“Departure for the coffee harvest by ox cart, Vale do Paraíba, Brazil, c. 1885” (image courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles)
Of all of the countries in the Americas, Brazil imported the most slaves from Africa and was the last to officially abolish slavery. While slavery may have been abolished officially with the signing of the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) by Princesa Isabel on May 13, 1888, forced labor, or “trabalho escravo”, took its place.
Forced labor, which the International Labor Organization (ILO) defines as involving “degrading work conditions and the impossibility of leaving the employer owing to fraudulent debts and the presence of armed guards,” was officially acknowledged by the State in 1995. That same year, Brazil’s Ministry of Labor initiated a Special Mobile Enforcement Group to track down companies suspected of using slave workers.
In 2002, the ILO and the Brazilian government initiated a technical cooperation project called “Combating Forced Labour”. Since then, around 50,000 workers have been freed from slave-like conditions in Brazil.
Yet there is more work to be done as the practice continues to this day. This month saw the publication of a “dirty list” by the human rights group Reporter Brazil, which named and shamed 340 Brazilian companies caught employing people in slave-like conditions between May 2013 and May 2015. The companies had previously been identified and fined by Brazil’s Ministry of Labor, which accused them of using slave labor, forced labor, and employing workers for little or no pay in degrading conditions.
Companies were associated with clothing sweatshops, farming and cattle ranching, timber and charcoal production, and construction. More than 1,500 adults and 5,500 children were released during 2014.
While Reporter Brazil used the country’s Freedom of Information Act to reveal the names of companies and individuals found by government inspectors to use slave labor, the practice of tracking down forced labor in Brazil is a dangerous one. Three Brazilian judicial officials were murdered in January 2004 while looking into allegations of slavery on ranches near the nation’s capital, Brasília.
The following month, government inspectors discovered 32 slave workers on the ranch of right-wing Senator João Ribeiro in the northern state of Pará. The officials said the captives worked seven days a week without pay and had no running water or toilets.
In 2009, the ILO estimated that between 25,000-40,000 people were being exploited in Brazil, primarily in the states of Pará and Mato Grosso. Other organizations such as The Global Slavery Index put the number much higher in 2015, at around 155,000. These workers are primarily recruited from the cities of Brazil’s impoverished Nordeste region.
Recruiters, often referred to as “gatos” (cats), lure the poor with promises of good pay for hard work, and some are told the cost of their transportation will be deducted from future wages. The workers are then transported hundreds of kilometers away to work in logging camps, or on ranches raising cattle or tending to crops. Many workers are only told once they arrive at the camp or ranch that they will now be responsible for paying the costs of their transportation, which are often inflated.
In addition, if they are held in collection points for days or weeks, all food, housing and other expenses they incur are deducted from their future wages—usually at inflated prices. And the price-gouging does not end there. Since the camp or ranch is typically isolated from nearby cities or towns and transportation is limited, employers often charge a premium for bringing such provisions as food, drink, and other essentials to the site.
When you add the inflated upfront costs to the ongoing necessities of food, drink and shelter, it is little wonder the typical worker quickly becomes trapped economically. Why does the typical worker stay when he or she realizes his predicament? Isolation, threats, violence and sometimes homicide can make it a difficult and dangerous choice.
What can be done to curb the practice of slavery and forced labor in Brazil? The government has already developed a database of offenders, yet the aforementioned mobile inspection group could be strengthened, as could the rehabilitation program for former slaves which grants them three months pay, builds job skills and offers them legal assistance.
A national pact has also been initiated with the help of ILO. It has been signed by almost 200 hundred private and public companies since 2005, obliging them to remove from their supply chains any inputs produced with the involvement of forced labor.
The efforts of the Brazilian government to combat forced labor, 120 years after the abolishment of slavery, have to date been laudatory, but must continue and intensify.
The post Slavery and Forced Labor in Brazil appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.
Suite aux récentes violences qui touchent la Turquie, avec notamment l’attentat qui a eu lieu mercredi 17 février dernier à Ankara, nous vous invitons à relire le dossier sur la Turquie et le(s) Kurdistan(s) du Politique étrangère n°2/2014, à commencer par l’introduction de Dorothée Schmid, responsable du programme Turquie contemporaine à l’Ifri.
« En novembre 2013 le maître de la Turquie, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recevait avec les honneurs Massoud Barzani, président du Gouvernement régional du Kurdistan (GRK) irakien, à Diyarbakır, « capitale » kurde de Turquie. Le même Barzani, qui tient efficacement tête au gouvernement de Bagdad, était quelques mois plus tôt à Paris le héros d’une campagne d’affichage vantant le Kurdistan irakien comme « îlot de stabilité au Moyen-Orient ». Au même moment, d’autres Kurdes commençaient à découper en Syrie des enclaves pacifiques en marge de la guerre civile, combattant au passage des groupes djihadistes craints de tous. En Iran même, les guérilleros du Parti de la vie libre au Kurdistan (Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê, PJAK), cousins du Parti des travailleurs du Kurdistan (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK), semblent hésiter sur la tactique à privilégier face à la répression des mollahs.
Ces instantanés révèlent une réalité inattendue : le Moyen-Orient vit aujourd’hui un moment kurde. Éternels oubliés de l’histoire, les Kurdes s’imposent partout sur la carte régionale, et pas comme on les attendait. À rebours de l’imagerie bien ancrée du peshmerga et de l’activisme révolutionnaire, ils font désormais beaucoup de politique, et leur quête de respectabilité contraste avec les errements de régimes qui les ont réprimés pendant des décennies.
Le retournement de situation est réellement spectaculaire : en 2009, Hamit Bozarslan décrivait encore dans un ouvrage de référence[1] la logique de sécurité collective unissant la Syrie, l’Iran et la Turquie dans une même obsession du danger séparatiste kurde, et qui débouchait partout sur des pratiques d’assimilation et de répression. L’auteur plaçait alors son espoir de progrès dans le GRK, seule entité politique à l’époque en mesure d’incarner un destin kurde indépendant. Aujourd’hui, le rapport des forces s’est inversé un peu partout à la faveur des puissantes dynamiques croisées à l’œuvre dans la région : poussée démocratique, réaction autoritaire, délitement des frontières issues des accords de Sykes-Picot de 1916. Ce contexte encourage la quête d’autonomie des Kurdes au sein des États, voire leur propre quête d’État. La perspective d’arrangements transkurdes augmente encore leur poids critique ; et l’exploitation des ressources au Kurdistan irakien et en Syrie les rend potentiellement riches. De variable d’ajustement, les Kurdes deviennent ainsi faiseurs de rois : ils peuvent ébranler en Irak le pouvoir du Premier ministre arabe chiite Nouri-al-Maliki, tandis qu’Erdoğan doit constamment rechercher leurs voix pour conforter son emprise sur la Turquie, et que la rébellion et le régime syriens se disputent leur appui.
La conjoncture leur est certes particulièrement favorable, mais les Kurdes ne sont pas surgis du néant. « Minorité » nombreuse – les estimations concernant leur nombre total, souvent intentionnellement sous-évalué pour des raisons politiques, variant généralement entre 30 et 40 millions (15 ou 20 % de la population en Turquie) –, ils ont toujours joué un rôle politique non négligeable dans l’histoire du Moyen-Orient. Vassaux ou alliés des empires, ils tenaient une place importante dans le dispositif d’équilibre entre l’Iran safavide et la puissance ottomane. Floués par le traité de Lausanne, qui escamotait en 1923 les promesses franco-britanniques d’un État, dispersés entre des patries imposées, ils sont devenus le révélateur des excès et fragilités de la culture politique du Moyen-Orient : dialectique entre autorité de l’État et communautarismes, cercle vicieux de la révolte et de la répression, instrumentalisation des minorités au service de conflits régionaux – on se rappellera les massacres perpétrés par Saddam Hussein contre une partie de la population de son pays en marge de la guerre Iran-Irak, et surtout le drame du bombardement chimique de Halabja en 1988 (5 000 morts).
Ce contexte violent a renforcé, tout au long du xxe siècle, une perception orientalisante et romantique des Kurdes, issue de la période ottomane[2]. Victimes et résistants, ils emportaient l’adhésion des militants tardifs du droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes. Dans le même temps, la militarisation de leur lutte nationale – qui a tout de même amené la Syrie et la Turquie au bord du conflit en 1998, avec pour enjeu le contrôle des activités du PKK – a permis aux Turcs de les étiqueter comme terroristes. En France même, leur image évolue maintenant entre deux pôles opposés : le mystérieux assassinat de trois militantes du PKK en plein Paris au mois de janvier 2013 a révélé la persistance d’une violence opaque, dont on ne sait si elle est d’ordre politique ou criminel ; mais le succès critique et public du « western kurde » irakien de Hineer Salim, My Sweet Pepper Land (2013), acte un changement de registre en cours : le sujet kurde se dé-marginalise, il devient sympathique au-delà de petits cercles d’initiés, et peut même être traité sur le registre de l’humour.
Victimes de l’histoire, ou d’eux-mêmes ? La vitalité de la poussée identitaire kurde attire aujourd’hui l’attention sur une diversité qui, en réalité, a toujours été porteuse de divisions. Domestiqués et largement acculturés par les États dans lesquels ils vivent, les Kurdes ont eux-mêmes toujours été organisés en clans puissants, parlé des langues diverses, transcrites aussi depuis le xxe siècle dans des alphabets différents (carte 1). La projection d’une identité kurde commune doit beaucoup au travail de leur diaspora européenne, longtemps structurée autour du noyau des Kurdes de Turquie, majoritaires. Les dynamiques politiques aujourd’hui à l’œuvre sur les terres d’origine des Kurdes posent à terme l’inévitable question de l’organisation politique globale et du leadership de la communauté. Entre Abdullah Öcalan et Massoud Barzani, les Kurdes syriens enfoncent un nouveau coin, qui complique encore la perspective d’ensemble. Reste à comprendre si les Kurdes souhaitent aujourd’hui avoir leur propre État, ou s’ils veulent plutôt trouver avec les États existants des arrangements politiques et sociaux viables, permettant de dépasser définitivement le négationnisme identitaire pratiqué jusqu’ici. »
[1]. H. Bozarslan, Conflit kurde : le brasier oublié du Moyen-Orient, Paris, Autrement, 2009.
[2]. Sur la politisation des études kurdes, dans des contextes et avec des objectifs variés, de la période ottomane à la guerre froide, voir l’article de S. Alsancakli, « Des kurdologues et des études qui font l’histoire », Qantara, juillet 2013, p. 54-55.
Retrouvez les autres articles du dossier sur Cairn.info :
– Les Kurdes et l’option étatique, par Hamit Bozarslan
– Turquie : le mouvement kurde à l’heure du « processus de paix », par Olivier Grojean
– Quelle politique kurde pour l’AKP ?, par Yohanan Benhaim
– Les paradoxes du printemps kurde en Syrie, par Jordi Tejel
– L’introuvable frontière du Kurdistan d’Irak, par Cyril Roussel
S’abonner à Politique étrangère.
In most cases the scenario is similar: over the past decade, oil exporting countries used excessive revenues from oil to expand public services, or simply pursue populist policy in order to buy political stability. Once oil prices started to fall, the budgets did not shrink accordingly, which created a wide gap between the oil revenues and swelling fiscal demands.
In order to stem the rapid outflow of foreign reserves, the governments were forced to devaluate their national currencies. An unwanted consequence is almost always the rise in inflation and household prices, along with a decline in living standards and stalled economic growth.
Here are the five most affected countries by this devaluation trend.
AzerbaijanThe former Soviet republic is the first country to request a $4 billion emergency loan from the IMF and the World Bank in order to cover losses caused by low oil prices. Although the Azerbaijani government officially denied the need for a bailout, the country is in dire straits.
Income from oil and gas makes up around 75% of the country’s revenues, and the recent devaluation of the national currency manat by more than 30% incited public protests that might easily disrupt the political stability of the authoritarian regime of president Ilham Aliyev.
VenezuelaVenezuela has gone through an equally depressing scenario since July 2014. Although the country’s economy wasn’t sustainable even with triple digit oil prices, a prolonged period of low oil prices brought the economy close to a breaking point. Over the past two years, the national currency, the bolívar, lost more than 90% of its value. According to the IMF’s forecast, inflation will reach 720% in 2016.
Venezuela’s domestic woes are further aggravated by the government’s efforts to limit imports in order to raise enough cash to stave off default.
There is, however, an increasing danger that with a further slump in oil revenues, and with sovereign bonds yielding at around 30%, Caracas might default on its debts at some point in 2016. The real question is, how long will the Maduro regime be able to suppress the growing social discontent and increased pressures from the opposition-controlled parliament?
NigeriaAfrica’s largest economy was hard hit by the falling oil prices. The national currency, the naira, dropped against the dollar by 25% over the past year. On January 30, the Nigerian government requested a $3.5 billion loan from the IMF and the African Development Bank to plug its $15 billion budget gap.
The country’s oil revenues are expected to fall by 70% in 2016, while the hard currency reserves almost halved from $50 to $28 billion, and the state’s emergency fund went from $22 billion in 2009 to $2.3 billion currently.
AngolaAngola earned around $500 billion from oil exports between 2000 and 2014. But today the country’s economy is among the hardest hit in Africa. Inflation is at 14% and the national currency, the kwanza, devaluated by more than 50% since January 2015.
The country earns 75% of its fiscal revenues from oil exports, which make up around 95% of total exports. As a consequence, José Eduardo dos Santos’ regime is starting to feel the pressure from well-organized public protests that might turn into more widespread unrest if the economic situation continues to worsen.
RussiaRussia is going through some tough economic times, as the toxic combination of Western sanctions and low oil prices is devastating the country’s economy and living standards. Since June 2014, the rouble devaluated by more than 100% against the dollar. GDP is expected to shrink by 3.7% in 2016 alone.
How do these numbers affect the everyday lives of average Russians? Real wages fell by almost 10% in 2015, and the percentage of households that cannot afford sufficient food or clothing has increased from 22% to 39% over the previous year.
Although Russia is not an average developing, oil-exporting country, the severity of Russia’s economic and potential political troubles, which might come along with the low oil prices, puts the country well inside this infamous club.
These five countries are already feeling the effects of low oil prices and devaluation. And there are more candidates: Brazil, Ecuador, and even the rich Gulf countries are starting to feel the pinch, and it seems that the end to depressed oil prices is nowhere near.
This article was originally published by Global Risk Insights and written by GRI analyst Ante Batovic
The post The Five Oil Exporters Most Affected by Currency Devaluation appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.
Source: Reuters
Written by Shehab Al Makahleh
Turkey, long hailed as a bastion of secular democracy in the Muslim world, could be spiraling toward an all-out civil war as conflicts between Turkish security forces and Kurds as well as other ethnic minorities continue to escalate. These conflicts have been exacerbated by the catastrophic war in neighboring Syria, which has created a refugee crisis in Turkey, expanded the government’s campaign against Kurds in Iraq and Syria, and pushed Turkish officials into collusion with ISIS.
The lurch toward autocratic rule by President Recep Tayyib Erdogan has long worried regional and Western observers, with curbs on freedom of speech and political repression of the Kurds. That policy has taken a bloody turn with the repeated bombing of Syrian and Iraqi Kurds and, since July 2015, escalating crackdowns at home.
The murder in November of Tahir Elci, a leading Kurdish human rights advocate and president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association in southeastern Turkey has dramatically increased tensions inside Turkey and put the Kurdish issue—seemingly settled only a few years ago—back on the agenda.
Turkey has other problems to contend with. The Russians—playing an increasingly important role in the region—have long maintained that Turkey is receiving oil from ISIS, through official complicity, illicit criminal networks, or some combination. The Associated Press corroborated Russia’s account by stating that upwards of 30,000 barrels of oil are being extracted each day by ISIS from Syria, with much of it ending up in Turkey.
While Erdogan and his ruling party have not been sanctioned by the U.S. or anyone in the West for that matter, one can only conclude that this willful blindness means that the U.S. is fearful for Erdogan’s political stability, not to mention Russia’s ascendant position in the region.
On the economic front, Turkey has recently lost a lifeline of non-energy trade with Russia–including agriculture and textile projects, tourism and construction—that supports tens of thousands of jobs in the country. It was severed following Turkey’s downing of a Russian plane flying combat sorties in Syria, a dangerous move by the Turks that could have easily (and perhaps justifiably) led to a Russian counterattack and a larger war involving NATO.
Russia held its fire, responding calmly when many expected escalation, and instead imposed economic sanctions against Turkey. This squeeze on vital elements of the Turkish economy could give rise to further internal discontent in the country. Lest we forget, bread riots helped start the civil war that toppled Egypt’s Mubarak, and economic issues sparked the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia.
A more subtle but no less powerful force is also at work against Turkey: regional resentment. The region has a long memory of the “Ottoman yoke” which was ended 100 years ago by the Hashemite-led Arab revolt and finally the expulsion of the Turks from Arab lands.
Turkey’s brash role in the region today—backed implicitly by U.S. and NATO firepower–is seen by some as coming at the expense of its Arab neighbors, especially as more evidence on Turkish involvement in illicit trade with ISIS grows. Turkey’s assertive role in a new regional triangular power structure with Saudi Arabia and Qatar has also created greater diplomatic isolation from much of the region.
The confluence of these internal and external factors has put unprecedented pressure on the Turkish state as a viable entity. The conflict with the Kurds seems to be tearing the nation at its seams—the very idea of the secular, pluralist state is at risk.
But other clouds—economic, diplomatic, and military—are looming over the horizon. What happens next is not entirely in Erdogan’s control. Will Russia’s military restraint hold? Will the fragile regional alliances against ISIS shift against Turkey? Will ISIS itself continue to shake the Turkish people’s confidence? Or will it be Erdogan’s own policies that ultimately undermines the Turkish state?
Shehab Al Makahleh is a journalist and co-founder of Geo-strategic and Political Studies of the Middle East Media.
The post Could Turkey Implode? appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.