Index on Censorship 1/2000 [antikvár]

EDITORIAL Everywhere in chains It took western média 10 years from the first substantiated report in 1986 to reveal that chattel slavery was still going on in south-western Sudan (p60). No doubt it was because we believe, want to believe, that slavery is dead. In fact, there are approximately 27 millión people around the world whose lives are completely controlled by others, and who are paid nothing. As Kevin Bales reports, slavery is alive and well, and 'the key these days is not ownership, but control through violence' (p36). The new slavery is cheap - slaves don't cost much nowadays - but highly profitable. Despite over 300 international treaties and UN conventions signed by most countries of the world, the plight of bonded labourers in India, Javanese women imprisoned in domestic slavery in Saudi Arabia, charcoal burners enslaved in Brazil makes very little impact on a worldwhere humán rights are, in theory, high on the agenda. One new version of slavery is the kidnapping or tricking of women from Eastern Europe into brothels in the West. Offered a new life with job prospects, they find themselves instead inescapably trapped into a life of prostitution. This issue of Index addresses other kinds of entrapment too. In Colombia, where fear eats the soul and only the bravest speak out, a disaffected soldier telis a journalist how he has been taught to torture, how massacres are planned, how innocent people are killed to deliver a body count required for promotion (pl56). In August this year the famous Colombian comedian, journalist and peace mediator Jaime Garzon (pl34) was assassinated, and since then five more journalists have been killed and 11 kidnapped. Our file describes the condition of a country where government, guerrillas and paramilitaries all play their part in a long standing culture of violence. Malcolm Deas (pl 16) compares the conflict in Colombia with that in Northern Ireland. The UK's Prevention of Terrorism Act (p84) was an attempt to deal with the Northern Ireland situation — it defines terrorism as the use of violence against the public for political ends. In a new bili just published by the Home Secretary that defmition has broadened to cover the threat of violence against the public or even against property. The bili alsó creates a completely new crime in Britain — that of seeking to topple foreign regimes. Where does that leave, for instance, dissident Iraqis opposed to Saddam Hussein s regime? There is a real risk that dissent will be criminalised, that political speech will be regulated, if this bili passes into law. ?