“This is a testament to when we are not vigilant in defense of human rights what can happen. Obviously, for an African-American president, to be able to visit this site gives me even greater motivation in terms of human rights around the world.”
—- President Obama, after his 2013 visit in Senegal to a former slave fort used in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
As uplifting as these words may sound, President Obama’s “motivation” and vigilance “in defense of human rights around the world,” at least in regard to the enslavement of black Africans, apparently ends with the now defunct Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For once again, the Obama administration has shamefully failed to raise a loud voice against the persecution and imprisonment of anti-slavery activists in the world’s worst slave state, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
The United Nations (UN) human rights office earlier this month called for a review of the conviction of a remarkable and fearless Mauritanian anti-slavery activist, Biram Ould Dah Abeid, who, like Obama’s Kenyan relatives, is black African. Biram and two others were sentenced to two years in prison last January, according to Amnesty International (AI), for having staged a demonstration last November “to raise the awareness about land rights for people of slave descent (land slavery).”