Susana Baca, Gilberto Gill, Danny Clover, Abdias do Nascimento, Louis Sala-Molins, Aimé Césaire and Christiane Taubira are among the many personalities who are taking part, from today to Saturday at UNESCO Headquarters, in events dedicated to the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery (December 2) and to close of the International Year for the Commemoration of the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition.

Proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, this International Year, 2004, marks the bicentary of the first independent black state, Haiti, symbol of uprising and resistance by slaves.

“This commemoration (…) is not only an act of historical solidarity with the victims of a terrible injustice and with those who fought for their freedoms and rights. It is also an act of re-commitment to the ongoing struggle against all forms of racism,” as UNESCO’s Director General Koichiro Matsuura said at the International Year’s launch in Cape Coast (Ghana).

In his message he also evoked the International cultural exchanges born of the slave trade: “By retracting the cultural interactions brought about by the slave trade, which transported as many African men and women far from the land of their birth, we can indeed celebrate the extraordinary meeting of the cultures born of this enforced dialogue.”

The year devoted to a tragedy recognized as a “crime against humanity” in 2001 at the Durban World Conference against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance- aimed to further and disseminate knowledge about slavery and the slave trade by highlighting the interactions it generated, as well as the philosophical, political and judicial processes involved in its abolition.