The mass kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram is only the tip of on iceberg of slavery in Africa. Slavery and trafficking is more often than not tied to conflicts in which core NATO member states and terrorist organizations with ties to their intelligence services play central roles. Ultimately, conflict, slavery and trafficking, as well as prostitution are tied to issues about sovereignty.
Boko Haram began its insurgency five years ago. Experts stress that Boko Haram is covertly funded and armed by intelligence services of core NATO member states. The function of the covert support for Boko Haram is the destabilization of a country to justify a NATO military presence.
One of the most recent incidents that supports this assessment comes from a clandestine recording of a phone conversation between Mustafa Varank, who has close ties to Tukey’s AKP government and Turkey’s intelligence service MIT and a Turkish Airlines official, in which the two are discussing details about arms smuggling to Nigeria.
Emma Christopher, an expert on slavery and human trafficking, stressed that tens of thousands of people are bought and sold in Nigeria every year. The majority of them are children. Christopher is referring to the International Labour Organization which estimated that in 2003, as many as six million Nigerian children had been trafficked at some time in their lives.
Core NATO Members Engineered Conflict Drives Slave and Trafficking Business.
This prompts the questions, why the sudden outcry about the kidnapped Nigerian girls throughout western governments? Why the sudden headlines in western corporate media?
In October 2012, the Irish analyst Finian Cunningham pointed out Boko Haram’s role as an instrument of western modo-colonialism, writing:
On the surface, a militant group known as Boko Haram appears to be the protagonist. But some believe that powerful Western interests are using the violence to consolidate foreign control over Nigeria’s vast oil wealth.
Cunningham stressed that some Nigerian analysts believe that the organization is being used by powerful external forces as a conduit for destabilizing Nigeria. A “believe” which since then has been substantiated. He quoted political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode saying:
“The upshot of this latest massacre is to destabilize the state of Nigeria by sowing sectarian divisions among the population. The killers may have been Boko Haram operatives, but Boko Haram is a proxy organization working on behalf of foreign powers.”
Note, that the rapid growth of the Nigerian economy and the country’s oil export coincides with the increased incidence of terrorist attacks and the increased presence of US AFRICOM troops.
Cultural Factors Play a Minuscule Role. A relatively small part of African slavery and human trafficking problems are related to cultural factors.
Mauritania is one of the countries where slavery is a remainder of the age-old Arab slave trade and the colonization of the Maghreb by Arabs. Slavery was banned in Mauritania in 1980.
The remaining problems in Mauritania, as tragic as they are, are minuscule in comparison with the conflict related slavery and trafficking. Moreover, most slaves in Mauritania are living within family units, which is in stark contrast to the destiny of the vast majority of those who are enslaved or trafficked in connection with conflicts.
Slave Trade in Africa and Middle East worth 1.6 Billion Annually. In an article about slavery in Africa, Emma Christopher stressed that the NGO Free the Slaves estimates that 1.6 billion dollar in profit derives from African and Middle Eastern slavery per year. Christopher adds, that his amount is greater than the combined GDP of eight African countries in 2013.
Christopher stressed that Around 40% of the world’s chocolate comes from cocoa produced in the Ivory Coast and that children from across West Africa are trafficked to work there: there is no guarantee that those children have not grown the chocolate you enjoy.
What Christopher doesn’t address in her article is that core NATO member France engineered the 2010 coup d’état against Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo who was about to end the French usurpation of the country and with it the usurpation of the other UMEOA member states.
Neither the conflict in Ivory Coast and the continuation of the slavery in and around the country can be understood without understanding the system of usurpation France installed in its former colonies and UMEOA member states.
The system was described in great detail, in the article “French Africa Policy Damages African and European Economies”. The problem can be reduced to the following:
- France has installed commissars in the UMEOA region’s three central banks. The commissars have veto right and can, in fact, block any financial, monetary or economic decisions.
- France is printing the regions money, the Franc CFA in Chemaliers, France.
- UMEOA member states “must” deposit 65 % of their foreign currency reserves in the French National Bank against 0 (ZERO) % interest.
- France earns about 3 % interest on the deposits and “lends” the profit back to individual UMEOA member states against 5 – 6 % or more as “development aid”.
- UMEOA member states “must” deposit “all” of their gold reserves in France. No audit has taken place for decades.
- Any head of state who wants to get his country out of the French racket is faced with the prospect of assassination, imprisonment or a coup d’état. Laurent Gbagbo has since 2010 been held in a prison of the International Criminal Court.
Christopher also, correctly points out that seven types of slavery are prevalent in eastern Congo. Men and boys are enslaved in the mines of the region, whose products we all have in our mobile phones and other electronics.
A covert investigation in 2013 by Free the Slaves found that more than 90% of mine-workers were enslaved, the majority through debt bondage or having been kidnapped by armed groups. Nearby, they found women and girls who had been trafficked to work as prostitutes to serve the miners. (emphasis added)
The Sudanese parliament reported in 2008 that at least 35.000 people remained enslaved, the majority of them being Christians from the South held by Islamic families in the North.
The problem has received little international attention, although it has been noticed when US and Qatari intelligence services began targeting the country for civil war and its separation into Sudan and South Sudan. That development came when depletion of oil resources made the exploration of Sudanese resources attractive.
NATO Engineered Conflict and Sex Slavery. October 2013 the Tunisian Interior Minister Lofti Ben Jeddou complained that Tunisian girls were being trafficked trough Turkey. Young Tunisian girls are being lured into traps or simply kidnapped and trafficked to Syria via Turkey.
Ben Joddou announced to Tunisia’s National Assembly, that Tunisian girls are forced to satisfy the sexual needs of terrorists in Syria under the euphemism sexual jihad.
Ben Jeddou stressed, that Turkey has become a bridgehead for sex jihad and declared that the trafficked Tunisian girls are forced into having sex with 20 – 30, in some cases 100 of the “holy warrirors”. Ben Jeddou stressed, that most of them return pregnant.
Besides the psychological trauma the young Tunisian girls suffer, the large number of children which will be born due to the forced sexual service will create a sociological time bomb in Tunisia. Another problem, which remains largely unaddressed, is that many of the girls who return, have been infected with sexually transmittable diseases, including HIV. Yet others again never return because life has become a chap commodity since the country was targeted for holy war.
It is worth noting that these holy warriors, for the greatest part, are US-UK-Turkish-Saudi Arabia and Qatar-funded mercenaries who are fighting a war on behalf of core NATO member states, CGG member states and Israel. For those who have not noticed the fact yet, a statement of the former French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas is a good starting point to understand the situation in Syria.
During an appearance on the French TV channel LPC, Dumas made a short remark, saying that top British officials were preparing the subversion of Syria with the help of “rebels” two years before the first protests in 2011, and that he was asked, whether he wanted to participate. During the TV appearance on LPC, in June, Dumas said:
“I am going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me, that they were preparing something in Syria. … This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister of Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate. Naturally, I refused, I said I am French, that does not interest me … This does not make sense, it is time to fix all this again. … there are some sides who have the desire to destroy Arab states, like what happened to Iraq and Libya before, particularly given Syria´s special relations with Russia. … that if an agreement is not reached, then Israel will attack and destroy the governments that stand against Israel”.
Kidnapping of girls and trafficking of girls to Syria has also been reported from Mali, invaded by France and NATO members in 2013 as well as from Egypt and Libya invaded by NATO and NATO-led Al-Qaeda “rebels” in 2011. Since 2014 the kidnapping of girls has begun spreading into Europe, with the “disappearance” of two Austrian – Bosnian girls being the best known incident.
Employment in Slave-like Conditions. One of the greatest Arab importers of migrant workers who are working under slavery-like conditions, is Qatar.
About 88 % of all workers in Qatar are migrant workers. Many of them are kept in appalling conditions. Violence and abuse, including sexual abuse is rampant. Many female migrant workers are literally being held as sex slaves. Similar conditions can be found in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.
An Entirely Different Problem – Trafficking for the Western Sex Industry. Trafficked African sex workers can be found in as good as every red-light district in every European capital as well as in most larger provincial cities. African girls are also being trafficked to Asia.
Many of the girls are lured into traps with promises about a cleaning job, au-pair jobs and other. Once they arrive, the standard procedure is that their passports are taken away and that they are “broken in”.
In an interview with several trafficked African prostitutes in a provincial town in Denmark, one of the girls told the author that she was hospitalized with severe blood loss after having been forced to service numerous “clients” one day.
Asked how she managed at the hospital she reported that a health insurance card was “lent” to her by her pimp. When she was asked why she didn’t use the occasion to escape, she said that she was scared. Her pimp knows who her family is, and they will kill someone if I run away, she said.
The standard price for these trafficked African girls in Denmark is between 170 and 200 dollars per hour. A trafficked girl can expect to earn about 20 to 30 of the 200 dollars. From that income, they are often forced to pay 50 – 100 dollars per day for accommodation and other “services”.
Trafficked African girls in similar situations can be found in their thousands across Europe. The vast majority of them are from the former French colonies, now UMEOA member states or one of the countries of “special interest” for other core NATO member states.
A Question of Sovereignty. Ultimately, what one is dealing with is a question of sovereignty. That is, national sovereignty as well as individual sovereignty.
The girls kidnapped by Boko Haram have been deprived of their sovereignty over themselves and their own bodies. Boko Haram is used by core NATO member states to deprive Nigeria of its sovereignty by subverting the country, to place AFRICOM troops, to “secure” the country’s resources for the USA and its western allies.
The slave or migrant workers in Ivory Coast and its cocoa plantations have been deprived of sovereignty over themselves and their bodies. They have been reduced to an instrument for a modo-colonialist system of usurpation. Ivory Coast and the other 14 UMEOA member states don’t have any sovereignty. France can and does dictate their fiscal, monetary and economic policies and changes regimes which threaten to break free from the racket.
The trafficked girl in the Danish provincial city does not have sovereignty over herself or her body. The thousands of girls in similar situations in Europe have been deprived of their sovereignty.
Double Moral in Western Prostitution Laws – The Ultimate Betrayal. Nobody should live in slavery or work under slavery-like conditions. Nobody, neither woman or man should be kidnapped, trafficked or otherwise forced into prostitution.
That said, some women and men alike are making the conscious decision to escape sweatshops in the Maghreb, cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast, gold mines in Congo, uranium mines in Mali, or minimum wage, zero hour contract jobs at a McDonald in London.. etc..
Some people make the sovereign decision to say unequivocally “no” to working as industrial slaves in a rigged game. Some of these people recognize that all that the system in which they are entrapped leaves them with is sovereignty over themselves, their own body and their entrepreneurial spirit.
Some of these people make a sovereign decision to sell sexual services under conditions which they themselves determine and agree to. People who empower themselves by providing sexual services to paying clients. Some of them travel from Africa or Asia to Europe to work and provide for their family and to save money to build a life when they return.
If there was a political will to crack down on trafficking there would be very few trafficked women in western countries. Instead, we see increasingly restrictive prostitution laws which target those who are working as free entrepreneurs as well as their clients.
Restrictive prostitution laws which prevent these people from empowering themselves with the only resource this system, in many cases, has left them with. These laws drive them into the hands of exactly those criminals who will abuse them – this is, the ultimate betrayal of their sovereignty – this is, the ultimate enslavement that denies even, that one uses one’s own body as a sovereign.
So why all that sudden interest about those girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram, which is clandestinely financed, fueled and instrumentalized by modo-colonialist powers?
Dr. Christof Lehmann is the founder and editor of nsnbc. He is a psychologist and independent political consultant on conflict and conflict resolution and a wide range of other political issues. His work with traumatized victims of conflict has led him to also pursue the work as political consultant. He is a lifelong activist for peace and justice, human rights, Palestinians rights to self-determination in Palestine, and he is working on the establishment of international institutions for the prosecution of all war crimes, also those committed by privileged nations. On 28 August 2011 he started his blog nsnbc, appalled by misrepresentations of the aggression against Libya and Syria. In March 2013 he turned nsnbc into a daily, independent, international on-line newspaper. He can be contacted at nsnbc international at nsnbc.wordpress@gmail.com
Dr. Lehmann, ya have more African spirit than 90% of us Africans. I hope you don’t misunderstand this, but you should become honorary citizen of any African nation with a leader worth his salt.