RUTHFULLY YOURS

A window slightly opening or simply more window dressing?

That is the question anti-slavery activists are asking after a court in the West African country of Mauritania surprisingly jailed two persons last month for owning slaves.

“Two men were… handed five-year prison sentences – one year to be served and four years suspended – and ordered to pay compensation to two victims in only the country’s second ever prosecution for slavery since it was criminalized in 2007,” reported a Thomson Reuters story.

The activists’ hesitation to heap praise on Mauritania for the recent legal decision is understandable. Mauritania is regarded as the world’s worst slave state, achieving this number one ranking on the Global Slavery Index in 2013. It was also the last country in the world to outlaw this obscenity in 1981, while declaring it a crime against humanity only last year.

The one person successfully prosecuted since criminalization in 2007 served only four months of a two year sentence for owning two boys, aged 10 and 11. In last month’s case, the maximum prison sentence the slaveholder could have received was ten years. This was doubled to 20 years in 2015.

While Mauritania’s top ranking as a slave state is not in dispute, the actual number of slaves in this largely desert country is. Some are owned by nomadic tribes that are often on the move, which makes it difficult to determine a true figure. But the estimated number is about 140,000 in a country of 3.5 million people. Indigenous anti-slavery organizations say the number may even be as high as 600,000.

The slaves in Mauritania are all black Africans, called the Haritin class. They are chattel slaves, belonging body and soul to their masters, who can buy and sell them at will. Children born to slaves also become property of their parents’ masters.

For a decade, the top search result for “EU referendum” on Google was the political blog EU Referendum. Then it was abruptly displaced by solidly pro-EU media outlets. It appeared that someone at Google had decided that search traffic should be driven to pro-EU sites. Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish columnist who covers, among other things, migrant violence, at Gatestone, had her Facebook account deleted after posting a video detailing migrant rapes in Sweden.

These seemingly isolated incidents fit into a larger pattern as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter helped create and signed a “code of conduct” banning hate speech. Facebook had already become notorious for its political agenda while Twitter had created a Trust and Safety Council filled with extremist left-wing groups like Feminist Frequency to censor the politically incorrect.

Google has historically been a pro-free speech outlier. Its politics have never been ambiguous, but it has eschewed the overt censorship of some of its new partners working to keep the EU free of political dissent. But the code of conduct goes well beyond censorship. The companies will be working to strengthen their “ongoing partnerships with civil society organisations who will help flag content that promotes incitement to violence and hateful conduct”. That amounts to empowering left-wing advocacy groups to dictate content removal to major companies. It means that not only Twitter, but Facebook, Google and Microsoft will get their own Trust and Safety Council. It may be called something else. It may not even have a name. But it will have power. That’s what this really means.

And it’s only a starting point in a larger propaganda initiative.

From the Republic of China on Taiwan, freely elected President Tsai Ing-wen tells the People’s Republic of China that democracy is nothing to fear: “Democracy is a good and fine thing.”

In Beijing, the authorities tighten security and carry out arrests. When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during a visit to Canada, is questioned by a reporter about China’s human rights record, he rejects the question as “irresponsible.” He says, “We welcome goodwill suggestions but we reject groundless or unwarranted accusations.”

And so we arrive at the 27th anniversary of Tiananmen: June 4, 1989, when China’s Communist Party rulers turned the guns of the People’s Liberation Army against their own people, to end China’s 1989 democratic uprising.

Does it still matter? On many counts, 27 years is a long time. In Beijing, a generation has more than come of age with no firsthand memory of the gunfire, or of the ruts in the streets in the summer of 1989, made by the treads of tanks. Whatever China’s one-party rulers could pave over of that uprising, they have long since paved. Outside China, we now read articles such as an anonymously authored piece, published June 3, and apparently written from inside China: “China’s Youth Think Tiananmen Was So 1989.”

The implication is that Tiananmen, June 4, 1989, will fade away, officially erased inside China and antiquated abroad — a relic of the past century. The suggestion is that beyond fodder for professional historians, there will be little left except the photo of the lone man facing down a column of tanks — a symbol of heroic, peaceful defiance, adopted by the world, but increasingly detached from today’s China.

Except that’s wrong. Tiananmen has not gone away. It haunts China still. It haunts us all. It was too big to just disappear.

Tiananmen was not solely a student protest, though the students occupying Beijing’s vast Tiananmen Square were the epicenter. It was a mass uprising, spreading through the major cities of China — of students, workers, ordinary people desperate for justice. It was an uprising in which the murderously repressive apparatus of the world’s most populous communist state lost control of its country’s capital for two full weeks.

It is important to understand just how big that was, and what determination and courage it took on the part of China’s people to defy their government. The Soviet-engendered communist experiment of the 20th century, responsible for the deaths of scores of millions, was starting to crack up. But in the spring of 1989, that had not happened yet. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen; the Ceausescus still ruled Romania; the Soviet Union still stood. In Burma, beggared by decades of the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” the military regime just a year earlier, in 1988, had put down mass protests by killing thousands.

China’s uprising, in 1989, was the leading edge of a desperate bid by people living under the brutal constraints of communism to break free. Materially, they were far more deprived than are most of China’s more than 1.3 billion people today. But their chief demands were not for more food, or lucre, or any of the things that the children of the free West are currently demanding under the rubric of “free stuff.” What they demanded was democracy, accountable government, freedom of speech and assembly. They wanted liberty. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Europe agreed to open its borders to Syrian refugees in response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our age, officials assured the Western world: we’ve got this. There will be no jihadists among them; and if there are, we’ll be sure they won’t get in.

But it wasn’t exactly true. Jihadists, we now know, have been among them. They have gotten through. And now those same officials are starting to admit things might get even worse.

On Saturday, only weeks after Germany’s national security agency confessed it had been alerted to the presence of jihadists who posed as asylum-seekers, German police arrested three Syrians on charges of planning a major attack in Dusseldorf. The arrests followed a confession by a fourth suspect, arrested earlier in France, who had informed officials there about the plot. All four suspects, reported the Washington Post, had traveled to Europe along the well-worn, so-called Balkan Route. Prosecutors say the attack aimed to kill “as many bystanders as possible with guns and other explosives,” as had a plot foiled days earlier in Antwerp.

Europeans already are on edge as a result of the multiple terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels over the past 18 months. But news of these arrests, coupled with heightened concerns among German intelligence officials, alarmed communities both in Germany and in neighboring countries. Yet despite this development, intelligence officials in the Netherlands, which shares a border with Germany, maintained until just last week that there is minimal chance that any asylum seeker there is a terrorist.

That changed suddenly on Tuesday, with the disclosure by the same French suspect that the militants arrested in Dusseldorf had been part of a group of 20, divided between asylum centers there and in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.

Not that this should be a surprise. Since the beginning of the crisis, Holland’s screening of migrants has been sloppy. A report released in May by Holland’s Ministry of Security and Justice noted that several screening centers were careless and inadequate, failing to meet established standards. Perhaps as a result of hastened procedural demands as the stream of refugees has increased, neither computer systems nor inspectors seems prepared to meet the challenges: as Dutch daily the Telegraaf observed, the system for checking fingerprints crashes daily; document screeners fail several times a week; and “it is unclear whether all baggage of the asylum-seekers is being properly inspected.”