I do not see any manipulation in this transcript. I have seen an old cut of the film and I remember Mrs Aboubacar, talking a lot more about slavery in the camps. I think the filmmakers have done the UNHCR a favour on the final film.

Below is an excerpt of the transcript of the UN interview, taken from the New Matilda.

Interview with Ursula Aboubacar - Deputy Director, UNHCR Bureau for Middle East & North Africa as appears in the film Stolen.

Interview took place in December 2007 at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva.

Present in the interview: Violeta Ayala, Ursula Aboubacar and Dan Fallshaw.

Ursula – You bring your contribution by alerting and making the documentary which I think is one step in the right direction.

V – In article four of the UN declaration of human rights, it says that no one shall be held in slavery or servitude, slavery and the slave trade shall be forbidden in all their forms.

Ursula – These practices exist not only in the camps but also in the camps as they exist in the surrounding and I can tell you whenever there is a report being made.

V – What’s slavery for the UN, for UNHCR?

Ursula – It’s an abuse of human rights, and we will immediately, it’s our job, if we are aware about it to combat it.

Dan – What are you going to do?

Ursula – What do you mean what are we going to do? I just said this is our daily work, when we are... For example when we are in the camp and someone brings it to our attention we bring it to the police officers.

Dan – UN police officers or POLISARIO police officers?

Ursula – POLISARIO police, we don’t have any UN police officers. What I want to tell you, it’s a cultural issue which is existing. This is not something that you can abolish from one day to another, this is something which needs a long time and it has to come from the people...

if you doudt the truth of slavery
[your certainly going to doudt this one]

Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson: Obama Czar’s Nightmarish Sterilization Plan
http://www.prisonplanet.com/alex-jones-paul-joseph-watson-obama-czars-nightmarish-sterilization-plan.html

The Alex Jones Channel
Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Alongside John P. Holdrens advocacy for a global planetary regime to enforce forced abortion, government `seizure of children born out of wedlock, and mandatory bodily implants designed to prevent pregnancy, Obamas top advisor also called for, “Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.”

http://www.prisonplanet.com/liberal-website-claims-source-of-holdren-controversy-is-radical-right-wing.html

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, July 13, 2009

http://www.newshounds.us/2009/07/13/fox_nation_cites_radical_right_wing_source_to_paint_obama_science_advisor_as_radical.php

Liberal website News Hounds attempts to giggle and guffaw at the controversy of Obama’s top science advisor John P. Holdren’s plans to mass sterilize the population and carry out forced abortions by claiming that the entire story is an invention of the “radical right wing,” when in fact it comes straight from Holdren’s own 1977 book Ecoscience.

If you visit our original article,
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-science-advisor-called-for-planetary-regime-to-enforce-totalitarian-population-control-measures.html

you will find screenshots of the book in question...Not Fox News,.Not Horowitz,..not the “radical right wing,”

Holdren’s own book,that he co-authored in 1977 ..you know,..the one he wrote...That is the source of the story...Get it?

Shocking proposals to mass sterilize the population by artificially medicating municipal water supplies, which were outlined by President Obama’s top science czar in his 1977 book Ecoscience, are already in effect as global sperm counts drop and gender-bending chemicals pollute our rivers and lakes.

As we highlighted on Saturday, alongside John P. Holdren’s advocacy for a global planetary regime to enforce forced abortion, government `seizure of children born out of wedlock, and mandatory bodily implants designed to prevent pregnancy, Obama’s top advisor also called for,”Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.”

Holdren added that the sterilant must meet stiff requirements in that it must only affect humans and not livestock.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/water-supply-will-stay-poisoned-with-gender-bending-chemicals-due-to-carbon-footprint-of-filtering-systems.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-science-czars-plan-to-sterilize-population-through-water-supply-already-happening.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-population-reduction-agenda-for-dummies.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1092638/Evolution-threat-gender-bending-chemicals-turning-males-females.html

From Newmatilda: http://newmatilda.com/2009/06/26/slave-story

I happened to be in the Sydney Film Festival audience on the night of the screening of Stolen and remained for the Q&A... But I came out of it feeling disturbed and uneasy. I had seen something that purported in the narration and subtitles to be an uncovering of widespread slavery in a particular camp in the Western Sahara. I had seen nothing much that supported this... It was all in the spoken words in the film. And these, as the weeks have gone on, have come more and more into question, it seems.

The 7.30 Report showed, in comparative subtitles, that there were real doubts about their translation. I then read a strong piece by Yvette Andrews, in which she quotes at length a woman named Ursula Aboubacar, a UNHCR representative in the area who insists that her words were used selectively in the film and to support a case for slavery in the camps that she and the other UNHCR workers had not seen any evidence of in many years working there... I do have a memory of Violeta Ayala saying either then or later that the translations of the subtitles had been certified and verified by a translator in New York. This translator proves to be a man named Oumar Sy who was quoted in the Herald on Monday July 13. According to the writer of the piece, Louise Schwartzkoff, Oumar Sy has now said that ‘Stolen is full of mistranslations and incorrect subtitles’ and there are quotes in the piece to support his contentions...

However one big question remains for me, which is that the repeated assertion by Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw that there are 20,000 slaves in the camp is surely not supported by the filmmakers’ observations of a single family over a few weeks alone and by the visual evidence — or lack of it — we saw in the film. Or is that really all there is? I think it is time that we knew this.

Martin, the portrayal of slavery in the film as practised in North Africa is different from what we grew up believing slavery to be.

The form of slavery perpetrated by white Arabs upon black Africans is not the slave trade variety that we know of from history. It is a hereditary class system that has existed for 100s of years. White families own slaves and pass them down; many developing close relationships like an extended family. This information is readily available.

Slaves, being slaves, don't have the same rights as their owners; not unlike what it used to be for women in Australia who were chattels of men 50 or 100 years ago, and still to some extent.

Slavery in North Africa is a current concern for human rights organisations. There are many reports that confirm that this form of slavery is still practised widely.

In Mauritania the number has been quoted as 600,000 or 20 percent of the population. It is an entrenched problem that has defied attempts to eradicate it for the last 100 years. Twenty percent of 125,000 is 25,000 so (alarming as it may sound) the 20,000 quoted by the film makers is not far fetched. Some of these people may have been "freed" from slavery if not from refugee status. How many and how successfully is anyone's guess given the experiences in Mauritania. There is evidence that by no means all Saharawi slaves have been freed. This is an issue that the Polisario wish to hide.

Nothing in the real world is black and white; more like many shades of grey and whatever the social or economic role a person might fill, there have always been people who have treated other human beings with compassion.

Daido may love Fetim and treat her well and Fetim may love her back; just as abused children love their parents. However well Daido treats Fetim and whether or not slavery is a traditional cultural practice, to deny Fetim and people like her freedom of speech and freedom of movement is a human rights violation.

JanF,

Do you have anything to say about what the translator, Oumar Sy, said as reported in Sydney Morning Herald. It seems he said that there are lots of inacuracies in the subtitles of the film. This is a very serious issue. Any comments?

From the Empire Online
http://www.empireonline.com.au/news/story.asp?NID=1000005134

They then state: "Ourmar Sy in New York only verified the film's translations, he did not translate the film. If he had concerns, there were many opportunities to clarify these for us at the time. We asked him if he was sure all the translations were correct, he signed a letter to say this. He had a further opportunity to raise this with us when we sent him the final version of the film, with subtitles. He did no such thing... The first we heard of his concerns he copied the e-mail to the New York and Australian representatives of the Polisario. Why?"
FISHY, FISHY, SUPER FISHY.