DAKAR: Mauritanian anti-slavery activists jailed last month have been tortured in detention and transferred to a remote desert location in an “intensification of repression” by the state, a leading campaigner said.
The West African nation in August jailed 13 members of the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) for up to 15 years for their role in June protests by residents of a slum in the capital Nouakchott, many of whom are former slaves. Slavery is a historical practise in Mauritania, which became the last country worldwide to legally abolish it in 1981. Today some 43,000 people or at least one percent of the population live as slaves, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. Yet other estimates put the number as high as 20 percent in a country that is a focus of activism by the modern anti-slavery movement.
The 13 activists have been tortured and were this week moved to the desert north where they are cut off from their families, doctors, and lawyers, according to members of the IRA in the northern town of Zouerate who were informed of the relocation. Mauritanian government officials did not respond for requests to comment. “This intensification of repression is equal to the intensification of the fight (against slavery),” Biram Dah Abeid, head of the IRA and an opposition politician, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Dakar, Senegal. agencies