The UN, Slavery, and History’s Selective Amnesia

On March 25th, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution describing the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity.” The text was adopted by 123 votes to 3, with 52 states abstaining, including France, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and most European countries. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against.

The symbolic significance of this resolution is considerable. No one would dispute that the transatlantic slave trade constitutes one of the greatest tragedies in human history. For several centuries, millions of Africans were deported to the Americas under appalling conditions, reduced to the status of commodities, and integrated into an economic system based on their dehumanisation. The memory of this crime deserves to be acknowledged and passed on.

But it is precisely because the history of slavery is too grave to be exploited that we must question the ideological assumptions underlying this resolution. For the controversial nature of the text does not lie in its condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade but in what it omits.

By designating the transatlantic slave trade as ‘the gravest’ of crimes against humanity, the UN appears to be establishing a moral hierarchy among historical atrocities—as if certain sufferings could be considered superior to others and as if one could objectively measure the horror and declare that one crime surpasses all others. This wording partly explains the numerous European abstentions, for whom, for many years, the Holocaust has been held up as the ultimate benchmark of human barbarity. Regardless of the comparison with the Second World War, the motivations for which may be suspicious, several states argued that it was not for the UN to establish a hierarchy among crimes against humanity. Should we place Auschwitz and Kolyma, the Armenian genocide and the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda on a graduated scale, as if ranking the competitors in a macabre contest?

But the main difficulty lies elsewhere. This resolution completely ignores the existence of other slave systems which have nevertheless shaped the history of Africa and the world for over a millennium.

The Arab-Muslim slave trade constitutes, in this regard, a particularly revealing blind spot. Long before the arrival of Europeans on the African coast, slave trade networks were already supplying the Middle East, North Africa, and certain regions of Asia. Historians generally estimate that several million Africans were deported as part of this trade, which lasted from the 7th century right up to the 20th century in some regions. According to estimates cited in numerous historical works, between 10 and 17 million slaves are thought to have been involved over this long period.

This trade also had several distinctive features that are often overlooked. Women were overwhelmingly destined for harems or domestic labour. Men were frequently castrated before being sold on, which partly explains the lack of significant descendants in the countries concerned and the absence of interracial mixing—unlike what happened in the Americas, where interracial mixing, though often violent, nonetheless took place and gave rise to the diverse societies we know today. The demographic decline of the deported populations was often far more pronounced in the Arab-Muslim world.

Added to this reality is another long-neglected dimension: the active participation of numerous African powers and kingdoms in the capture and sale of slaves. The history of the slave trade cannot be reduced to a simplistic dichotomy between predatory Europeans and victimised Africans. Numerous African actors were involved in these systems, whether in the context of the transatlantic slave trade or the eastern slave trades.

Recalling these facts is obviously not tantamount to downplaying European responsibility. It is simply a matter of restoring the historical complexity. Yet, for several decades, any attempt to broaden the perspective to encompass all forms of the slave trade has regularly been met with suspicion. Historians, such as the French researcher Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, have paid a heavy price in their academic careers for having highlighted these historical facts. Those who mention the Arab-Muslim slave trade or African responsibilities are frequently accused of seeking to relativise Western crimes or even of being driven by ideological ulterior motives akin to those of the ‘far right.’

This reaction has become almost automatic, as if the mere mention of an indisputable historical reality were in itself a suspect political stance. In the media and among politicians, certain narratives are deemed legitimate whilst others are condemned to invisibility. The terrible story of Henry Nowak, in a different sphere, has just provided a fresh illustration of this. The issue is not so far removed: George Floyd was elevated to icon status because he was one of the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade; his death at the hands of a white police officer thus made him a martyr. The young Nowak, however, belongs to the race of exploiters. He may have died whispering “I can’t breathe” without anyone batting an eyelid.

This situation fuels a growing intellectual unease. Serious history should never operate according to a logic of competing memories.

In May, a heated debate took place on X between Bally Bagayoko and Marion Maréchal regarding the existence of the African slave trade. Marion Maréchal pointed out that in 2021, UN experts themselves had expressed alarm at the persistence of forms of hereditary slavery in Mali. The UN rapporteurs had then denounced repeated attacks against people considered “slaves by descent” and lamented the inaction of the Malian authorities. The newly elected mayor of Saint-Denis was thus reminded that his Malian ancestry of noble lineage, which he had proudly highlighted in the media, did not constitute a certificate of civilisational innocence. 

Yet this simple historical and contemporary reminder is often enough to trigger accusations of revisionism or of diverting the debate. However, the facts remain stubborn. Slavery was never exclusively a Western phenomenon. It existed on every continent and in a wide variety of forms. Some of these forms still persist today in several regions of the world. 

On the contrary, abolitionism, it turns out, is not universal. It is precisely this observation that lies at the heart of Ferghane Azihari’s latest essay, Islam Against Modernity. In it, the author puts forward a thesis that has sparked fierce controversy in the French press: the abolition of slavery constitutes one of the great moral achievements of modern Western civilisation. Azihari points out that abolitionist movements originated in Europe and North America, often contradicting considerable economic interests. He also highlights that many Muslim countries abolished slavery only very late, sometimes under Western diplomatic pressure. Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery only in 1962, Mauritania in 1981. Furthermore, he observes that no major movement of repentance comparable to those that developed in the West has ever truly emerged in the Muslim world on this issue. Azihari touches on a fundamental question: why did certain civilisations produce the intellectual resources to challenge slavery when this institution had been considered normal since antiquity?

The UN resolution unfortunately seems to be part of a reverse trend, an interpretation that tends to make the West the main, if not the sole, culprit in the history of slavery—whereas it is this very same West that freed humanity from the trap of man’s exploitation of man. This is precisely what Philippe de Villiers denounced in the pages of the Journal du Dimanche. In his view, this resolution is part of an ideological view of the past in which the West becomes the primary target for all historical faults, whilst other responsibilities are systematically overlooked.

Human history is tragic. Every civilisation has its dark side. None has a monopoly on barbarism. Nor does any have a monopoly on virtue. But not all have contributed in the same way to humanity’s moral progress, and the West has nothing to gain by despising itself for the good it has achieved. By proclaiming that the transatlantic slave trade constitutes “the gravest crime against humanity,” the UN no doubt believed it was doing justice to a long-neglected memory. But by ignoring other slave trades and suggesting a hierarchy among atrocities, it achieves the opposite of its intended aim—reconciliation through remembrance. Yet selective memory does not reconcile peoples: on the contrary, it fuels the resentments it claims to soothe.