http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=813618&page=1

June 2, 2005 - Slavery may seem like a historical relic, but in many parts 
of the world servitude remains prevalent. The United Nations estimates that 
there are 27 million slaves in the world, including victims of human 
trafficking, debt bondage, prostitution, child labor and serfdom.
And little seems to be reversing that trend.

In the Western African nation of Niger, one of the poorest countries on 
earth, despite being prohibited, slavery is rooted in the traditional 
customs and the culture of the country. There are more than 800,000 slaves 
in Niger - more than seven percent of the population - and although some of 
their conditions have improved over the years, slavery remains a fact of 
life in this Saharan country.


Trafficking Report

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is presenting a State Department report 
Friday on worldwide modern-day slavery: human trafficking. The 150-country 
"Trafficking in Persons Report" focuses on the millions of people across 
the world who are victims of servitude and debt bondage. Rice hopes to 
raise awareness to counter the phenomenon of forced labor trafficking. This 
type of slavery, involving millions of people every year, happens most 
frequently in an individual's own country and is often based on culture, 
heritage or lack of economic well-being.

ABC News traveled to Niger with the help of a London-based Anti-Slavery 
International to assess the situation of slavery in the landlocked nation 
where two-thirds of the population lives below the poverty line.


Scars of Slavery

Ioukhede carries the scars of a lifetime. She works long, hard hours in the 
sweltering heat of the African desert in Tichinbardei, 600 miles north of 
Niger's capital of Niamey. She is a slave. "I am skinny not by nature but 
by the ill treatment I get," she said. "The day I come back with a broken 
bucket will be a bad day. I will be beaten."

She's afraid to rebel because she heard that her master had once killed a 
slave. "Some days I look for something to hit my master with but I'm afraid 
he'll turn around and might even kill me," she said.

Ioukhede lives with 50 other slaves in a camp and serves masters that live 
in the surrounding area. Their masters are Tuareg nomads, descendents of an 
ancient desert culture that hasn't changed much in thousands of years. 
Consider it an inflexible caste system where the masters are at the top and 
the slaves lie on the bottom. Life is ordered with the men herding the 
animals while the women fetch water and prepare food.



"The life of a slave is no better than a mule," said Romana Cachiolli, the 
Africa-Programme officer at Anti-Slavery International. "They really work 
from before dawn to after dusk doing the most menial tasks," she adds.

Stand Up for Your Rights


Things started to change a bit thanks to Ilguilas Weila. Weila, president 
and founder of Timidria, which means solidarity, a civil rights 
organization, is Niger's equivalent of a Martin Luther King Jr.. Since the 
1960s, he's been fighting for the rights of slaves and the poor in his 
native country.



"Traditional slavery is the oldest, the oldest slavery which the world has 
known, and this slavery is a product of inheritance," he said. "All the 
slaves that we have here today are slaves from the ancestors, their 
parents, their grandparents. They are slaves of inheritance."



In Ioukhede's case, her master's son inherited her. "I do the same work 
that my parents did for my master." She has five children, two boys and 
three girls, and they all also belong to her master.



Cachiolli says that children are taken away from their mothers to destroy 
the family links so slaves don't really know who their ancestors are. "As 
you can imagine in Africa, that's a very important tradition, to know who 
your parents are, so that's how slavery is perpetuated," she said.




Religious Excuse


One Muslim holy man explains Niger's slave policy as a religious phenomena.



"According to the Koran, a slave is a person who refuses to become a 
Muslim," said Al-aji Idriss Abandaba, Imam of Niamey. "This means that if 
you are a Muslim you cannot be a slave."

But critics say slavery has been around a lot longer than Islam and that 
the arrival of religion did nothing to break the chains of tradition. Some 
masters may even be accused of using religion as a way to brainwash their 
slaves and control them.



"Islam assisted in the indoctrination of slaves through the use of 
religion, by saying for example if you disobey your master, you will not 
access paradise, hence your paradise is in the hands of your master," said 
Weila.

Easier Said Than Done


Slaveholders' dominance may be waning, however.



"Slavery is a state of an individual on which is practiced attributes the 
rights of ownership, it's a human being who is the object of another," said 
Masouse-a-Damou, the secretary general and minister of justice of Niger, 
reading from the text of a new anti-slavery.



Before this law was enacted, slaves did not technically exist. They were 
non-people, they weren't even defined in the legal system, but with the 
help of lawyers like Chebou Abdoura Hamam, Ioukhede is now recognized as a 
citizen and a person.



"The slave is someone who has been molded for generations, that is a form 
of fatalism, they have accepted their status," said Abdoura Hamam. "They 
think that it is God that says that we are born slaves, so there is no need 
to fight against it.

According to the Ministry of Justice it's a criminal offense to reduce a 
human to slavery in Niger, punishable by law with a minimum sentence of 10 
years to a maximum of 30 years.



Enacting the law criminalizing slavery is the first step, but applying it 
is a different matter. Many of the government ministers are from 
slaveholders' families, and are being lobbied hard by the traditional 
leaders to protect the status quo. In April, the government of Niger 
announced that slavery no longer existed.

But slaveholders are still clinging to their "inheritance," and have more 
or less disregarded the new law.




Losing Their Defendant
Worse still, the slaves have now lost their key campaigner and defendant. 
Weila was arrested and imprisoned at the end of April on charges of 
fraudulently trying to raise money from Anti-Slavery International. The 
nongovernmental organization denies the allegations. Weila has been refused 
bail and no date has been set for his trial.



Cachiolli says Weila is guilty of one thing: he lifted the lid on slavery 
in Niger. "The authorities are now very irritated that so much 
international attention is now being focused on Niger, particularly slavery 
in Niger," she said.




If you would like more information about slavery in Niger and around the 
world, Click Here.






ABC News' Oliver Steeds filed this report for "Nightline."