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ASI and The Globalization of Slavery

By Garda Ghista, November 2002

"We should not forget even for a moment that this whole animate world is a large joint family in which nature has not assigned any property to any particular individual … When the whole property of this universe has been inherited by all creatures, how then can there be any justification for a system in which someone gets a flow of huge excess while others die for lack of a handful of grains?"
Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

Introduction
The above quotation describes the tragic consequence of capitalism. It also describes global capitalism or globalization in the year 2002. Globalization is the root cause of slavery. Profit is everything and people are nothing. Today more than 27 million people around the world are enslaved. Tens of millions more are in bonded labor. Thousands more are chattel slaves like in olden times. They are bought and sold at the auction. Perhaps more than 20 of the 30 Articles of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights are in direct contradiction to slavery and all its ramifications. But the most relevant are Articles 4 and 5, which state respectively that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms,” and “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Tragically, every source on the subject today tells us that slavery is increasing. It is a matter of unbridled shame that people allow slavery to continue. Article 26-2 of the Declaration states that ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups….” After 55 years, one would be forced to admit that educational systems have failed miserably in the above-mentioned task. In this context, let us examine the NGO Anti-Slavery International to learn about its work and its impact on the society and in particular on the lives of slaves.

Anti-Slavery International
Anti-Slavery International, with its headquarters in London, declares in its introductory literature that it is the oldest human rights organization in the world.¹ Its origins go back to 1787 when the first abolitionist society was created. This society was at the forefront of efforts to abolish slavery in Britain, which was achieved at least on paper in 1833. Public pressure was instrumental in bringing more freedoms to slaves; this taught the (abolitionist) society the value of an NGO in having the power to bring about societal change. In 1839 it named itself the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and by the 1890s the organization merged with the Aborigines’ Protection Society to form the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society which played a key role in drafting the 1926 Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. It proceeded to work towards creating a group of people inside the UN who would dedicate themselves to this cause. This group came to be known as the UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. In 1990 the Society changed its name to the present Anti-Slavery International, also called simply Anti-Slavery. Its areas of concentration are related to bonded labor, child labor, trafficking and chattel slavery.²

The scope of Anti-Slavery International is vast. Along with an ample introductory packet, there is a long list of relevant publications, a library containing archives going back to the 18th century, and a superlative website. Studying their literature and website, it becomes clear that Anti-Slavery International (ASI) has done tremendous service to humanity. They have frequent news releases (three to five per month) that focus on specific problems in regions around the world. In their latest (October 2002) news release, “Governments Fail Victims of Trafficking: New Report Says”, ASI announced their launching of “Human Traffic, Human Rights: Redefining Victim Protection,” a plan to do further research and pass laws required for protecting the victims of trafficking. Mary Cunneen, Director of ASI lays responsibility on the governments, saying it is their responsibility to protect the human rights of trafficked people. In August ASI released another news report called “London Remembers Its Slave Trade Role” wherein it commemorated the first successful uprising by enslaved Africans in Haiti in 1791 that empowered Africans throughout the Caribbean and Americas to rise up against their oppressors. August 23rd is designated by UNESCO as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. There are numerous links, including to one of their branch websites called Breaking the Silence. This is a highly educational site that talks about the history of slavery and how grievously distorted history has been written by Europeans with regard to Africans. It provides exciting information that should be in every elementary, middle and high school – information that tells about the enormous contributions of the African continent to the modern world – information that has been denied to the world due to Eurocentric and racist thinking on the part of white Caucasians. An example would be the North African scientist Al Idrisi who wrote, “What results from the opinion of philosophers, learned men and those skilled in observation of the heavenly bodies is that the world is as round as a sphere, of which the waters are adherent and maintained upon its surface by natural equilibrium.” This was in the 12th century! It was not until 1530 that Copernicus wrote his great work ‘De Revolutionibus’ in which he asserted that the earth is round, rotates on its axis once daily and travels around the sun once yearly. Yet, who has heard today of the African man named Al Ibris? This is just one of countless examples ASI provides us regarding the ‘true’ history of Africa and its people. It would appear Howard Zinn and other historians have a great deal more re-writing of history to do so as to enlighten humanity!

The information provided by Anti-Slavery International is extensive. Providing a fraction of that information in this paper is essential for the simple reason that most people are not even aware that slavery exists. From Anti-Slavery International we learn what is slavery today. It is global. It is also increasing in the United States. There is trafficking of women and children all over the US to work in the sex industry, in sweat shops, in motels and hotels and as indentured servants in households.³ As of 1999 around 50,000 women and children were being trafficked annually into America.⁴ Earlier they were arriving from primarily Southeast Asia and Latin America. Increasingly however they are coming from the New Independent States and Central and Eastern Europe, such as Rumania and Ukraine. New York and Florida are being inundated with women from Russia, Ukraine and Central Europe. Other source countries are Thailand, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Philippines, Korea, Malaysia, Brazil and Honduras. These women and very young girls end up working as slaves (prisoners) in the sex industry, doing sweatshop labor, in domestic servitude and agricultural work. They are also used as maids in motels and hotels, to sell trinkets on subways and to beg. Those who spend their days begging on city streets earn two to three million dollars in profits for their traffickers/ owners annually.⁵ Since the Japanese economic bubble burst in 1992, Japanese organized crime (called the Yakuza) had to look for other means of profit and consequently is now full-scale in the business of trafficking in women.⁶ As an interesting aside, Rey Koslowski writes that "… transnational organized crime groups are not all that different from transnational corporations (TNC) in that they both run border-transcending economic enterprises."⁷

The average age of these ‘global’ slaves in US is around 20 years old. They are ‘caught’ (meaning seduced, tricked or kidnapped) in their source countries due to abject poverty,⁸ collapsing culture (often under the aegis of western colonialism) and the low status of women in those countries. Once the women are tricked into coming with the traffickers, they are enslaved. They enter a cycle of never-ending debt bondage. They are imprisoned and prevented from leaving the site by security guards, violence, threats and dire punishment in the form of beatings, other kinds of physical torture, gang rapes, and threats to kill their families. Hence, their humiliation is the worst possible. Rape alone is the worst humiliation a woman can undergo, but this fact is barely acknowledged in US, being treated so callously by the American media and film industry. The enslaved women are denied medical treatment and often compelled to serve sexual clientele without protection against HIV.

The President’s Interagency Council on Women which deals with the issue of trafficking in women has provided the following definition for trafficking:

"Trafficking is all acts involved in the recruitment, abduction, transport, harboring, transfer, sale or receipt of persons; within national or across international borders; through force, coercion, fraud or deception; to place persons in situations of slavery or slavery-like conditions, forced labor or services, such as forced prostitution or sexual services, domestic servitude, bonded sweatshop labor or other debt bondage."

The Thirteenth Amendment of the American Constitution outlaws slavery by prohibiting an individual from selling him/herself into bondage. If traffickers use force, threats of force, or threats of legal coercion to create a ‘climate of fear’ to compel service, they are guilty of involuntary servitude. As Amy O’Neill Richard writes in her monograph on international trafficking, "Traffickers have taken advantage of the unequal status of women and girls in the source and transit countries, including harmful stereotypes of women as property, commodities, servants and sexual objects."⁹

The traffickers who bring slaves into US from Mexico are called ‘coyotes’. They bring them in vans, buses and U-haul trucks. Coyotes will get up to $1500 for each person they bring into the country. Hundreds of deaf-mute Mexican men and women are brought into US cities to beg. While this is standard practice in third world countries, it is becoming common now in larger American cities as well. Oriental women are brought in using the stopovers of Guam and Saipan, two islands (and US territories) in the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands). Russian women come into US by the thousands and are frequently used as maids, becoming indentured servants in the process. Profits for traffickers range anywhere from one to three million dollars per year. The slave, in contrast, can never pay off her supposed debts to her trafficker. She is his slave until he decides to discard her. Prabhat Sarkar has said,

"I have spoken about haves and have-nots. To satisfy their hunger, the haves misutilize their physical and intellectual wealth and force the have-nots to become slaves and sinners to try to appease their own hunger. In the background there is the big exploiter; in the front, as his agents, are half-naked children This is the cause of the downfall of society."¹⁰

Slavery takes place in many other countries of the world. Perhaps the prime example would be India, but there is also extensive slavery in Japan, European countries, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Haitians are kidnapped or arrested by the government annually and sent as slaves to work in the sugar plantations across the border in the Dominican Republic. In Mauritania and Sudan there is chattel slavery. People in these two countries are sold in the marketplace just like in days of yore. They are then stripped of their cultural, religious and personal identities and are used for labor in homes or farm work or for sex. Children born to them are born slaves and die slaves. If they do not behave, they are tortured in numerous ways, including having their ears filled with insects and sealed in with scarves and stones. They are left like this in physical torture for days until they do what they are told. Their bodies, their sweat and their blood are owned by others.¹¹ Virtually they have no existence of their own. Their lives many of them comprise of “bone-breaking beatings, back-breaking labor and heart-breaking neglect.”¹² Justice PN Bhagvati of the Indian Supreme Court declared in 1982:

"[Bonded laborers] are non-beings, exiles of civilization, living a life worse than that of animals, for the animals are at least free to roam about as they like… This system, under which one person can be bonded to provide labor for another for years and years until an alleged debt is supposed to be wiped out, which never seems to happen during the lifetime of the bonded laborer, is totally incompatible with the new egalitarian socio-economic order which we have promised to build…."

The ILO (International Labor Organization) estimates that there are around 250 million children aged five to seventeen who are working. Two hundred million of them are working in the worst forms of child labor – that is one of every eight children. Half of those children are working in hazardous conditions, and about 70 percent of them are not paid.¹³ In the book “Fingers to the Bone: United States Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers” published by Human Rights Watch, we learn how thousands of children employed in US as agricultural labor are working in hazardous conditions. They are compelled to work 12 to 16 hours a day, often with pesticides being sprayed as they work, or with crops still fully wet from the poison. They are not given a chance to wash their hands before eating lunch, they are provided little or no water risking heat exhaustion and dehydration, and they suffer injuries from sharp knives, falls from ladders and accidents using heavy equipment. Their biggest injury is mental depression. The majority of agricultural child workers in US are minorities, primarily from Mexico. The white capitalist owners simply do not care for their welfare. Agriculture is considered second only to mining as the most hazardous occupation.¹⁴ The power of the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) are mind-boggling as they oversee governments, businesses and industries around the world. As William Greider has said,

"…The terms of trade are usually thought of as commercial agreements, but they are also an implicit statement of moral values. In its present terms, the global system values property over human life. When a nation like China steals the property of capital, pirating copyrights, films or technology, other countries will take action to stop it and be willing to impose sanctions and penalty tariffs on the offending nation’s trade. When human lives are stolen… nothing happens to the offenders since, according to the free market’s sense of conscience, there is no crime."¹⁵


Impact of Anti-Slavery International

"You must have a flaming moral purpose so that greed, oppression and exploitation shrivel before the fire in you."
Prabhat R. Sarkar

Anti-Slavery International uses the media - television, radio, newspapers and magazines - to highlight the problem of global slavery. Their public awareness campaigns are extensive. Their educational material in the form of children’s books, videos, poster board presentations, and classroom material is superb. In the 2001 Annual Report of ASI there is further documentation of the work they are involved in, which includes: engaging with governments (presently Nepal and Sudan regarding bonded labor and chattel slavery respectively), lobbying (governments and the United Nations), research (it is already extensive), campaigning, supporting like-minded organizations, for example through its annual award giving program¹⁶, and education – to raise awareness through its website and publications. ASI demonstrates complete transparency by publishing their audited financial statements in their Annual Report. According to these statements, seven percent of funds are spent on administration and support, twelve percent on fund-raising and events, and 81 percent of funds are spent on direct objectives. This is exemplary and is in stark contrast to many other NGOs and IGOs including the United Nations. ASI provides many ways for citizens to help in their cause. On their website they provide names, addresses and email addresses of presidents and prime ministers of countries to whom people can write to protest slavery in their country. They provide sample letters and invite people to write their own. At their offices they provide volunteer positions as well as internships which are generally research-based. In short, Anti-Slavery International sets a superlative example of how to organize and run a successful Non-Governmental Organization.

In the past two years ASI has worked hard in Nepal, engaging with political representatives there and demanding government action to free thousands of bonded laborers. In January 2000 ASI sent a delegation to Nepal to urge their government to introduce a law banning bonded labor. In May of the same year ASI supported labor demonstrations, where hundreds of poor laborers marched to Parliament in Katmandu with their demands. In July the Nepalese Prime Minister declared bonded labor illegal. However, the government failed to provide land and rehabilitation for the laborers, causing thousands to become destitute, disease-ridden and starving. Freeing those in bondage was only the first step. ASI then organized a petition signed by prominent IGOs working in Nepal which demanded the government to give land and support to the ex-bonded laborers. This is an example of concrete work that ASI is doing world-wide to free slaves.

Along with Anti-Slavery International and other NGOs such as Global Survival Network and CAST (Coalition to Abolish slavery and Trafficking), there are also individuals working tirelessly to end slavery. Kailash Satyarthi is one such person. Satyarthi rescues child slaves in India. He calls child slavery “the biggest shame in the world” and the biggest human rights violation, as child slavery “turns humans into animals.” If we stop to consider that children are the most defenseless of all human beings, then certainly his words are correct. According to Speak Truth to Power organization, Satyarthi and his fellow activists have freed more than 40,000 child slaves in India. It is a tremendous service to children and to humanity.

Anti-Slavery International worked tirelessly with ILO (International Labor Organization) delegates to create its Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up passed in 1998. The Declaration reflected a renewed call to relegate slave labor to the history books. In recent years they have spent considerable time and attention to the issue of bonded labor and slavery. However, we have to ask the question, how much practical impact has this Declaration had on the lives of slaves everywhere? Prabhat Sarkar has declared,

“I want every human being to be guaranteed the minimum physical requirements of life; every human being to get scope for the full [utilization] of his or her psychic potentiality; every human being to get equal opportunity to attain absolute truth; and endowed with all the glories and achievements of the world, to march toward the Absolute. In and through this movement, humanity should be made conscious of the purpose and meaning of life.”¹⁷

Solutions
The main reason for slavery is poverty. Abject extreme poverty seen today around the world is due to globalization. Desperation as a result of starvation of the impoverished leads to slavery. To eliminate slavery one needs to eliminate the poverty in the host country. Very simple strategies would be: (1) Implementation of micro-credit strategies in the source countries. This is the practice of giving small loans to the very poor, which gives them the opportunity to start their own small business and survive - a practice that has been very successful in rural areas of India and Bangla Desh, two of the poorest places in the world. (2) Laws and penalties against traffickers need to be far more harsh.¹⁸ At present if traffickers are caught they serve from one to four years maximum, and often serve no sentence at all.

Slaves in America even if rescued generally suffer a double whammy since, as most of them have entered the country illegally, when rescued they are immediately thrown into jails for this ‘crime’ over which they were quite helpless. Rather they need to be transferred to shelters where they can receive professional counseling, guidance and rehabilitation as well as gradual repatriation to their homeland. Government grants should be awarded to such shelters and even to people who are ready to create such shelters for the express purpose of rehabilitating the slaves in America. Presently the government funding from the Violence Against Women Act in US is expressly for victims of domestic violence, stalking and sexual violence. There needs to be a new act passed which is expressly for the rehabilitation and eventual repatriation of the victims of slavery in America. Another aspect to be looked into is organizing to have former slaves who return home met at the airport by social workers or NGO representatives who can help them to get re-absorbed into their own society and hopefully back into their own family, and to protect them from retaliation from their former traffickers. Along with economic alternatives, there need to be public awareness campaigns in the source countries, and ways to provide the local women with both information and jobs. Punishment for traffickers engaged in these heinous crimes against humanity should be 20 year to life sentences instead of the present one to four years, which is a mockery of justice.

It is only in very recent years that the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice) has admitted that slavery really exists in United States. However, to the average citizen, it is an unknown and most likely unbelievable fact. When Americans think of slaves, they think of African-Americans and they think it was something in the past, in the history books. Sadly, both white Caucasian as well as African-Americans in US do not know about or do not care to learn about and fight for the rights of the ‘foreign’ slaves living today in their midst. Yet the lives and freedom of these new slaves are no less precious than our own. We need to care about our brothers and sisters coming from far-away lands just as much as we care about our neighbors in America.

Again and again the problem of slavery – tens of millions of slaves – comes back to poverty, which is instantly traced to the economic system of capitalism and globalization. Hence, the solution to slavery must incorporate economic alternatives and solutions for those who due to starvation become slaves. Extreme poverty is the root of the problem in third world countries and may well be the cause for increasing numbers of American slaves in the coming days of economic depression.¹⁹ On the local level, many initiatives can be undertaken such as micro-credit initiatives, small business development and business cooperatives with simultaneous education in how to run cooperatives, providing job skills training such as in dairy farming, bee hives production, poultry business, cloth-making – all with the goal of making the local impoverished people gradually become financially self-sufficient. Grants can be given to local NGOs working to uplift and give empowerment to women through education. With the relatively new U.S. trafficking law passed in the year 2000 called “Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act 2000 – there is now partial protection for slaves in America. The law recognizes all forms of ‘modern’ slavery and provides authorization for temporary visas and even permanent residence and work authorizations.²⁰ The task is horrendous because in many cases the victims do not understand that they are victims, do not understand their fundamental rights, and want to return immediately to their homelands. In fact their mindset is quite similar to that of abused wives who also do not understand they have been abused. Often slaves (and wives) suffer from the traditional symptoms of torture: severe depression, unbounded shame, chronic fear and anxiety and great difficulty in speaking about what has happened to them.

However, still, with all these good intentions, with all the good intentions of the NGO Anti-Slavery International and other similar NGOs such as Global Survival Network and CAST – Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking – and even including the tremendous work done in India by Kailash Satyarthi and other ‘silent’ volunteers – we have to again ask ourselves the question, how much impact are all these groups and individuals combined having on millions of slaves world-wide? Furthermore, slavery is rapidly increasing – hand in hand with the rapid increase in globalization. This is despite the superb efforts of ASI and other NGOs. It means, this is not the final solution.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the occasion of the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery on December 3, 1998 said that governments bear the primary responsibility for eradicating contemporary forms of slavery, but that civil society must also be proactive in pressuring their respective governments to pass and enforce relevant legislation and in raising public awareness of the problem. According to this author, the final solution has to come through the development of a world government. The global dimension and inter-networking of trafficking means that individual countries even if well-intentioned are relatively powerless to stamp out modern slavery unless there is a cohesive international effort. This effort can be nothing less than the establishment of a world government that has the power to enforce justice anywhere in the world. This is the absolute need of the day. There is no other way to end slavery or for that matter to end many other injustices happening today. A world political body with power over individual states is the need of the hour, so that it can take on the resolve to neutralize hostilities between races and communities and most especially to enforce the rights of minorities in every country.²¹ At present the permanent members of the Security Council can veto any issues they like depending on their vested interest. Furthermore, the UN Charter presently contradicts itself by first expressing that their objective is to maintain collective peace and then going on to present the principle of sovereign equality of its members. The main point as expressed by Acarya Krtashivananda is that the world body “must have constitutional sovereignty over national sovereignty.” The great political scientist and humanitarian Prabhat Sarkar has proposed that:

"Peace and tranquility depend on a well-knit socio-economic structure. The molding of the economic structure depends on the ideological outlook…. Universalism does not depend upon any relative factor. Hence it is free from the vices of ‘ism’s. ‘Isms’ are a major contributor to war. Those who are eager to establish peace should shake off nationalism and other allied ‘isms’. If we are to shake off these ‘ism’s, we have to organize a universal body and go on strengthening its power. It will be the first phase in establishing the world government. In the initial stage it will be a law framing body. The first beneficial effect of such a body will be that no country will be allowed to frame laws detrimental to the interest of its minorities. The right of executing those laws will be vested with the local government and not with the world government. That world government will decide the principles to enforce laws in a particular country."

The laws of the world government need to be based on higher values. There should be minimum distinction between cardinal human values, moral laws and human laws. Cardinal human values can be defined as ideas or eteologies (revelations) that come from the blending of the unit (human) mind with the mind of the Absolute. An eteology is not a philosophy but a window through which verition or the Absolute truth expresses itself in a way free of ego. Jean Gebser in his book The Ever-Present Origin²² says that “mentally conditioned justice in this new over-determined form is becoming what we have called ‘verition’ or ‘a-waring’. Practically this means that the deepest truths people realize about justice and exploitation – truths that often cannot be put into words – become manifest through the etiology. Sarkar says that we should be evolving from human laws to cardinal human values as defined above. Gebser also says that this is the present course of evolution. This would mean that in future the laws of nations, rather than being legal tricks of the elite, would be expressions of humanity’s deepest intuitions of truth and justice. Moral laws are laws that vary from culture to culture and as per the point or moment in time. Human laws are “mentally conditioned justice” bound by the limitations of the ego and the vested interests of the era in which they are created.

Sarkar has provided key points for the new world constitution to imbibe as being (1) guarantee of complete security to all plants and animals; (2) guarantee of purchasing power adequate to secure the minimum requirements of life to all citizens. He further says that citizens should have the right to sue their government if this guarantee of adequate purchasing power is not forthcoming; (3) recognition of four fundamental rights, which are: (a) spiritual practice, (b) cultural legacy, (c) education, and (d) indigenous linguistic expression. Cardinal human values are to take precedence over all rights and are to be the polestar for the framing of international law.

In his article on “World Government, Globalization and UN Reform”, Sohail Inayatullah presents many suggestions for UN reform so as to help it evolve into a meaningful and effective world government.²³ Along with setting forth the valid suggestions of other political scientists, he also refers to the ideas of Sarkar, who advocates for the future world government to have two houses, the first having representatives based on population and the second with representatives based on regional socio-economic units. Both houses would have to ratify decisions. This world body would be able to draft international labor laws that would be enforced by a world militia made up of volunteers. This would, for example, guarantee the rights of the “fourth world” or the indigenous peoples, who are exploited by the dominant ethnic majority for their labor. Furthermore, it would remove regional exploitation of backward parts of countries by the wealthier sections. An example would be the exploitation of the Midwest in United States by companies located on the east and west coasts, causing the Midwest to become merely a string of factories – a system now fading as TNCs more and more are moving their factories to Mexico, Malaysia and elsewhere. We see in third world countries that prosperous states like West Bengal have dwindled into poverty and decline because wealthy capitalists from western India crushed the labor movement in West Bengal by bringing in thousands of bonded laborers from other parts of India, including desperate refugees from Bangladesh.

Hence a world government needs to be based on economic democracy (reflected in regional self-sufficiency) for all communities of the world and not on national or international exploitation. Without this base, any world government will be helpless to stop the various forms of persecution, suffering and slavery that infest our planet today. World government can never succeed if it is based on vested corporate interests. But it can succeed if it is based on the genuine economic and cultural freedom of the myriad communities that make up this planet.

There is a Sanskrit word, sadvipra, which means spiritual-moralist. Sadvipras are those persons who (1) are imbibed with deep love and devotion to the Supreme Entity, evidenced by their greater love and compassion towards all humanity, and (2) who simultaneously devote their lives to tirelessly fighting all kinds of injustices in the society. These persons’ love and longing for God are unquenchable, their tears at the sufferings of human beings endless, their determination to fight injustice ferocious as a lion, and their joy at the happiness of those who see the light of justice is boundless. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar has stated:

"In every age the dominant class first governs, then starts to exploit, after which evolution or revolution takes place. Due to the lack of sadvipras [spiritual-moralists] to lend their help, the foundations of human society fail to become strong. Today I earnestly request all rational, spiritual, moral fighting people to build a [spiritual-moralist] society without any further delay. Sadvipras [spiritual-moralists] will have to work for all countries, for the all-round liberation of all human beings!"

Notes
1 Anti-Slavery – US: http://www.iabolish.com/today/background/worldwide-evil.htm
2 Anti-Slavery International. http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/antislavery/history.htm
3 It is relevant to note that sweatshop labor is involved in producing items for the following companies, to name a few: The Gap, The Dress Barn, The Gymboree Corp., J.C. Penney Company, J. Crew Group, Jones Apparel Group, Lady Bryant, The Limited, The May Department, Nordstrom, Oshkosh B’Gosh, Sears Roebuck and company, Tommy Hilfiger, Wal-Mart and Warnaco Group. It then becomes a question of solidarity not to patronize these companies/stores.
4 Central Intelligence Agency briefing, “Global Trafficking in Women and Children: Assessing the Magnitude”, April 1999.
5 For this very reason, it is better when meeting beggars anywhere to purchase on the spot some healthy food and wait to ensure they eat the food instead of being compelled to hand it over to their traffickers who may be watching from nearby. This is often the case in the cities of India.
6 “Japan Reports Rise in Foreigners Forced into Prostitution”, Agence France Presse, April 6, 1998.
7 Rey Koslowski, “Economic Globalization, Human Smuggling and Global Governance”, in Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by David Kyle and Rey Koslowski. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2001. p. 340.
8 Such abject poverty in so many countries this author lays squarely to blame on the heads of the leaders of those countries. P.R. Sarkar has stated in the book Supreme Expression, Part II that “Today there is catastrophe and misery in the human society and there is one reason: defective leadership of society. People blindly follow even the unintelligent leaders. The leaders hypnotize and attract thousands with their tall talks, gesture and other dramatics. You should know that the poverty and misery of people in any country are the sins of the leaders. True leaders should always be vigilant and think how to work best for the human society; they must be ever cautious that under their guidance the people are not led to darkness, death and immorality.”
9 Amy O’Neill Richard, “International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery and Organized Crime”, November 1999.
10 Prabhat R. Sarkar, The Great Universe: Discourses on Society, Ananda Marga Publications.
11 Anti-Slavery website: http://www.iabolish.com/today/background/worldwiwde-evil.htm
12 Ibid.
13 Anti-Slavery International. http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/antislavery/childlabour.htm
14 Human Rights Watch, Fingers to the Bone: United States Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers, June 2000.
15 Ted C. Fishman, “The Joys of Global Investment”, Harpers, February 1997, pp. 35-44.
16 Their 2001 Anti-Slavery Award went to the Association for Community Development, honored for its relentless fight against human trafficking in Bangladesh. They are located on the Indian border and in 1999 founded a shelter for trafficked victims so as to rehabilitate them from once again being trafficked.
17 Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, The Thoughts of P.R. Sarkar, Ananda Marga Publications, Calcutta, 1991, p. 137.
18 Singapore is an excellent example of a government that has taken on the responsibility to check all crime by meting out harsh penalties. As a example, I read in the Singapore Strait Times in 1998 that a man who had mildly molested a girl early morning on her way to school was given a sentence of 17 years. This is in stark contrast to American laws where if a man rapes a woman he will get a far lighter sentence than if he had killed a deer in the off-season which also gets a 17-year sentence in Kentucky, USA. A husband who murders his wife is sentenced to anywhere from one to four years in prison maximum. If there are no harsh punishments for offenders, it is natural for those offenses to remain in the society and to increase. It is due to the callous shameful indifference of the politicians.
19 One source mentioned that today American children are also being kidnapped and enslaved for sex or labor in sweatshops. As there was no further documentation on this in any other source, I did not put it in the paper.
20 Ann Jordan (Director, Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons, International Human Rights Law Group), “Trafficking in Human Beings: The Slavery That Surrounds Us”,
http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itgic/0801/ijge/gj05.htm
21 Acarya Krtashivananda Avadhuta, “The Necessity and Prerequisites of a World Government”, www.proutworld.org/ideology/leadership/wg.htm
22 Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, Ohio University Press, 1985, p. 309.
23 Sohail Inayatullah, “World Government, Globalization and UN Reform”, http://www.proutworld.org/ideology/leadership/futunandwg.htm

Bibliography
Anti-Slavery-US: http://www.iabolish.com/today/background/worldwide-evil.htm

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