Biram Dah Abeid


Biram Ould Dah Ould Abeid is a Mauritanian politician and advocate for the abolition of slavery. He was listed as one of "10 People Who Changed the World You Might Not Have Heard Of" by PeaceLinkLive in 2014, and by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People". He has also been called the 'Mauritanian Nelson Mandela' by online news organisation Middleeasteye.net.
A courageous leader of the international anti-slavery movement, Biram has been arrested and imprisoned several times by Mauritanian authorities. His case has been taken up by Irwin Cotler and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Early life

Biram was born in 1965 in a village called Jidrel Mohguen in Rosso, Trarza. Though his father Dah, who ran a small business in Mauritania and Senegal, was granted freedom from slavery as an act of benevolence, his mother remained enslaved. Dah was unable to convince his first wife's master and the Islamic judicial authority in Mauritania to free her from slavery, due to insufficient finances. Even the French colonial governor of the time refused to interfere with matters that fell under Islamic Law.
Dah inspired his son Biram to amend the injustice of modern slavery inflicted upon the Haratin ethnic group, to which Dah belonged.
As Biram grew up, he attended high school in the city of Rosso in 1979, where the social inequalities, also present in his native village, were even more prominent. He became more aware of how the caste system, which separated the black masses from the other tribes, denied the marginalized communities access to education and employment, and further impeded their ability to ever gain independence.
When he was 19 years old, Biram started a movement called National African Movement to fight discrimination and slavery, and often advocated against the mistreatment of black people by writing open letters to the Secretary of State. At the age of 28, he had to interrupt his studies for economic reasons and ended up participating in municipal elections during this time. However, after 3 years, he decided to continue his studies and went on to obtain a master's degree in History and trained as a lawyer in Mauritania and Senegal.

Life as an Activist and Politician

After his studies, Biram became an active member of the anti-slavery NGO "SOS Slaves", for which he also conducted research in the year 2002.
It was in the year 2007 that Zeine Ould Zeïdane, former presidential candidate, offered Biram to work on his political program, advocating for the abolition of slavery and against discrimination. Biram accepted the offer and in the same year, following a hunger strike held by Biram and 3 other activists, Mauritanian government officials arrested three women accused of holding children in slavery in the capital Nouakchott. This was the first time in Mauritania that someone was charged with the crime of slavery since the practice was criminalized by law in 2007.
Later in 2008, Biram founded the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement, which he defines as "an organization of popular struggle," and he serves as its president.
Abeid sees his abolitionist mission as making slaves—who are isolated by illiteracy, poverty, and geography—aware of the possibility of a life outside servitude. He believes that slaves are tied to their masters not only by tradition and economic necessity, but also by "a misinterpretation of Islam", that teaches that slavery is not illegal but governed by religious law.
He argues that
there is a kind of informal coalition — Beydanes , the state, police, judges, and imams — that prevents slaves from leaving their masters. "Whenever a slave breaks free and IRA is not aware and not present, police officers and judges help Arab-Berbers to intimidate the slave until he returns in submission."

In 2010, Biram Abeid was discharged from his duties as a Senior Adviser to the President of the National Commission for Human Rights in Mauritania for continuously voicing slavery issues. He was also threatened with prosecution and imprisonment for "illegal activities" if he did not suspend his active role in the fight against slavery.
Abeid was also later arrested, detained, and tortured in December 2010 during a dispute between the police and his group, when about 80 of his activists descended on the house of an owner of two slave girls, demanding that the owner be jailed. Abeid told the police "we would not leave until you free the girls and put these criminals in jail."
On 6 January 2011 along with two other activists, Biram Abeid was sentenced to 12 months in prison. He was imprisoned in February 2011 and then pardoned by Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz.
Later, in August 2011, the Mauritanian police violently suppressed a sit-in in front of the police brigade over their 'employment of minors against the law'. Biram and 10 other IRA activists were injured and hospitalized in the Kissi clinic in Nouakchott.
In April 2012, during a demonstration in Nouakchott, his group was accused of burning early Islamic legal texts of the Maliki school of Islamic law that permitted slavery. The burnings caused considerable uproar. The President called for his death and even promised to administer the death penalty himself. Biram's phone and Internet service were cut off, and he was imprisoned with other IRA activists. Later the NGO apologized for the incident. After several months of detention and cancellation of their trial, they were released on bail on 3 September 2012 following pressure from the European Union.
In May 2013, Biram Dah Abeid received the Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk from the Irish NGO Front Line Defenders, and in December 2013, he received the UN Human Rights' Prize.
He also stood as an opposition candidate in the Mauritanian presidential election of 2014 but lost to the incumbent Abdel Aziz.
Again on 11 November 2014, Biram and 16 other IRA-Mauritanie anti-slavery activists were arrested for protesting against the repeal of charges against a slave master who raped a 15-year-old girl that worked as his slave.
Hearings of the case took place on 15 January 2015, when Biram, along with two other activists, was sentenced to two years in jail. An appeal was rejected in August 2015.
On May 17, 2016, the Supreme Court of Mauritania reached the decision to immediately release Biram Ould Dah Abeid along with fellow activist Brahim Bilal Ramdhane.
In August 2018, Biram was imprisoned on an "order from above" intended not only to silence him and criminalize his freedom of expression, but to prohibit his participation in the September parliamentary elections, in which Biram was running as an anti-slavery, opposition candidate. Despite Mauritanian authorities' attempts to deprive him and the Mauritanian people of their democratic liberties, Biram was elected to Parliament from his prison cell this September. Following his illegal detention and ascension to Parliament, Biram defiantly proclaimed: "I will do everything possible to demonstrate that slavery, racism and torture are set up as a system of management by a small entity around a very corrupt head of state." Biram has since declared himself a presidential candidate in the June 2019 elections. On 22 June 2019, he clinched 18.58% electoral votes behind Mohamed Ould Ghazouani and ahead of Mohamed Ould Boubacar in the election.

Awards and recognition