands gestured wildly but her eyes stayed focused, with sprint-like precision, on mine.

Listening to her story, 2 facts became painfully clear:

In Mauritania, the shackles of slavery are mental likewise as physical.

And breaking them — an unthinkably long process — requires unlikely allies.

DOCUMENTARY: The long path to freedom

Moulkheir was born a slave in the northern deserts of Islamic republic of mauritania, where the sand dunes are pocked with thorny acacia copse. Equally a child, she talked more than frequently with camels than people, spending days at a time in the Sahara, tending to her master's herd. She rose earlier dawn and toiled into the night, pounding millet to brand food, milking livestock, cleaning and doing laundry. She never was paid for her work. "I was like an animal living with animals," she said.

Slave masters in Islamic republic of mauritania exercise full ownership over their slaves. They can send them away at will, and it's common for a master to give away a young slave as a wedding present. This practice tears families apart; Moulkheir never knew her female parent and barely knew her father.

Most slave families in Mauritania consist of dark-skinned people whose ancestors were captured by lighter-skinned Arab Berbers centuries ago. Slaves typically are not bought and sold — merely given as gifts, and bound for life. Their offspring automatically become slaves, likewise.

All of Moulkheir's children were born into slavery.

And all were the result of rape past her main.

The attacks began when she had barely begun to comprehend her caput with a scarf, a Muslim tradition that begins at puberty. The principal took Moulkheir out to the goat fields near his home and raped her in forepart of the animals. Moulkheir had no choice only to endure this torture. She'd convinced herself that her master knew what was best for her — that this was the fashion it had always been, would ever be.

She couldn't come across across her small, enslaved earth.

To document slavery in Mauritania, we traveled out of Nouakchott and into the Sahara, where the desert landscape is so expansive information technology's claustrophobic.

We collection for hours without seeing a single person or dwelling house, relieve for the military checkpoints where men in black turbans — only slivers of their faces showing — stop every vehicle, demanding to know what its occupants are doing in the desert.

"I was like an animal living with animals." — Moulkheir Mint Yarba, escaped slave

The scenery is a highlight reel of emptiness: dusty plains, thorny shrubs and sand dunes flying past our Land Cruiser'due south windows at 75 mph. Information technology looks as if an enormous syringe has been jabbed into the ground to suck out all the color — except for yellows and browns.

The farther into the desert 1 goes, the more it seems possible that the outside world simply doesn't exist — that memory is playing a flim-flam. That this is all there is.

Information technology'due south in this isolated environment that slavery has been able to thrive.

Occasionally, a village pops into view. In most of these, we saw the same scene: dark-skinned people working every bit servants. They live in tents made of rags, some so shabby that their bawl-stripped stick frames wait like carcasses left to rot in the lord's day.

It'due south impossible, from the road, to know for sure which of these men and women are enslaved and which are paid for their work. Many exist somewhere on the continuum between slavery and freedom. Some are browbeaten; some aren't. Some are held captive nether the threat of violence. Others are like Moulkheir once was — chained by more than complicated methods, tricked into believing that their darker skin makes them less worthy, that it'southward their place to serve light-skinned masters. Some have escaped and alive in fear they'll exist found and returned to the families that own them; some return voluntarily, unable to survive without assist.

Because slavery is so common in Mauritania, the experience of being a slave there is quite varied, said Kevin Bales, president of the grouping Free the Slaves. "We're talking nigh hundreds of thousands of people," he said when asked about how slaves are normally treated in Islamic republic of mauritania. "The reply is all of the above."

In a strange twist, some masters who no longer need a slave's help send the servants away to slave-only villages in the countryside. They check on them only occasionally or employ informants who make sure the slaves tend to the land and don't leave it.

Fences that surround these round villages are often fabricated of long twigs, stuck vertically into the ground so that they wait similar the horns of enormous bulls submerged in the sand.

Zip ties these skeletal posts together. Nothing stops people from running.

But they rarely do.

Life in Mauritania

To understand Moulkheir'southward path to liberty, we sought out the two unlikely allies who helped liberate her in 2010: a slave and a slave master.

Boubacar Messaoud and Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane grew up in radically different worlds. Each would accept an amazing journey of his ain to terminate up fighting for the freedom of Moulkheir and others similar her.

We met Abdel, an olive-skinned human being with a marathon-runner's effigy and a Caesar-style haircut, in his family'due south apartment in Nouakchott, well past dark, while our government minders were asleep. Abdel'due south oversized blue robe, a sign of dignity, crinkled like crepe paper as he tucked the flowing garment behind his knees and sat downwardly on an embroidered green sofa. He offered us camel'southward milk and asked if he could smoke before curling into the couch similar a Cheshire cat and first his story.

It's the tale of how a slave owner becomes an abolitionist.

Abdel is 47. He was vii when he selected a boy with skin the color of coal to be his personal slave for life. The immature slave possessor made the choice at his circumcision ceremony; he could take picked annihilation as a gift for this rite of passage into machismo: a goat, candy, money. Just Abdel wanted the dark-skinned male child.

Indigenous groups in Mauritania

White Moors

Lighter-skinned Berber people who speak Arabic and take traditionally endemic slaves. Most men wear calorie-free blue shirts called boubous, which have ornate designs on the breast. White Moors are the power class in Mauritania and control more than wealth than any other grouping. Some, nevertheless, alive in poverty. It'southward not uncommon to find a White Moor living in a tent only slightly larger than that of his or her slaves.

Black Moors

Darker-skinned people who historically have been enslaved past the White Moors. Originally from sub-Saharan Africa, the Blackness Moors have taken on many aspects of the Arab culture of their masters. They speak Hassaniya, an Arabic dialect.

Black Africans

Islamic republic of mauritania'south other darker-skinned people come from several indigenous groups, including the Pulaar, Soninke and Wolof. These groups likewise are found in Senegal, which shares Mauritania'southward southern border. They wait similar to Black Moors, but never were enslaved and are quite unlike in terms of civilization and language.

Haratine

The give-and-take literally means "freed slaves," but it can be used to depict people who are in slavery or who belong to the former slave grade of Blackness Moors. Many Haratine people exist somewhere on the spectrum between slavery and freedom and are the target of class- and race-based discrimination.

"Information technology was as if I were picking out a toy," Abdel said of choosing his slave. "For me, it was as if he were a affair — a affair that pleased me. This idea came to me because in that location were all these stories nearly him which made me laugh — that he talked in his slumber, that he was a bit chubby and a bit impuissant, that he was ever losing the animals he was supposed to exist watching over and was then ever getting punished for this.

"So for me, he was an interesting and comic effigy. It's normal that I chose him."

Abdel was careful to say his family never beat his slave, Yebawa Ould Keihel. Family unit members did, however, force him to tend their herds of goats and camels, out in the deserts of central Mauritania, without pay. At the fourth dimension, Abdel told u.s.a., he didn't experience guilty. In fact, he and the other children in their nomadic group, which followed h2o from one bearding area of the Sahara to the next, openly taunted the slaves who served them. When it rained on the Tagant plateau, slaves like Yebawa had to hold upwardly the edges of the master-family'southward tent to prevent water from leaking in, he told us. Abdel recalls hearing the slaves' teeth chattering through the common cold desert nights — and mocking this "teeth music" with his slave-owning friends.

"Here they were standing up, protecting u.s., and we were completely unconscious (and) ignorant," Abdel said. "This was actually quite innocent considering, for us, slavery was really a natural state. One must actually have in mind that when one is built-in into a sure surround, information technology is considered the right 1 — just and fair."

Abdel could have gone on thinking that way if it weren't for a teacher who sent him to a library where books transported him to other worlds — places where slavery had long been abolished.

Abdel'due south parents wanted him to go to school in Nouakchott, 300 miles to the west of the sandy plateau where they raised goats and camels. He was assigned a tutor, an eccentric European man with chunky glasses and an Afro, every bit Abdel recalls. The homo required Abdel, at about 12, to get to Nouakchott's French Cultural Middle every twenty-four hour period to do extra reading.

Hesitant at showtime, Abdel soon dove into every volume he could find. He started with French comic books like "Asterix." It wasn't long before he was picking up volumes about the French Revolution.

In a book on the subject of human rights, pulled from the library'southward shelves almost at random, Abdel found the idea that would change his life forever:

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.

Abdel read the line again and over again.

"I started to ask myself if lies were coming out of this volume," he told us, "or if they were rather coming out of my very own culture."

One time this seed — a question that would disengage his entire world — had been planted in his mind, he couldn't stop it from growing. Past 16, he returned to his family unit'southward nomadic settlement in the desert to tell his slaves that they were free. He was shocked past their response.

They did not want to be free, he recalled. Or they didn't know what freedom was.

His mother told him to stop being lightheaded — that the slaves needed the family to take intendance of them and that this was the natural social club of the world, the way it always would exist.

But Abdel was becoming ever more set in his belief that slavery was incorrect — that the rights of his slave, Yebawa, were no dissimilar from his own.

In his early 20s, Abdel organized a community of young activists, nearly of them light-skinned similar him, who began to argue the merits of the slavery they'd grown up with and had, in fact, perpetuated. They sat on sand dunes belatedly at dark — in secret, for fear they would be plant out by the government, which officially abolished slavery in 1981 just allowed information technology to proceed. There, they discussed means to end the practice that was so ingrained in their culture.

Information technology was through these conversations that Abdel met Boubacar Messaoud.

The men came together on a rooftop in 1995, nether a midnight heaven of desert stars. In muffled voices, they plotted the founding of the abolitionist organisation called SOS Slaves. It's one of the few groups fighting slavery in Mauritania today.

And it would liberate Moulkheir.

Boubacar still lives in the concrete compound that served as the meeting place for that showtime rooftop word about SOS Slaves. The night nosotros interviewed him, nosotros walked a circuitous route to his house, turning down sandy alleys and doubling back to check for followers. Nosotros slipped through the metal door that serves as the chemical compound'south entry around midnight, with merely a sliver of the moon hanging in a charcoal sky. We found Boubacar, an imposing figure with strong shoulders, ebony skin and a snowy goatee, reclining in his living room.

Why slavery even so exists in 2012

Why has slavery connected in Mauritania long after information technology was abolished elsewhere? At that place are many factors that contribute to the complex situation. Hither are a few:

Politics

Mauritania's regime has done little to gainsay slavery and in interviews with CNN denied that the do exists. "All people are free in Mauritania and this phenomenon (of slavery) no longer exists," 1 official said.

Geography

Islamic republic of mauritania is a huge and largely empty country in the Sahara Desert. This makes it difficult to enforce any laws, including those against slavery. A branch of al Qaeda has constitute it an bonny hiding identify, and the country's vastness also means that rural and nomadic slave owners are largely hidden from view.

Poverty

40-iv percent of Mauritanians live on less than $2 per twenty-four hour period. Slave owners and their slaves are often extremely poor, uneducated and illiterate. This makes seeking a life outside slavery extremely difficult or impossible. On the other hand, poverty has too led to some slave masters setting their slaves costless, considering they can no longer afford to keep them.

Organized religion

Local Islamic leaders, called imams, historically accept spoken in favor of slavery. Activists say the practice continues in some mosques, peculiarly in rural areas. Diverse religions in many countries have been used to justify the continuation of slavery. "They brand people believe that going to paradise depends on their submission," ane Mauritanian activist, Boubacar Messaoud, said of how religious leaders handle slavery.

Racism

Slavery in Mauritania is not entirely based on race, but lighter-skinned people historically have owned people with darker pare, and racism in the country is rampant, according to local analysts. Mauritanians alive by a rigid caste system, with the slave course at the bottom.

Education

Maybe most surprising, many slaves in Mauritania don't understand that they are enslaved; they have been brainwashed, activists say, to believe it is their identify in the globe to work as slaves, without pay, and without rights to their children. Others fright they would lose social condition if they were to run away from a main who is seen equally wealthy. Slaves of noble families attain a certain level of status by association.

An evening breeze sailed through the open up windows equally he told united states virtually his life equally the son of slaves in southern Mauritania, near the country's edge with Senegal. Even though the master had granted his family express freedom before Boubacar was built-in, he still grew upward working in the homo's field, he said, and the primary took a cut of the crops they produced each year. This may not have been literal slavery, but information technology wasn't substantially different. "In that menstruation, I could nevertheless experience that I was a slave," Boubacar told us, "that I was unlike from other children."

One important distinction: He could not get to schoolhouse.

The master would not allow it, and his parents weren't going to have up the issue. This is something Boubacar never understood. So at 7, the aforementioned historic period Abdel selected his slave, Boubacar went to the local school fifty-fifty though he wasn't allowed to exist there. An administrator saw him standing on the steps of the schoolhouse crying and, out of empathy, Boubacar told u.s., allowed him to attend.

Didactics would change Boubacar's life, just as it had changed Abdel's. In one case he started reading about life outside his tiny earth, he grew dedicated to the idea that all people — including those in his family — should be free.

Years after, he would observe an instant marry in Abdel, the erstwhile slave master. This collaboration — between two men from opposite ends of Mauritania's rigid caste organization — would become the inherent power of SOS Slaves.

"If nosotros fail to convince a maximum number of whites and a maximum number of blacks" that slavery is wrong, Boubacar told united states of america, "then slavery will non go away."

Together, they developed a method for fighting slavery in Mauritania.

Stride i was to interview escaped slaves and publicize their stories. The thinking: If a person knows slavery exists, how could they not want to fight information technology?

Pace 2 was to aid slaves gain their freedom. This was trickier, Boubacar told us, because a slave like Moulkheir — the woman whose child was left outside to die — must make up one's mind she wants to be free before SOS can do anything to aid.

Scholars notice many similarities betwixt modern Mauritanian slavery and that in the United States before the Ceremonious War of the 1800s. But ane fundamental departure is this: Slaves in this African nation normally are not held by concrete restraints.

"Chains are for the slave who has just become a slave, who has . . . just been brought across the Atlantic," Boubacar said. "Just the multigeneration slave, the slave descending from many generations, he is a slave even in his ain caput. And he is totally submissive. He is ready to cede himself, fifty-fifty, for his master. And, unfortunately, it'southward this type of slavery that we take today" — the slavery "American plantation owners dreamed of."

For a slave to be free, she first must break the shackles in her heed.

The kickoff time activists tried to rescue Moulkheir, she refused to become.

She'd never known life outside of the desert. The thought of the metropolis scared her and she feared violent retribution by masters who had already been so abusive.

"She was unwilling to talk to usa — with anyone, for that affair," said Boubacar, the SOS Slaves co-founder. "She was with her masters and that was that."

This was 2007, shortly before Mauritania passed a law criminalizing slavery. After that law went into effect, the government embarked on a campaign to bear witness slavery did non exist, Boubacar said. A public official in Adrar, the region where Moulkheir lived, tried to deny the presence of slavery in his province. An SOS Slaves representative in that region said otherwise: We know of a slave named Moulkheir, he told officials. She is very badly treated. We tried to rescue her just she would not come up with u.s.. She needs help.

To ensure that Moulkheir's story of slavery would not be fabricated public, Boubacar and Moulkheir said, government officials staged a faux rescue. They arrived in a police car and took the woman and her five children abroad from the master who had enslaved all of them since birth. The master cooperated, Moulkheir said. To her surprise and confusion, he gave her 6 goats and a loincloth to take with her. She'd never had a possession before.

"I realized afterward that this was all in society to conceal my true condition of slavery," she told anti-slavery activists, according to a written transcript of the interview.

Her taste of freedom would be brief, like an ethereal mirage on the horizon.

Shortly, Moulkheir and her children were given to a one-time colonel in the Mauritanian army, SOS Slaves says. He was supposed to use them. What he did, Moulkheir says, is re-enslave them.

"He turned out to be worse" than the original main, Moulkheir told u.s.a.. "He shell me and slept with my daughters. He would burn down above their heads with a gun" to scare them.

Presently, the abuse — directed not simply at her, but at her young children — would be more than than Moulkheir could stand up.

Slave villages, and life in limbo

The fact that Moulkheir tin can talk about the abuses she suffered is, in itself, a victory. For many slaves, the idea of being owned by another person and treated equally a piece of livestock is normal — and has been for centuries.

Against the government's wishes, a small number of reporters and activists have visited Mauritania to try to document this phenomenon, which is unique in the mod world. In the 1990s, Kevin Bales, the American anti-slavery activist, posed as a zoologist to obtain permission to enter the country, which is required of almost outsiders. He found a system of slavery that echoes that of Onetime Attestation times.

"Its closeness to former slavery makes the situation in Mauritania highly resistant to change. Because it never went abroad or reappeared in a new form, this slavery has a deep cultural credence," he wrote in the book "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy." "Many people in Mauritania see it every bit a natural and normal office of life, non equally an aberration or even a existent trouble; instead, it is the right and aboriginal order of things."

Our beginning journey out of Nouakchott took us north, where purple mountains dip in and out of the desert like a dragon crawling through the sand. We would visit a center for locust inquiry located in that office of the state. The true goal, of course, was to find people who were currently enslaved.

A government minder was assigned to shadow us, which would brand it hard to talk with slaves at length. Nosotros drove in a small convoy, our SUV behind the regime'southward white 4x4 truck. In a remote stretch of the Inchiri region, rectangular tents made of bright-colored rags caught our eyes. We waited for the regime'south vehicle to shrink on the horizon alee, so slammed on the brakes and pulled over to talk to a group of villagers living past the side of the road. Before the authorities officials noticed, we were able to speak with slaves and slave masters.

Place descriptive text here Some people live in "slave villages" without their masters. Still, they may be forced to work without pay, and the land usually is owned by a master. Residents alive in extreme poverty.

They talked about their situation as if aught were wrong.

Fatimetou, a night-skinned woman who covered her hair with a majestic-and-green material that would look at home at a Grateful Dead concert, told the states her family unit doesn't own anything and can't go out the village.

"On this land, everybody is exploited," said some other dark-skinned man, speaking through a translator.

We ducked into the shade of a tent to muffle the audio of our potentially dangerous chat. Inside eyeshot was another tent camp, slightly larger. There, we met a homo who appeared to exist Fatimetou'due south master.

Mohammed, an older human being with a toothy smile and slightly lighter skin, told u.s.a. in a nonchalant manner that he holds workers on the compound without compensation.

"We don't pay them," he said through a translator. "They are part of the land."

Four sets of eyes peeked through the sheets of the slave principal's tent while we talked. They disappeared earlier our minder returned to shut downwards the interview and warn u.s.a. against stopping in the desert without seeking his consent. We asked a few questions about locusts every bit he approached to attempt to go on upwardly our cover, but sensed he was getting angrier.

We apologized halfheartedly and moved on, wishing nosotros'd had more time to talk with people who run across slavery every bit a normal role of life.

Later on the tour of the northward, we turned our sights south to the Brakna region, where the terrain is the color of Mars. Our mission was to visit the villages inhabited entirely by slaves and former slaves, places called adwaba.

These villages, more anywhere else, represent the limbo that many slaves notice themselves in. Neither free nor shackled, the residents of adwaba villages are owned and beholden to masters who live elsewhere, according to abolitionists. The slaves' owners come to town for harvest, to reap the compensation of the workers they practice not pay. Information technology'due south as if these slaves are bound to their masters by a long leash — one that'south rubberband just can't be broken.

At the first slave village, nosotros tried the same trick to ditch our minders — stopping unexpectedly and so rushing to practice interviews before they could make a U-turn and come dorsum.

At the base of a picturesque sand dune, where goats nibbled on bits of shrubs, we found Mahmoud, a nighttime-skinned 28-twelvemonth-onetime man wearing a imperial striped shirt and a black turban. Kids clamored at our ankles as Mahmoud gave us a hurried bout of his village. Information technology's unclear who owns the country here, but in many adwaba villages like this one, all profits are said to get back to the "tribe." (Co-ordinate to local slavery experts, one light-skinned family unit unremarkably manages the tribe of blackness slaves).

Food shortages in Mahmoud's village are and so dire that children stave off hunger pangs by eating sand. We saw i barefoot boy scooping the gritty globe into his mouth with a bright green piece of plastic.

Such conditions are nonetheless another reason some Mauritanian slaves actually adopt to stay in the homes of their masters: If they go out, it'southward hard to survive.

Couple all of this with masters — and some local religious leaders, according to activists — who tell slaves and the full general population that their natural identify in gild is serving their masters, and you lot have a recipe for slavery that persists in 2012.

"If a slave becomes complimentary, others volition judge him as evil," Boubacar had told us. "The guild he belongs to does not accept, nor forgive, him for being gratuitous."

Moulkheir's oldest kid, Selek'ha Mint Hamane, has skin the color of milky java — a visual reminder that she was born of her black female parent'southward rape by her first, light-skinned primary.

Slavery's history in Mauritania

Circa 200 to 1900s

Arab slave traders in the region that would go Islamic republic of mauritania capture darker-skinned people from sub-Saharan Africa and force them to work without pay. "You can trace this back for 2,000 years," said Kevin Bales, CEO of Free the Slaves.

1905

The colonial French administration declares an end to slavery in Islamic republic of mauritania. The abolition never takes agree, withal, in function considering of the vastness of the country.

1948

The United Nations adopts The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which abolishes slavery internationally.

1961

Subsequently gaining independence from French republic the twelvemonth before, Mauritania adopts a new constitution abolishing slavery. The effort has little touch on, according to written accounts.

1980 - 1981

Mauritania'south government abolishes slavery and declares that it no longer exists. This abolition was "essentially a public-relations do," says Human Rights Watch. "True, the government abolished slavery," writes Bales, the American anti-slavery activist, "but no one bothered to tell the slaves about it."

1995

A one-time slave and a former slave owner commencement an anti-slavery organization called SOS Slaves.

2007

Mauritania passes a police force criminalizing slavery. It allows for a maximum prison house sentence of 10 years. To date, merely one legal example against a slave possessor has been successfully prosecuted.

Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica; Man Rights Lookout; UN.org; Lonely Planet; "Disposable People: New slavery in the global economic system"; Library of Congress; BBC

Cruelty would baste from one generation to the next.

Selek'ha's beatings by the new master, the old colonel, started by age xiii. The rapes came soon after. He would enter her room in the centre of the night, she said, waking her suddenly by smacking her face with an electrical cord or hitting her back with a stick.

In spite of this treatment, Selek'ha still considered this low-cal-skinned man to be a benevolent relative. He forced her to practise chores all solar day long and beat and raped her in the middle of the night. He also made certain she was fed in a state where many die of hunger.

"When I was with them, I thought they were family unit," Selek'ha told u.s. in an interview held in the eye of the nighttime, and so every bit non to draw attention. "But when they began to beat me and they did not beat out their other sons and daughters, I realized something was wrong."

1 incident forever changed her psyche and led Selek'ha and her mother, Moulkheir, to plot their escape: In 2009, when Selek'ha was 15 or sixteen, her master raped and impregnated her.

From the moment she realized she was pregnant, Selek'ha was terrified of the day the child would be born. The master would be furious, she knew.

That child's birthday would never come. In Selek'ha's 9th month of pregnancy, her chief put her in the back of a pickup truck and drove her down a bumpy rural road at loftier speeds, jostling Selek'ha and her unborn child like laundry in a washing machine.

Selek'ha's baby died on that ride — but as the master planned.

"There are no bad things they did not exercise to me," she said. "He killed my babe."

Just every bit another master had killed her mother's.

Moulkheir felt a new pain, unlike annihilation she'd experienced before.

She wanted out.

Look closely at the desert of Mauritania and you lot'll come across that winds carry ghosts of sand along the surface of the ground, slowly pushing massive dunes across the Sahara.

Freedom, too, is a transformative force here, but barely visible.

During our travels, nosotros met people who never knew freedom existed; people who claimed they were not slaves but whose environments suggested otherwise; people who dreamed nigh freedom merely were too scared to escape; people who had seen friends die trying.

Belatedly at night, we spoke with Yebawa Ould Keihel, the slave Abdel selected at his circumcision ceremony decades agone.

We met Yebawa in our hotel room, shades drawn — again, with a security guard keeping watch in the lobby in case someone had followed him.

Yebawa has peel that evokes an African sky at midnight. He wore a thick white scarf and a blue cloak that gave him the air of a judge.

Abdel, the SOS co-founder, said he freed Yebawa decades agone. He is in his early 40s at present works as a servant for Abdel's family, and others, for pay. But when we asked Yebawa almost the moment he was freed, he was confused by the idea. Information technology seemed as though he'd never considered it before.

"No one ever told me I was costless. I don't know what that would be like," he said through our local translator, who, after the interview, expressed stupor to have heard those words come out of the oral fissure of a person today, even in Mauritania.

"I guess information technology would be something like what I am doing now, getting paid for piece of work."

Abdel would afterwards tell united states he considers Yebawa's plight to be ane of his greatest failures. He has dedicated his life to working against slavery in Mauritania. Simply the very human being he enslaved and then liberated hasn't been able to capitalize upon his freedom — or, it seems, doesn't sympathise it.

"Information technology is a ending," Abdel told u.s.. "He's my slave — he'd say nothing unlike even today. So, with Yebawa, I failed. I had success with others, merely not with Yebawa."

We asked if in that location was a chance Yebawa's life still could change.

"No, it is as well tardily," he said. "Since he was little he's been with animals, watching the herds, until now. The only difference is that now he gets a salary. . . . A person like Yebawa — if he gets paid a salary — he tin can't count to see if he was paid correct or not."

Boubacar, the other SOS founder, later would tell us that when masters grant freedom to their slaves, in a perverse way they are actually serving to farther enslave them. "Freedom is not granted," he said. "When freedom is granted by the primary you remain dependent, grateful."

Freedom is something that must be claimed.

From slave to free — and in-between

Due northews that Moulkheir had changed her heed — that she now wanted out of slavery — traveled from her main'due south compound to the office of SOS Slaves in Nouakchott.

Moulkheir's brother alerted SOS Slaves to her situation. His sis had not been set free, he told Boubacar, the SOS co-founder. She had been recaptured and now was beingness treated even worse. If they went back to rescue her, he said, Moulkheir would exist willing to get out. Boubacar agreed to help. This, subsequently all, is why he and Abdel had founded SOS Slaves: to liberate people like Moulkheir, who had decided that they wanted to claim their freedom.

To escape, however, she would have to get out her children backside.

While the second master was out of town, an SOS representative in that region of the desert went to the compound where Moulkheir had been held for nearly three years and drove her to freedom. Later, she would go dorsum to confront her master and demand custody of her children.

He gave her four of the five. He kept Selek'ha.

"No one e'er told me I was gratis. I don't know what that would exist like." — Yebawa Ould Keihel, a slave freed past his chief

Moulkheir had one human foot in the complimentary world. The other remained firmly planted in the northern deserts of Mauritania, where her daughter was still enslaved. SOS could facilitate Selek'ha's escape. Just start they would have to convince her that she needed to go. SOS arranged a phone telephone call between female parent and daughter.

Moulkheir told her girl that she had to stand up upward for her freedom.

When the principal went abroad to a nearby village, SOS sent a team to rescue Selek'ha. Reunited in the city, mother and daughter are at present focused on prosecuting the two slave owners who worked them all their lives without pay.

"I need justice — justice for my girl that they killed, and justice for all the fourth dimension they spent beating and abusing me," Moulkheir told us, her eyes more serious than ever. "I desire justice for all the piece of work I did for them. I hold them all responsible."

Her odds of success in courtroom are not good.

Activists have tried to bring dozens of cases to trial since 2007, when the law criminalizing slavery was passed. Merely one has been successful. In January 2011, Oumoulmoumnine Mint Bakar Vall was sentenced to six months in prison for enslaving 2 young girls, co-ordinate to news reports. Yet the victory was seen as bittersweet: Anti-slavery activists were arrested and sentenced to six months in prison for bringing the case to the attention of the government, according to the human being rights group Anti-Slavery International.

In other instances, activists take gone on hunger strikes to try to force prosecutions.

And then far, no guess has taken up Moulkheir's case.

One thousandoulkheir and Selek'ha, now 18, live together in a one-room shack on the outskirts of Nouakchott. The home has a corrugated metal roof and no piece of furniture. They sleep on the floor with sheets and, on winter nights, the warmth of their family.

It'due south a simple beingness, but one that is peaceful and, most importantly, dictated past what the mother and daughter want to do with their time, not what someone else demands.

Asked what she likes best almost liberty, Moulkheir said: "I can brand tea when I want. I can sleep. In the past, I could not sleep. I was like a donkey — merely working."

2 or 3 times a week, the two nourish a school for escaped slaves and their children. It's a new project of SOS Slaves, located in a neighborhood where goats walk the dusty streets and men ride rickety wooden ass carts, smacking the animals with switches to go on them moving down the alleys.

We visited the eye quickly, for but 20 minutes, because we didn't want to be seen in a identify that would give away our cover. To avoid existence followed, we arrived in one car and left in another.

From the exterior, the schoolhouse is eerily silent and still. Merely the anonymous facade gives mode to a warm interior. The walls are painted a Caribbean turquoise and floors are speckled with red, yellow and blueish chips of tile, the kind that might be establish in a Tex-Mex eatery in the United States. Women's voices echo in an interior courtyard. The chatter of sewing machines is contained within the school'south concrete walls — a secret to the outside globe.

Here, former slaves and their children acquire skills that will help them in their new lives, mail-slavery. In 1 room, Mariem, 21, braids the pilus of a mannequin that's wearing oversized, Bono-mode sunglasses. Anytime, she says, she'd like to open up her own hair salon. In some other room, a dozen women sit on the ground tie-dying bright-colored garments.

Moulkheir is with them, weaving white threads into a dress.

Alioune Ould Bekaye, director of the recently opened center, says didactics is the only manner former slaves tin make a life for themselves as freed people.

"It's another mode to liberate them," he said.

So far, xxx women accept enrolled at the center, he said, with funding coming from SOS Slaves and the Eu. Much more is needed to run across the state'south demand for grooming of sometime slaves. Only ane other such center exists, also in Nouakchott. There's no help for slaves in rural areas, and many thousands of former slaves alive on the fringes of the capital city in abject poverty. Slaves who don't receive training are at more risk of being re-enslaved.

Selek'ha says the center is irresolute her life.

During our afternoon visit, while the Saharan dominicus vanquish downwards on the metropolis outside, she sat in the shade at a sewing automobile, stitching pink thread into khaki fabric — the start of a pair of trousers she was making from a blueprint. "I want to know how to sew, and so I want to get my own sewing machine," she told us. "Eventually, I want to open a shop."

Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night thinking of the master who crush her, raped her and killed her unborn baby. None of those thoughts come to her when she's moving her hands beyond the material — creating something new.

Photos: School for escaped slaves

Odue north our final evening in Mauritania, we met one last time with Moulkheir and Selek'ha, in a private residence with the exterior lights turned off.

As we took the women through withal some other conversation nigh their lives under the hand of the masters who trounce and raped them, Moulkheir grew visibly uncomfortable. She covered her oral cavity with green fabric and put sunglasses over her optics — a pair with fake rhinestones on the frames. "I can't talk about this anymore," she said.

Her daughter urged her to continue. Speaking out might help their example against the masters, she said, because outsiders will and so know what is happening here, largely hidden from view and in silence. But Moulkheir wouldn't budge.

I asked them one terminal question: What did their master expect like? I wanted to be able to depict to readers the face that had haunted them over the years and caused them then much hurting.

"It's a destitute land. It needs a few friends in the globe." — Kevin Bales, Free the Slaves

"He was light-skinned with a bristles and glasses," Selek'ha said.

There was a interruption. Then our translator spoke, giving words to the elephant in the room:

"He looked like y'all."

I know it's irrational, but in that moment I felt responsible for everything that had happened to Moulkheir and Selek'ha — and to their children who died.

Who was I to ask them to unearth the horrors from their past? What could people outside this troubled country practice to end a practice that's thousands of years old and so ingrained in the national psyche?

Every bit we wrapped upwards the interview, I thought back to something Moulkheir had told us before in the week. I'd asked what she would say to people in the U.Due south., many of whom aren't enlightened that slavery still exists in Mauritania — or who might feel helpless afterwards learning well-nigh it.

Her reply was simple: "I would inquire them to help us to change our country."

But how?

Information technology's a question that keeps me up at night.

Activists say the international community has done relatively picayune to pressure Mauritania to address slavery. "The French government and American regime have had a lot of opportunities to help Mauritania footstep up and bargain with this — and have pretty much squandered those opportunities," says Kevin Bales, of Complimentary the Slaves. People tend to focus on topics similar kid trafficking and sexual activity slavery, says Sarah Mathewson, Africa programme coordinator at Anti-Slavery International, rather than the one-time-world slavery in Mauritania.

The U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, Jo Ellen Powell, called slavery in the state "completely unacceptable and abhorrent" and said America is pressuring Mauritania to change. The nation should invest in the education of its children rather than "keeping them sweeping floors somewhere or herding goats," she said. "Human capital letter evolution is something that's very important to the Mauritanians and I hope that they get that connection."

For a few weeks afterwards returning dwelling, I tried to block the most troubling images from my heed: haunting villages where kids consume sand; a slave possessor who smiled while he told us about the free labor he gets from people with darker skin; and, most of all, the piercing optics of a woman whose master left her infant in the sand to die.

Mauritania is a identify of agonizing beauty, 1 that's hard not to love and curse. Its people accept lived with unfulfilled potential and broken promises for decades, since the country first tried to abolish slavery in 1905. But that could modify, several activists told us, if Islamic republic of mauritania knew the rest of the world was watching.

The Un has proposed a number of changes the Mauritanian government could brand to quicken the end of slavery. Among them: Pay lawyers to represent victims; permit international monitors into the country to bear a full survey of slavery; and fund centers like the one SOS runs to rehabilitate slaves who have claimed their freedom.

It would assist if a global public demanded these changes. "It'south a destitute country," says Kevin Bales. "It needs a few friends in the world."

Perhaps and so women similar Moulkheir and Selek'ha could discover justice.

And Boubacar and Abdel could get their wish.

We asked the SOS founders how they will know when their fight against slavery in Islamic republic of mauritania is over — how they'll know they accept won. Both men had the same reply:

When a one-time slave becomes president.

"Help us to change our country"

Design & development by Bryan Perry, Brian Duckett, Judith Siegel, Kyle Ellis, Nick Lusk, Thurston Allen & Ken Uzquiano

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Source: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html