Freeing Sudan’s slaves may be one of the world’s most compelling human-rights crusades. Church groups and classrooms of schoolchildren have joined fund-raising on behalf of the Zurich-based CSI and competing “redemption” groups. CSI, which is by far the most active, says it has “redeemed” almost 8,000 Africans in Sudan since 1995, including more than 1,700 during a recent trip, accompanied by NEWSWEEK. Anti-slave activists consider Eibner a saint. But many mainstream relief groups and U.N. officials see his tactics as misguided. They say war, not slavery, is the real enemy in Sudan, and that “redeeming” slaves with money only feeds the evil. “The traders make money in both directions,” says a U.N. official. “This is not going to end slavery in Sudan.”
It’s not clear that anything could. Slavery, after all, has become an entrenched instrument of war in Sudan. International human-rights groups accuse the Islamic-fundamentalist regime in Khartoum of arming and financing local Arab militias that prey on blacks in the war zone. The government denies that it condones slavery. But Arab tribes on the northern side of the Kiir River, in Darfur and Kordofan provinces, have long claimed that the Koran gives them the right to make slaves out of blacks, whom they consider inferior. Indeed, many believe they are doing the Dinka a favor by “Islamicizing” them. With the Dinka men off fighting in the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)–and the government, at the very least, making no effort to intervene–Muslim raiders are free to sweep through southern villages, looting food and livestock and abducting women and children to use as domestic slaves.
The abduction is only the beginning of the nightmare for these slaves. Sitting in the shade in Mulual 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. Nevertheless, 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 north. On the way, she says, she was repeatedly raped by the raiders, Islamic fighters and members of the People’s Defense Force (PDF) militias. 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, made to say Muslim prayers. Last year she was forced to undergo female circumcision. One fate escaped her: many of the other women under the shade tree are nursing half-Arab babies, living testaments to the abuse of their captors.
What makes Sudanese slavery so insidious, according to human-rights groups, is that the Arab slave traders want nothing less than the cultural extinction of the Dinka. Their goal: to Islamicize the entire country by teaching the Dinka to say Koranic prayers and worship Allah. To that end, the younger the slave, the better. Namiri Lual, now 12 or 13, was captured before he was old enough to walk. Raised by an Arab in the northern town of Abu Jafra, he speaks only Arabic. Although the man told Lual to call him “father,” he made him sleep in the cattle pen with the animals. Lual says he was taught in Koranic school that “‘jihad’ is protecting Islam from the Kaffirs [nonbelievers],” mainly the Dinka. Ironically, he now sits in a Dinka jail in the south, captured by the southern rebels during a raid in February when his “father” left him behind after being hemmed in by the SPLA. Local officials say there are thousands of Dinka youth like Lual, who have been turned against their own people. “I think I was well treated,” recalls the boy. “I have never known anything else.” Because he was enslaved so young, he has no idea where he came from–or where his birth family might be.
Nobody doubts that boys like Lual deserve to be free. But the idea of buying back slaves from their oppressors troubles many humanitarian organizations.UNICEF, the United Nations’ child-welfare agency, has called slave redemption “intolerable.” “As a general principle,” said UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy last month, “we do not encourage the buying and selling of human beings.” Human Rights Watch believes that Western groups may do more harm than good, interfering with local negotiations that in the past have yielded the release of Dinka slaves in exchange for access to rivers. Most damning, critics charge that CSI is fueling the slave trade. They say that by paying the same Arab tribes who raid Dinka villages to return the slaves, CSI is giving them a double incentive to continue the practice.
Eibner believes CSI is making crucial inroads into ending Sudanese slavery. He denies charges that the organization is made up of religious zealots, though he says he has received death threats from Muslim extremists. He also scoffs at the notion that the group’s efforts actually fuel the slave trade. “There is no evidence that more people have been taken into slavery since we began this,” he says. “[Redemption] is not something we imposed on [the Sudanese]. Through our support, it has grown considerably and works more efficiently, [but] this is their program.” The redemption process dates back to a 1991 agreement between the Dinka and the Arabs along the Kiir River, which allowed African families to buy back their enslaved relatives. Eibner insists that the retrievers and the raiders are not the same, and local Dinka chiefs agree.
The Arab middlemen, for their part, claim that they take great risks to purchase or abduct the slaves from their masters and then sneak them across the Kiir. They often travel by night and hide by day, counting on local Dinka leaders to provide the slaves with food and clothing. If caught, they face harsh penalties. A retriever who goes by the alias Nour Hassan says he was tortured by government security services two years ago when they suspected he was buying slaves to redeem in the south. After several months, he was released because of a lack of evidence. Hassan insists that he doesn’t do it for the cash, though the trades have made him undeniably rich in a country of grinding poverty.
Defenders of CSI say money is the only thing that talks in Sudan. They condemn the United Nations for being close-minded and naïve “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, which raises funds for CSI. “If UNICEF thinks it is wrong to free slaves with cash, then what is their alternative?”
Diplomatic dealings with Khartoum have proven unproductive. Until recently, the Sudanese government denied that slavery existed at all. But under pressure from CSI and other nongovernmental organizations in the south, it recently acknowledged that the practice does occur–but only by independent Arab tribes operating without Khartoum’s approval.
Lately the United Nations has begun to take more decisive action. Earlier this month, the U.N. investigator for human rights in Sudan, Leonardo Franco, called on the government to accept an investigation into slavery. And U.N. aid agencies have started including details of slavery in their in-house “rapid-assessment reports” on the humanitarian situation in southern Sudan. A final draft of one recent report obtained by Newsweek included the story of a 50-year-old Dinka woman who says she was raped repeatedly by members of the PDF until she fainted. When she regained consciousness, she says, she was forced to drink her own urine. According to the report, another woman had part of her left breast bitten off by militiamen who raped her. “For years we have been giving [the United Nations] the information, but they never included it in their reports,” a Sudanese U.N. employee told Newsweek.
Still, the United Nations’ push may be too little too late. International aid agencies fear that money for the U.N. humanitarian program in Sudan, Operation Lifeline Sudan, will dry up as Western donors shift their aid dollars to the refugee crisis in Kosovo. And U.N. agencies fear that Khartoum will respond to their mounting pressure to end slavery by banning Operation Lifeline Sudan flights, virtually the only source of food in the drought- and war-plagued south.
That possibility terrifies SPLA officials, who believe the government’s ultimate goal is to intimidate the Dinka into abandoning their land. “They want to eliminate [the Dinka from] this area,” says Commander Dau Aturjong Nyuol, “to make us Muslim or to push us out.” But even though the rebels lack the manpower and materiel to protect civilians in the region, he insists, “the Dinka people will not leave.”
For those who return from captivity in the north, the future is uncertain. CSI provides no organized follow-up for the freed slaves. And as long as the Arab raids continue, they will never be able to live in peace. Neither will the relatives of those still in bondage.
Sometimes families wait eagerly at redemption sites for relatives who never show. Simon Akot Akok walked two hours from his home to Yargot when he heard that CSI was going to release slaves there two weeks ago. But his wife and daughter, abducted by Arab raiders two years ago, were not among the 300 released. “I’ll keep looking,” he says. “I hope to find them some day.”
But when families do locate lost relatives, their reunions are ecstatic. At Malual Baai, when Eibner announced that the slaves were free, several families rushed over to embrace their loved ones. Alung Lual Gerang, whose two young sons were among those released, fell on top of them and covered the smiling boys with kisses. She hadn’t seen them since they were captured while grazing the family cows in the southern village of Leith last year. Until that day she had never heard of CSI. But she has no problem with its practice of buying back slaves. Through joyful tears, she asks: “How is it bad that my children are here under my arm?” How, indeed?
