Mixed Message Protest

It appears that we are not going to see the end of some activists demands .... that's if we really understood what those demands actually are ...

US Billionaire Demands Atonement Money To Be Paid To Black Americans .....

..... sometimes it looks like its some sort of unspecified changes that compensates for past, very old sins (see below), and then other times, it appears to be to simply hand over vast sums in reparations ... then again, maybe its both of those things.

Indentured Indignities

Not so long ago I posted on one of the modern forms of slavery, indentured servants in the Asian and Muslim regions (as opposed to people trafficking). So perhaps its no surprise that a scandal has erupted in Singapore, where a couple starved their Filipino maid.

Ms Gawidan The Maid, Lim Choon Hong
 and his wife Chong Sui Foon

The couple, finance trader Lim Choon Hong and his wife Chong Sui Foon, pleaded guilty and were convicted and jailed with sentences of three weeks, and three months respectively, for starving their domestic worker. This after their maid ran away and went to a charity .... where she was found to have lost 20kg (44 lbs) - about 40% of her body weight after being kept on a restricted diet of bread and instant noodles. 
 

Slavery, UK Style

Commenting on yet another 'slavery case', Labour MP and ex Labour Culture Secretary, Dame Tessa Jowell said on BBC radio London 94.9. that

'She woke up three times during the night thinking about the women who were held as slaves for 30 years. "How is it possible? We've had so little information from the police about the conditions the poor women were living in." .... she also questioned if parts of the city were so disconnected that nobody noticed anything.'

Domestic Slavery - Not A New Crime

This is a laughable comment from one of the architects of 'New Labour' and its 'let it rip immigration policy' .... a policy that did so much to destroy social unity in the UK, and especially in London, where 38% of the population are not from the UK originally at all.

 

Modern Slave Trade

Some times a story kind of tells itself .... I stumbled across this image on the Internet.

Malayan Flyer Selling Maids

And this unlocked a whole new story, that was apparently little reported outside of the South East Asian area. It appears that Indonesia is the main source for cheap female domestic servants (or 'slave labour', depending upon your point of view) in the greater region (with Filipinos being the other source). Of course this leads to much abuse, including imprisonments, beatings, rapes and murder, and the stories of their mistreatment by the Arab employers of Saudi Arabia are legion.

Indonesian Maid In Saudi Employers Car

However, when it was reported in Jakarta that the door flyer above was circulating in Malaya, there was much outrage. Demands that the Malayan government do something (probably the standard request to 'kill the perpetrators'), were legion, but then it turned out that this kind of indignity was common regionally. Reports came in from all over that adverts selling Indonesians as servants were common. 

Indonesian Maids in Singapore

The trade is openly advertised in Singapore, and in fact any country around that region where the standard of living was higher than in Indonesia ...... it just goes to show that slavery has survived. It is still being practised in North Africa and Arabia (where there were over 300,000 slaves in 1960 when it was abolished - but carried on because the law was never enforced), with recent reports alleging that a castrated black African slave was sold on a Facebook style advert last year.

Alleged Slave Sold in Saudi Arabia (Facebook) 2012

  
So it is still practised in the Muslim world, but just not in the traditional form. Debt Bond slavery has now disguised the trade, and allows slaves to be owned, bought and sold and moved around the globe in much the same way as before the West tried to abolish it in the 19th and 20th centuries.