The Clay Mine and Other Matters

A friend, Hamza shared a searing well-known poem : ‘Mitti Ki Khan’ by Afzal Ahmed Syed. Hamza reads it here for us. 

It describes the fate of those tied to work in slavery like conditions. 

Some 40 million people or one in every 200 people are languishing in slavery across the globe, according to the International Labor Organization. This might well be a conservative figure as many forms of slavery are invisible and largely unreported. Yet the figure is more than three times higher than the roughly 13 million people captured and sold as slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries in the transatlantic slave trade.

About 70 percent of slaves are women and girls, while children account for 25 percent or 10 million slaves worldwide.

Slavery is a highly lucrative business in the modern world that generates as much as US$150 billion in profits every year.

Slavery is a condition or practice that people accept against their will, ranging from forced labor, debt bondage, forced marriage and human trafficking to the commercial sex industry.

China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines and Russia account for 60 percent of modern-day slaves.

Endemic poverty, unsafe migration, weak governance and abuses of cultural practices, are all blamed for fuelling slavery in Asian nations. But a major driving force is a lack of anti-slavery legislation in many countries, which means one cannot be prosecuted and punished in a criminal court for putting another human being into slavery.

Some 94 out 193 member states have not passed laws prohibiting slavery.  Most of these countries are in Asia. Most Asian nations have anti-trafficking and labor laws but such legislation does not necessarily address slavery.

Asia is both a source and a destination of human trafficking, one of the many forms of slavery.

Global supply chains for agriculture, construction, fishing, clothing, fashion, beauty and the sex industry are feeding grounds for trafficking. The global sex industry has some 4.5 million women and girls trapped in perpetual slavery and about two-thirds of them are in the Asia-Pacific.

Every year, tens of thousands of poor young girls and women from relatively impoverished regions like South Asia are trafficked and sold into the sex industry in well-off countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Middle East and even Europe.

India is home to the largest numbers of slaves, ranging from 14 to 18 million with women and girls making up the majority. It is a major source country for sex trafficking to Southeast and East Asia and a prime destination of sex trafficking from other South Asian countries. According to a 2017 study, India has around 16 million sex workers and about 37 percent are minors.

A common and cruel form of modern-day slavery in South Asia is debt bondage. Under this unlawful and humiliating system, men, women, children and even entire families are enslaved by the debt holder to repay debts through endless labor. The debt holder often squeezes laborers with psychological pressure and physical violence, denies freedom of movement and offers a lump-sum amount that is never enough for survival. A bonded worker remains enslaved until death.

Debt bondage is still prevalent in agriculture, brick kilns, construction sites, rice mills, embroidery and garment factories, stone quarries and even private houses. Pakistan has an estimated 2.1 million bonded laborers out of 3.1 million people living in slavery. The bonded labor system still exists in agriculture, brick making, carpet weaving, mining, fishing, domestic work and handicraft production, where a significant number of laborers are children.

The above referenced poem entitled 'Clay Mine' allegorically refers to their situation.

There is a shocking article on the plight of workers in the tea industry in Bangladesh. From what I could gather, several large tea estates are still owned by the British. 

The Clay Mine poem was written in the context of those selling everything they had to be able to migrate to the middle east to make a decent living. But many low-level workers suffer terribly in unjust systems in the middle east to this day. 

Sadly, it appears that some Western democracies are making up their labour shortages via the same very exploitative systems.