Where’s “Black Lives Matter”?: The Mauritania Islamic Slave Trade

From The Guardian

The routine abuse of thousands of enslaved Mauritanians, including rape, beatings and unpaid labor, should prevent the African republic from receiving US trade benefits, American labor unions have said.

Mauritania, which has one of the highest rates of modern-day slavery in the world and has been roundly criticized for its poor human rights record, is currently on a list of countries that benefit from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa). The act, designed to promote the economic development of countries that can show they uphold human rights and meet labor standards, enables African countries to export goods duty-free to US markets.

“The government of Mauritania routinely fails to conduct investigations into cases of slavery, rarely pursues prosecutions for those responsible for the practice and fails to ensure access to remedy or otherwise support victims,” the union wrote in a petition, adding that the state harasses and imprisons anti-slavery activists and will not publicly acknowledge the continued existence of slavery.

“This represents a total failure to take any meaningful steps to establish freedom from forced labor,” said the petition.

Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, the last country in the world to do so, but only made it a crime in 2007. Since then, campaigners say the government has passed a handful of inefficient reforms and failed to properly address the issue.

There’s modern slavery all over the world.  The leftwingnuts ignore that in favor of obsession over slavery that was abolished in America 152 years ago.

Aside from selling their own people into slavery and running a slave market in Africa, where it still exists, there were blacks who participated in the slave trade in early America. I’ve read about slavery though the ages, but this is a part of American history that few people realize; the first legal slave owner in America was a black man by the name of Anthony Johnson.

Slavery was known in almost every other ancient civilization, including Egypt, China, Assyria, Abyssinia, West Africa, India, Greece, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Caliphate, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas. As a matter of fact the Irish were also sold into slavery in early America, the West Indies, Antigua and Montserrat. In the mid 1600s, 70 percent of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.