Two ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) journalists recently visited Mauritania to report on slavery there. They met slaves who managed to escape and activists who are working to end slavery, despite the climate of oppression and the Government's insistence that slavery is a thing of the past. P Isham (not his real name) reports.

Speaking to us in a safe house in Mauritania's capital Nouakhchott, Matalla, a runaway slave introduced to us by members of the officially unrecognised Mauritanian non-governmental organisation, SOS Esclaves, explained: "I always tended the camels near the road, and one day a truck full of soldiers was lost and asked me directions ... I climbed in and led them to where they were going." When the soldiers asked Matalla whether he wanted to go back to his masters: "I said if you want me to go back to them, I would rather you shoot me [and] bury me here than make me go back, because I know what they will do to me there, and I would rather die here."

Matalla's powerful testimony echoes a life experienced by many, and yet he is among the lucky ones as he acted upon his urge to be free. The weight of tradition, cultural conditioning and lack of legal protection for slaves make breaking the shackles of slavery a difficult endeavour.

Once born a slave, always a slave. Such is the reality for a large part of the Mauritanian population today. Although there are no official figures, estimates of the slave population run as high as 30 per cent. Descent-based slavery, regionally an 800-year-old tradition, is still practised in Mauritania. To understand the context of Matalla's story, we set up a clandestine interview with a lawyer from SOS Esclaves. He wished to remain unidentified for his safety, as slavery is a highly sensitive issue in Mauritania. He explained "the slave who leaves the desert … [to] file a complaint …. is not heard, he is not acknowledged. Quite often he fears for his life because he is not protected [by any law]. The slave is someone who hasn't attended school, he is not sent to school, he is not taught the Koran … he has no qualifications …. He is someone who is powerless."

In fact, the slave, or abid, does not even know his blood-family's last name since by being born into slavery he or she takes on the name of the master's family. The slave experiences a form of cultural amnesia eradicating knowledge of his origins. During our investigation, we spoke to another escaped slave, Joumaa. When we asked him where he came from, all he could answer was "from my grandmother" -- his black grandmother; his slave-masters, who claim to be his relatives, were not of the same skin colour. Typically, he had no idea from where and from which tribe his family came. But it is different for the masters who claimed kinship over him; they were of a lighter skin colour and know their lineage. They are part of the bidane, or white-moors, the minority ruling elite of Arab-Berber descent of Mauritania.

Over generations slaves inherit their status through their mothers, believing in a familial link between their slave-masters and themselves. This creates a dependence, which is reinforced by their being denied the basic rights that free individuals in Mauritania enjoy. As Joumaa described, "I grew up in the [master's] family, there was one son, we [were] almost the same age ... He went to Koranic school and I was a shepherd, herding animals. I fetched water, I did [the] work of domestics 24 hours a day." As a slave, he continued, "we are the first to wake up. We are the last to go to bed … [we work] without pay, we don't even know what salary is beyond its being food, drink."

According to another human rights lawyer, who also works with SOS Esclaves and who equally requested to remain anonymous, the slave is trapped in the psychological labyrinth of indentured servitude. Slaves, he said, undergo a form of brainwashing ingrained from hundreds of years of cultural and social tradition. One example of this is the belief that if the slave disobeys their masters, they will not go to paradise. Everything in society reinforces this; slaves are made to feel they need a master to protect them or to act as an intermediary to get by in Mauritanian society. According to SOS Esclaves, the legal status of slaves is equal to that of an object over which someone can exercise attributes of property.

SOS Esclaves was founded in 1995 by Abdel Nasser Ould Othman Sid' Ahmed Yessa, the son of a prominent Mauritanian minister, and himself a former slave master, and Boubacar Messaoud, a harratine (a freed slave). Despite being the leading anti-slavery organisation in the country, the Government does not recognise it. In 1998, after French television broadcast an interview with Messaoud describing the existence of slavery in contemporary Mauritania, four members of SOS Esclaves, including both of the co-founders, were sentenced to 13 months in prison. Since then little has changed. On our drive back from interviewing Joumaa and Matalla, we heard a news report warning people not to associate themselves with SOS Esclaves, which was described as a malevolent organisation.

Although the Mauritanian Government in 1981 officially abolished slavery, there have been no follow up laws, no penal sanctions against its practice. The first lawyer we spoke to put it plainly: "[what] is needed is something concrete in the penal system. It is necessary to penalise slavery. It is necessary to make laws, which reprimand the phenomenon. As long as this isn't done, [abolition] is useless". Creating sanctions is a first step. In conjunction with legal action there need to be economic and social measures in place to help integrate the slave and compensate the master, he said. Yet, his words may be a long way from becoming reality. The second human rights lawyer explained that so far, the governmental stance is one of denial: "if no one admits in public to the existence of slavery, it does not exist."

Mauritania's stratified society is set in an immutable racial caste system making class mobility and status change difficult to achieve. The lowest are the abids, next are the harratines who comprise the second lowest echelon of society. They do work often associated with service, such as building roads, white washing buildings, driving trucks.

However, both abids and harratines are not the only ones to suffer from the ossified caste system. Even the bidanes, who run the government, the military, the courts and schools, are locked in traditional lifestyles and find themselves at a loss when they can no longer afford their slaves. As Yessa said, "masters … are completely dependent on the system of slavery. I have relatives who no longer have slaves and ... they have no idea how to work or to care for themselves."

Although the bidanes clearly benefit from the rights granted to free men and women, Yessa illuminates the deeply rooted relationship of master and slave in Mauritania. The co-dependency is not only a physical one, but also a psychological one, constructed over centuries. The challenge is not only to free all slaves, but to reform the country's psyche and the racial attitudes between individuals. Clearly this is a significant challenge; unsewing the social fabric of tradition will not happen overnight.

Women are being trafficked into domestic work across the Middle East. Trafficking Officer Iveta Bartunkova, who recently visited some of the countries that women are being taken from and to, reports on the realities of their situation.

I met Genet (not her real name) in a house on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital. She had recently managed to return after three years, working as a domestic in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Despite the years away, she had little to show for her labour as the salary she was given was far less than she was promised and the work far greater.

At 22, Genet left to what she believed was a job that would enable her to support her family. She found work through an agent, and was taken via Somalia to Yemen's southern coast in a small over-crowded boat. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that many have died on these journeys, forced at gunpoint to leave the boats before they reach the coast; those who cannot swim, drown.

Genet, however, arrived, but she found she had to work for three separate households, for a fraction of what she had agreed to. "I had to do everything," she said. "I had to clean, help prepare food, do the washing all by hand. It was very hard. When I finished the work at one home, I had to go do the same at the other two." In Yemen, households are large with men often having more than one wife and many children. There was no time for rest and nothing to send home.

Genet was trapped, her papers were in the hands of her agent and she did not have the money to leave.

Tens of thousands of women come from countries in Africa and Asia to work as domestics across the Middle East, including Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Although some do find good work, many are employed in slavery conditions, forced to work long hours, for little or no pay. They are kept locked in the flats and houses for months and even years on end, and their passports are taken from them. Many have been verbally and physically abused, beaten, raped and even murdered.

There are no laws to protect these women; instead they are treated as property. Those who manage to escape harsh conditions have to leave their papers behind. With no documents and no money, they live in fear of being caught by the security forces, which means being sent to a detention facility and then, in some cases, to prison. Once in jail, they cannot get out as they have no money and cannot return home for the same reason. Genet, while seeking work in Saudi Arabia through an agent, was first put in prison en route to her job and again outside of Jeddah. In both prisons she was raped and was made pregnant.

There have been small improvements in terms of some embassy concern, but the countries where these women work need to make laws that protect the rights of migrant domestics. Laws that govern the relationship between the domestic and her employer, ensuring her rights are recognised and enforced, acknowledging she is part of a legitimate work force that is protected by labour laws.