Africa – Arab Facts

Africa – Arab Facts

1. Libya is perhaps one of the most divided countries in the world. No one group controls Libya, nor can they at this time. Militias affiliated with each government are also fighting for territorial control. Indeed, most of their territories have become magnets for rogue groups and organized crime – where abuse, cruelty and extortion are common currencies. As it stands right now, there are three governments, two parliaments, and only one of those – made up of elected officials in Tripoli – is an internationally recognized government.

Libya Slave Trade

2. A few weeks ago (December 2017), CNN uncovered the horrors of the Libyan slave trade. Since then, I have painfully watched videos of my African brothers and sisters being treated like cattle, each with a price tag on his or her forehead. But these are the sons and daughters of Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Cotê d’Ivoire, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Nigeria. They are human beings – and they deserve to be treated with humanity.
3. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) also says it has helped citizens of Cameroon, Gambia, Senegal and Nigeria to return to their countries using chartered planes.

4. ‘It Was As if We Weren’t Human.’ Inside the Modern Slave Trade Trapping African Migrants

https://time.com/longform/african-slave-trade/

5. By the time his Libyan captors branded his face, Sunday Iabarot had already run away twice and had been sold three times.The gnarled scar that covers most of the left side of his face appears to show a crude number 3. His jailer carved it into his cheek with a fire-heated knife, cutting and cauterizing at the same time.

6. Iabarot left Nigeria in February 2016 with a plan to head northward and buy passage on a smuggler’s boat destined for Europe, where he had heard from friends on Facebook that jobs were plentiful.

7. The journey of more than 2,500 miles would take him across the trackless desert plains of Niger and through the lawless tribal lands of southern Libya before depositing him at the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He never made it. Instead, he was captured the moment he arrived in Libya, then sold to armed men who kept a stable of African migrants they exploited for labor and ransom.

8. “It was as if we weren’t human,” the 32-year-old from Benin City, Nigeria, tells TIME.

9. Iabarot is among an estimated 650,000 men and women who have crossed the Sahara over the past five years dreaming of a better life in Europe. Some are fleeing war and persecution. Others, like Iabarot, are leaving villages where economic dysfunction and erratic rainfall make it impossible to find work or even enough to eat. To make the harrowing journey, they enlist the services of trans-Saharan smugglers who profit by augmenting their truckloads of weapons, drugs and other contraband goods with human cargo.

10. But along the way, tens of thousands like Iabarot are finding themselves treated not just as cargo but as chattel and trapped in a terrifying cycle of extortion, imprisonment, forced labor and prostitution, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “They are not only facing inhuman treatment. They are being sold from one trafficker to another,” says Carlotta Sami, southern European regional spokesperson for UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency.

11. Slavery may seem like a relic of history. But according to the U.N.’s International Labor Organization (ILO), there are more than three times as many people in forced servitude today as were captured and sold during the 350-year span of the transatlantic slave trade. What the ILO calls “the new slavery” takes in 25 million people in debt bondage and 15 million in forced marriage.

12. As an illicit industry, it is one of the world’s most lucrative, earning criminal networks $150 billion a year, just behind drug smuggling and weapons trafficking. “Modern slavery is far and away more profitable now than at any point in human history,” says Siddharth Kara, an economist at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

13. The trade might be most visible in Libya, where aid organizations and journalists have documented actual slave auctions. But now it is seeping into southern Europe too—in particular Italy, where vulnerable migrants are being forced to toil unpaid in the fields picking tomatoes, olives and citrus fruits and trafficked into prostitution rings.

14. “The rope of desperation has replaced their iron chains. Now Africans are sending themselves to Europe and becoming slaves in the process.”

15. In 2016, the year Iabarot set out from Nigeria, the number of migrants arriving in Italy from Libya spiked to 163,000, prompting a political backlash and a determination to stanch the flow at all costs.

16. The IOM estimates that nearly half a million sub-Saharan African migrants are currently trapped in Libya, ripe for exploitation by armed groups and corrupt officials.

17. “The Libyans understood that if the E.U. doesn’t want blacks to come, it means we are not valuable as humans,” she tells TIME, cradling her newborn, in a shelter for trafficked women in Lagos, Nigeria. “The E.U. is essentially rewarding these militias for abusing us, for raping us, for killing us and for selling us.”

18. Two migrants, a man and a woman of African origin, died in the night of Sunday (January 23 2023) in the southern province of Foggia of carbon monoxide inhalation emitted by a brazier lit to keep them warm at night.

19. More than 1,500 people live in the so-called ghetto, mostly farmhands who work in the countryside around Foggia.

20. Sagnet estimates that 3 out of 5 items in every Italian’s weekly food basket, including wine, cheese, fruit, vegetables and olive oil, are produced in part by unfair migrant labor.

21. Migrant workers comprise the vast majority of the workforce in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait where they effectively fall under the control of employers due to the kafala (sponsorship) system and have few, if any, labour rights.

22. Prominent social-media influencers admitted that they often heard derogatory terms used to describe Blacks from their elders (and sometimes from their peers), in particular the word abeed, meaning “slave,” being used to describe people with dark or black skin. Others pointed to ubiquitous racist references to Blacks in Arab media and the use of blackface in Arab entertainment

23. Mohamad Azmi, the director of the Egyptian Monitoring Centre on Racism, published the results of an investigation in 2018. Together with co-authors, he examined Egyptian media, ranging from news reports to talk shows and movies. According to their findings, half of the films produced in Egypt between 2007 and 2017 disparaged or made fun of people with dark skins or Upper Egyptian dialects. People from Upper Egypt were given stereotypical roles as janitors or servants. Racist language and hate speech, moreover, was used in about one third of the talk shows and news reports that were produced between 2011 and 2016 and dealt with topics from Upper Egypt.

24. Tunisia is the first Arab country to have passed an anti-racism law. An intense discussion about racism emerged there after the 2011 revolution. It resulted from a vibrant civil society making use of the freedom of expression. In October 2018, the Tunisian Parliament passed a law that defined racism and made racist statements and deeds punishable by law.

25. Black Tunisians, who make up between 10-15% of the Tunisian population, according to official figures.

26. In the absence of formal statistics, their community leaders estimate their numbers today to be as high as 1.5 to 2 million inhabitants.

27. Black Iraqis have lived in Iraq for centuries – most of their ancestors were enslaved under the Abbasid Caliphate in the eighth century. They were from what are now coastal Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique (known then as the Zanj), as well as Zanzibar, Ethiopia and other locations in subSaharan Africa, to work in southern Iraq’s farms and salt marshes.3 An estimated 1.5 to 2 million Black Iraqis – a majority of whom identify as Shiite Muslims – live in Iraq today, with populations centered in Basra and some neighborhoods in Baghdad

28. In 2021, their (black Saudis) population is 3,500,000, or 10% of Saudi Arabia’s 35,000,000 people.
29. Black Algerians are literally not visible to other Algerian citizens – self-identified white Arabs and Amazighs – who are overwhelmingly found on the northern Mediterranean coast. Nevertheless, Black Algerians are indigenous to Algeria’s Sahara
30. Similar progress has not been made in recognizing Morocco’s Black population, including the Black indigenous presence in the south and the impact of the trans-Sahara slave trade. The Moroccan government does not keep demographic statistics by race, so the exact number of Black Moroccans is not known
31. Despite its prevailing Arab identity, Mauritanian society is multiethnic; the Bidhan, or so-called “white moors”, make up 30% of the population, while the Haratin, or so-called “black moors”, comprise 40%.
32. The 30,000 people living in a town in northern Libya have been driven out of their homes, in what appears to have been an act of revenge for their role in the three-month siege of the city of Misrata.
33. Tawerghans are mostly descendants of black slaves. They are generally poor, were patronised by the Gaddafi regime and were broadly supporters of his regime. Some signed up to fight for him as the regime fought for its survival.
34. Roughly 10% to 15% of Tunisians are Black, many of them descended from slaves, analysts say. While Tunisia became the first Arab country to ban slavery in the 19th century, its legacy remains tangled in Arabic slurs that refer to Black people as slaves and in complicated community relationships, especially in the south.