Once nearly wiped out, slavery in Sudan has sprung back to life in the 1990s amid the chaos of an intractable civil war. The victims are black Christians and animists; the slave traders who raid southern villages are Muslim Arabs, whose racial and religious kin control the central government in Khartoum. Journalists and human-rights groups have documented the resurgence of slavery in Sudan, but that has done nothing to reverse the trend. Now a new humanitarian movement is attacking the problem frontally–by buying the slaves’ freedom.
Freeing Sudan’s slaves may be one of the world’s most compelling human-rights crusades. Church groups in Europe and the United States and at least one school classroom, in Colorado, have raised money on behalf of the Zurich-based CSI. The group says it has “redeemed” almost 8,000 Africans in Sudan since 1995; a NEWSWEEK reporter this month saw 1,783 more liberated during CSI’s most recent mission. But many mainstream relief groups and U.N. officials see the crusade as misguided. They say war, not slavery, is the real enemy in Sudan, and that it is wrong to enter into the slave trade even to free its victims. “As a general principle, we do not encourage the buying and selling of human beings,” said UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy last month. “The traders make money in both directions,” says a U.N. relief official in Sudan. “This is not going to end slavery in Sudan.” Even some Christian relief officials charge that the “redemption” movement has been corrupted by Sudanese who sell bogus slaves.
But the new redeemers say money is the only thing that talks in Sudan. “What is intolerable is to leave these women and children in the hands of brutal captors,” says Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston, which raises funds for CSI. “If UNICEF thinks it is wrong to free slaves with cash, then what is their alternative?” And Eibner denies that paying cash for slaves fuels the problem. The rate of slave raids has not increased since the program began, he says. And he argues that he didn’t invent the concept of redemption. He says CSI’s program is built on an agreement negotiated eight years ago between Dinka and the dominant Arab tribes along the Kiir River, the border between north and south Sudan. Ever since, he says, Arab middlemen have been going north, usually buying back slaves, sometimes abducting them from their masters. The middlemen themselves say they risk severe punishment if they are caught. Former slaves led to freedom recently said they traveled by night and hid by day to avoid Sudanese security forces.
The Khartoum government denies that it condones slavery. But human-rights officials say the practice advances the government’s religious agenda. They say the rate of slave abductions increased sharply after the Khartoum government began arming informal tribal militias in the war zone in the early 1990s. Arab tribes on the northern side of the river, in Darfur and Kordofan provinces, fall back on a traditional justification for the ancient practice–that the Koran gives them the right to make slaves out of infidels. With the Dinka men off fighting in the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army–and the government, at the very least, making no effort to intervene–Muslim raiders are free to sweep through southern Bahr al-Ghazal province, looting food and livestock and abducting women and children.
The abduction is only the beginning of the nightmare for these slaves. Sitting in the shade in Malual Baai is Nyanut Adwal Anei, a pretty young woman who was kidnapped by Arab raiders two years ago. Anei looks 16, but she cannot remember her age. She’ll never forget the day she was held in a cattle pen with hundreds of women, children and animals–the Arabs’ booty–before being marched off on a two-week trek to the north. On the way, she says, she was repeatedly raped by the raiders. In the northern town of Kerega, she lived first in a slave camp, then in the house of her master, Mahmoud, where she fetched water, cleaned house and acted as one of his two Dinka concubines. Anei was given an Arab name and forced to say Muslim prayers. Last year Anei was also forced to undergo female circumcision. Only one fate escaped her: many of the other women under the tree nurse half-Arab babies, testament to the abuse of their captors.
Whatever human-rights experts may say, Dinkas don’t quibble about how lost family members are being returned. For the victims’ families, getting them back becomes an obsession. After the stack of money changed hands in Malual Baai, Simon Akot Akok, who had walked two days to the village hoping to reclaim his wife or daughter abducted two years ago, left by himself. “I’ll keep looking,” he said. But Alung Lual Gerang found her two boys, 9 and 11, in the crowd and fell on them with kisses. She had never heard any criticism of CSI until that day. “How is it bad that my children are here under my arms?” she said through her tears. “When they were gone, I was always sad. Now I am happy. Somebody has bought back my children. How is that bad?” Who could argue with her?
