Last week, the US Department of State released its second annual report on the worldwide extent of the phenomenon it calls "Trafficking in Persons", but which might better be called "Slavery".

The report begins with this summary: "Over the past year, at least 700,000, and possibly as many as four million men, women and children worldwide were bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slavelike conditions. In this modern form of slavery. traffickers use threats, intimidation and violence to force victims to engage in sex acts or to labour under conditions comparable to slavery for financial gain."

Just for the sake of ease of reference, let's take the lower figure as being more accurate. If one were to measure disasters by the number of their victims, regardless of whether they lived or died, then modern slavery, in one year, accounts for a far larger number - almost twice as large - than that representing the number of Americans killed in action since the Revolutionary War, more than 200 years ago. I know a statistician would say that is a terrible example of an apples-and-oranges comparison, but what on earth would a fair comparison be? The American Anti-Slavery Group, an independent body based in Boston, estimates there are 30 million people held in slavery today, and quotes the Central Intelligence Agency as suggesting that 50,000 such people are smuggled into the United States each year.

The State Department's report (available on the Internet at www.state.gov) names a number of countries it says are involved in the slave trade. They are arranged in three Tiers - Tier One, the least culpable, being those nations involved to the extent that, although they comply with US standards and are vigorous in their pursuit of traffickers, they are a destination for slave traffickers. The United States acknowledges that it itself is such a country, as are nine of the 15 European Union countries, including the United Kingdom and France.

The second Tier is the largest of the three. It includes countries which are making an effort to comply with minimum standards, but which have not yet reached first tier level.

The third Tier includes countries that the Americans say "do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance." They add that "some of these governments refuse to acknowledge the trafficking problem within their territory."

Translate the diplomatic language, and you get something like `These are countries, in it up to their necks, who could care less.' The complete list of Tier Three countries is as follows: Afghanistan, Armenia, Bahrain, Belarus, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Burma, Cambodia, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Kyrgyz Republic, Lebanon, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

I have written before about the separation of Church and State as a fundamental reason for the progress enjoyed by American-style democracies, and for the lack of it in countries where the Church is the State. Is it a coincidence that Tier Three includes some of the most prominent of the world's Islamic states? Independent watchdog groups, of which there are many, would probably enlarge the US list a bit, on the basis of their experience, to include Tier Two nations Pakistan (where making slaves of Afghani refugees is reported to be reaching epidemic proportions), India, Nepal, China and Thailand.

Television coverage of the release of the report focused, as it always seems to, on the trafficking in women who are forced into prostitution or other types of sexual slavery. That is sadly only one part of the equation.

The other part involves the kidnapping and sale of men, woman and children as labourers of one type or another. I suspect there might be a simple reason for that focus, inasmuch as the media will have miles of film footage to illustrate prostitution, but very little to illustrate slave labour.

In modern times, slavery can take many forms, including: Chattel slavery, which involves people who are kidnapped from their homes being bought and sold as slaves, or given as gifts.

Forced marriage, bonded labour, in which people are physically forced into hard labour for the repayment of a loan. Typically, the value placed on their work is such that they are unable to repay the loan during their lifetime.

Forced labour. People are recruited or forced to volunteer under threat of violence by the state, or by private individuals.

Child slavery, which involves children who are forced to work in dangerous conditions or as sex slaves. At the press conference called to release the report, Ambassador Nancy Ely-Raphel, senior adviser to the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, declined to say which countries were the worst offenders.

The independent groups all seem in no doubt, however, that the worst offenders are two countries in North Africa, Sudan and Mauritania, although the latter is not on any of the US report's lists.

To back up their claims, they use previous US estimates in asserting that in Mauritania, as many as 100,000 blacks serve Arab Berbers. These slaves are the inheritable property of their masters; any children born to slaves belonging to the master. In the Sudan, they say, a civil war has been raging for over 12 years between the Islamic government in the north and the African Christians and Animists in the south. As part of that conflict, government-armed militias raid African villages, shoot the men, and kidnap the women and children. These captives are taken to the north, where they are bought and sold, branded and bred, and stripped of their religious and cultural identities. It is claimed that women selected as concubines are genitally mutilated. Children have their Achilles tendons removed so they cannot run away.

Human Rights Watch has published a number of reports on slavery in Sudan. The organisation has accused the government of Sudan of "knowingly arming, transporting and assisting the slave-trading militia, and of not enforcing its own laws against kidnapping, assault and forced labour. They note there is no prohibition in the Sudan Criminal Code of 1991 against slavery.

HRW's reports make frightening reading: "The abducted children and women often lead lives of extreme deprivation and cruelty at the hands of their masters. Many are physically and sexually abused, and forced to live at a standard well below that of their captors (sleeping on the floor, minimum food, no chance for education). Beatings for disobedience are common.

"They are denied their ethnic heritage, language, religion, and identity as they are cut off from their families and are held by Arabic-speaking captors, most of whom rename the abductees with Arabic names and some of whom coerce the children and women into adopting Islam.

"Those who force these changes on their captives often are convinced that they are doing a favour for the captives; they regard the Dinka culture as inferior and believe that the abductees are fortunate to have been incorporated into a superior culture. This notion of beneficial side effects to the practice of war booty or slavery is a self-serving sop to the conscience of those who engage in abductions or reap the benefits of this practice, particularly where the incorporating family is childless and treats the children kindly - a rare event in any case.

It also makes it imperative for the government to engage in an educational campaign of toleration for diversity." Sudan, incidentally, was the member country of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that sponsored the recent resolution condemning Israel for human rights violations during its recent invasion of Palestinian refugee camps, but failed to say anything about Palestinian suicide bombings.

Just thought I'd mention that. Since the mid-1980s, individuals and groups have been working in places like Sudan to buy the freedom of people held as slaves. It is a controversial practice - there are several dangers involved. Not the least of them is that unscrupulous individuals, knowing there are wealthy foreigners willing to pay large prices for slaves, will make a business out of redemption by encouraging the taking of more slaves, or doing it themselves. Redemption might work against local agreements to stop slave-taking, and it might also work against efforts to secure peace in a country or region.

If any reader is interested in doing a little research for more information, there are a lot of web sites that deal with this subject. To prepare this article, I looked at a number of them, but two seemed better organised than some of the others: www.iabolish.com/index.htm, which is the iAbolish Anti-Slavery Portal, and www.freetheslaves.net/, which is the website of a Washington-based organisation called Free the Slaves.

Although I don't want to be understood as making a negative comment about either of those sites, I suspect readers in a general sense ought to be careful about which organisations they give money to, as there are often unscrupulous people on the fringes of an emotive issue like this one, looking for a quick and easy dollar.

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@EDITRULE:

"A final point. Devere of St George's has pointed out that in the column touching on Christopher Marlowe and his 16th Century writing career, it was a mistake to suggest that Elizabeth ll was on the throne at the time. So it was. Quite how this inaccuracy crept in is not altogether clear. The explanation I prefer is that the first "I" spontaneously reproduced itself out of sheer joy at seeing the truth revealed."