The night of August 22 to 23, 1791, in Santo Domingo--today Haiti and the Dominican Republic--saw the beginning of the uprising that would play a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. It is against this background that the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition is marked on August 23 each year.

According to the United Nations this International Day is intended to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of the people. In accordance with the goals of the intercultural project “The Slave Route”, it should offer an opportunity for collective consideration of the historic causes, the methods and the consequences of this tragedy. It is also a day to analyse interactions to which it has given rise between Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. 

The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) Director-General Audrey Azoulay, has invited the Ministers of Culture of all Member States to organize events every year to mark this event, involving the people of their country and in particular young people, educators, artistes and intellectuals.   

This day was first marked in a number of countries, in particular in Haiti on August 23 1998) and Goree in Senegal on August 23, 1999. 

In a message the UNESCO chief says on this day the world should honour the memory of the men and women who, in Saint-Domingue in 1791, revolted and paved the way for the end of slavery and dehumanization. We should honour their memory and that of all the other victims of slavery, for whom they stood. To draw lessons from this history, we must lay this system bare, deconstruct the rhetorical and pseudoscientific mechanisms used to justify it; we must refuse to accept any concession or apologia which itself constitutes a compromising of principles. Such lucidity is the fundamental requirement for the reconciliation of memory and the fight against all present-day forms of enslavement, which continue to affect millions of people, particularly women and children, the UNESCO chief says   

In Sri Lanka itself there may be no direct slave trade now. But for the past few decades, more than 1.5 million people, mostly women and girls, have gone or been forced to go to some Middle Eastern countries, where many of them work as virtual slaves. Reports say some of them work from dawn to dusk or even more and often are not given proper meals or other basic facilities. It is a shame that Sri Lankans -- including powerful politicians and multi-millionaire business people -- depend on these workers or slaves for the main source of foreign exchange amounting to more than seven billion US dollars a year. Last year this worked out to be about 7.9% of our gross domestic product (GDP).   

Last week, 60 Sri Lankan housemaids who had suffered harassment at their Kuwait households were brought back home by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE). The Bureau said 45 of these housemaids had been sheltered at the Suraksha Detention Centre and another 15 were in the custody of the Kuwait Police. A Daily Mirror report also quoted the SLBFE as saying that 173 more housemaids were waiting at the Sri Lanka Embassy in Kuwait to return to Sri Lanka. Several housemaids claimed that they were not given salaries but were assaulted and tortured. “We escaped from the houses where we were enslaved and went seeking the shelter of Suraksha Detention Centre at the Sri Lanka Embassy in Kuwait,” the housemaids said.   

The government has been giving much publicity to its Gamperaliya and Enterprise Sri Lanka projects whereby Sri Lankans are being given interest free loans to set up enterprises mainly in the villages and provide creative, well-paid jobs for youth there. But there are questions as to how successful these projects are because men and women are still continuing to seek employment in the Middle East often paying huge amounts to shady foreign job agencies which sometimes send them into slave jobs. We hope the government will act urgently and effectively to set up village enterprises which will give creative and well-paid job opportunities for the young people. We need to remember the immortal words of a liberated slave trader, “amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”