Genocide Quietly

The Hidden Holocaust in Sudan

“We were home relaxing in the evening when men on horses with machine guns stormed through, shooting men, women, and children. With no guns to defend against soldiers armed with rifles, we ran out of the village. As the soldiers changed after us, I saw friends fall dead in front of me… All around us we saw children being shot — in the stomach, in the leg, between the eyes. Against the dark sky we saw flames from the houses and building the soldiers had set on fire. The cries of the people forced inside filled out ears as they burned to death.”  — Victoria Ajang, an escaped slave from Sudan, testifying about genocide before the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee.

For 18 years, what has been called a civil war in Sudan, the largest country in Africa, has been waged by the Arab government in the North — the fundamentalist National Islamic Front — against black Christians and animists in the southern and central parts of the country.

But the phrase “civil war” does not adequately convey what has been happening in Sudan. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in an impassioned article in the Washington Post, is more succinct in his description of the Sudan nightmare:

“One does not lightly invoke the specter of genocide — the intentional physical destruction of national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups as such. But the horror that afflicts Sudan is staggering — some two million dead, another four to five million people driven from their homes … mass starvation used as weapon of war …. We cannot remain bystanders as this remorseless fire consumes the people of Sudan …. Remembrance of the Holocaust has instilled in us a profound appreciation for the cost of silence.”

Most Americans are unaware of this genocide — and the mass slavery conducted by the Sudanese government’s armed forces against the villages in the South. In a typical slave raid, men in the village are killed and the women are taken north to become house slaves and concubines. The enslaved children are forced into schools where they are inculcated into the Muslim faith, for this is a jihad — a holy war. Until very recently, except for an occasional op-ed column, American newspapers and television news programs largely ignored the fact that — as Kate O’Beirne has noted in the National Review — “more people have died in this conflict than in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia combined.”

I have been covering this story for five years, primarily in the Village Voice. Among my sources have been staff members of Senator Sam Brownback (A-Kansas), who has been to Sudan and has taken a passionate interest in alerting the nation about slavery there; also the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group and the Swiss-based Christian Solidarity International. These two concerned organizations have bought back thousands of slaves from traders (members of the Baggara tribe, which had been involved in the slave trade for centuries prior to the period of British rule in Sudan) who steal them from slave camps in the North and bring them back south for sale into freedom. These Arab traders wear hoods when conducting their business because, if they are recognized by government agents, they themselves will become enslaved or killed.

Here, extracted from sources of Christian Solidarity International, the American Anti-Slavery Group, and the staff of Senator Brownback, are stories from survivors of these raids. So far as I know, none of these have appeared in the mainstream American media:

• The Popular Defense Forces — the soldiers of the National Islamic Front in the North-executed seven black schoolboys at the Guong North Community Elementary School. Two boys who escaped reported that all the children were forced to witness the executions, the purpose of which was “to instill fear and obedience in the other children.” In that raid, 24 other children, including six girls, were taken.
• Abuk Athian Bal is in her mid-thirties. She has terrible scars all over her body. There are deep, herniated slashes in her skin. Three years ago the raiders came to her village, Rumrol. They took her and her three children, and she has no idea what has happened to them. Enslaved in the North, she has a baby after having been raped by her master.
• At dawn the raiders came to a village where a woman named Ngeng Chor Malek lived. They killed all the men and took the women and children. Her husband was killed in the raid and her eldest son, who was enslaved, died in the North. On the first night on the march to the province of Dien, in the North, she was raped by six men; and then, every night after, she was gang raped. She refused to become a Muslim, even when the raiders used force to try to convert her.
• Ten-year-old Marion Akok Wol has one blind eye that is swollen and shut permanently, and a gash on her leg from beatings by raiders. The last time she saw her mother, her mother was being chased by men on horses. She later found out that her mother had been killed. Marion kept house for her master, and once, when she was too slow, he hit her with his fist, full-force and now she is blind in her left eye.
• Abuk Deng Deng was abducted from Wakabil Village and taken to Yargot. The raiders had beaten the men of the village until they died. On the five-day trek up north, “the worst things of all happened”: the rapes. Women who refused sex were killed. She saw many die. She was raped by up to ten men at a time, every day. Sometimes more than once a day. Her master had three wives who treated her badly, probably because the master often tried to have sex with her, which she attempted to refuse. When she refused, he would beat her with the flat side of a sword. She had scars on her body, with particularly bad ones on her chest.
• Adut Mou Mou was abducted fromWakabil by a raider who became her master. She was enslaved for three years. On the way north, she was gang raped several times. She was terribly burned on the shoulders and back. When she was asked what this was, she said that her master put hot coals on her skin when she refused to have sex or work because she was sick. Her master raped her often.
• Aluel Ring Mahal is in her early teens, perhaps 13 years old. Her village, Pan Agok, was surrounded by gunmen in the early morning. The prisoners’ journey up north took about ten days. They were beaten and raped the entire time. Along the way they were forced to walk in a line with their hands tied together on a rope. At night, when they sat, their feet also were tied together. There were 19 people with her who had been abducted. Rape was common; she was gang raped repeatedly. She was taken to a village in the North called Nus. She shared her food with the dogs, she said with disdain. That was the only food given to her. While enslaved, she was beaten randomly and severely by everyone in the family, even the children. She had been enslaved only a month when she managed to escape.
• Adau Najock Ajang is a beautiful young woman with a little boy. She was abducted in 1998. She and other females were raped several times a day. She even saw little girls being raped. The women were told they would be killed if they did not submit — the choice was to live and be raped, or die. Many of the women miscarried because of the force of the rapes. Her little boy was the result of a rape by her master.
• Abuk Lueth Duonge is branded with knife cuts to indicate her ownership by a particular master. She says that the women were forcibly circumcised. “Me too,” she says. Such circumcisions are typically done when the women are between the ages of 13 and 18.
• Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, reports that one mother who was interviewed said that during a raid on her village, her child’s throat was slit by a raider. He then cut off the toddler’s head and forced the mother to carry the head on the march up north. Eventually she was forced to throw her child’s head into a fire.

Last November, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir declared the start of a new season of slave raids. According to Agence France-Presse, he exhorted 12,000 Popular Defense troops to, in his words, “go on with the jihad.”

Increasingly, the slave raids have also had an economic impetus. There are very profitable oil deposits under the land where these black Christians and animists live, and the government is engaged in a systematic ethnic cleansing of that land, as Amnesty International points out in its report Sudan: The Human Price of Oil: “Tens of thousands of people have been terrorized into leaving their homes … since early 1999. Government forces have used ground attacks, helicopter gunship, and indiscriminate high-altitude bombardment to clear the local population from oil-rich areas …. The military tactics of the government’s security forces destroying harvests, looting livestock, and occupying the area are designed to prevent the return of the displaced population …. In the area surrounding Bentiu, the killings of hundreds of civilians … have been documented.”

Christian Solidarity International has continually reported the bombings of churches, hospitals, and schools. Last fall, the Congressional Black Caucus asked President Clinton to condemn “the aerial bombings of civilian and humanitarian targets by the government of Sudan …. This is the only situation in the world in which a government bombs civilian targets year after year without rebuke …. At least 194 such bombings have been recorded during the past four years.”

Two of the most recent attacks, said the Black Caucus, “occurred during food distributions to hungry civilians by humanitarian-aid workers.”

Clinton finally broke his silence on these atrocities last December: “America,” he said, “must continue to press for an end to these egregious practices and make clear that the Sudanese government cannot join the community of nations until fundamental changes are made on these fronts.”

His condemnation of these violations of basic human rights was hardly mentioned in the media. And even Clinton’s political enemies didn’t point out that his words “America must continue to press for an end” were peculiar, since his administration had never before spoken or acted against the atrocities in Sudan.

“The world… reacted strongly to gang rape in Kosovo. Shouldn’t we expect the same response when the victims are black African women?”

Indeed, the year before, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Charles Jacobs, in a private meeting at the State Department, that what was happening in Sudan was “not [an issue] marketable to the American people.” This was a bitter fact, as Jacobs’s Anti-Slavery Group noted in contrasting the “silence of the American media” on Sudan with the coverage through the years of South Africa, in which the press reports on apartheid helped to publicize and end that disgraceful situation. The media were not alone in their silence. Jesse Jackson, who did so much to awaken public consciousness to apartheid, was silent until this past April, when he finally spoke out against the horrors in Sudan.

But, to their credit, many brave individuals are spreading the word without waiting for their one-time comrades-in-arms-against-injustice to join them. One of these “new abolitionists” is journalist Sam Cotton, who, as a graduate student at Columbia University, traveled across the United States informing audiences at black churches and other meeting halls that slavery still exists. Another is Congressman Donald Payne (D-New Jersey), a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, one of the first public officials to speak out repeatedly and vigorously about the genocide in Sudan. And the Reverend Al Sharpton returned from a trip to Sudan in April, declaring that its government will be the next target of his civil-rights crusade.

Some of the most inspiring and effective activists were kids in a fifth-grade class in Aurora, Colorado, and their teacher, Barbara Vogel, who read them an article from the Rocky Mountain News about slavery in Sudan.

The students were shocked. “No one had any idea,” said 11-year-old Brad Morris, “that slavery could still be going on anywhere in the world. We decided to do something so it wouldn’t go on and on.”

They started raising money to liberate slaves. They pooled their allowances and sold their toys. The kids hawked lemonade and T-shirts, and they wrote letters to the president and t-lillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, and many others (their letters to Jesse Jackson were returned unopened). To his credit, Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, featured the kids on his Nickelodeon cable channel to help spread their message. Other donations and pledges poured in from around the country.

The going rate to the Baggara “retrievers” was $50 to $100 a head. Kids from other cities contacted the fifth-graders in Colorado and joined the effort to free slaves. By the end of 1998, these combined efforts had helped Christian Solidarity International to rescue 4,016 Sudanese slaves.

I am in frequent contact with their teacher, Ms. Vogel, who traveled to Sudan, talked with liberated slaves, and then brought some of her students to Washington to personally lobby the government to speak out for the thousands still in slavery.

Clinton declined to see them, but they did speak with Madeleine Albright and found a very attentive listener in right-wing Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. As he heard the children tell about the slaves, Helm s began to cry, and pledged to hold a full hearing on what was happening. And he did.

As attention began to be paid, Congressmen Frank Wolf (R-Kansas) and Donald Payne and other abolitionists rallied to prevent the election of the Sudanese government to a seat on the powerful United Nations Security Council. Sudan was eager to win election and gain the international prestige that accompanies that, membership. But last October Richard Holbrooke, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — aware of the growing concern in Congress about slavery — worked hard and successfully to quash Sudan’s efforts.

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, went to Sudan at great personal risk to witness for herself what Clinton, echoing her outrage, would condemn as “the scourge of slavery in Sudan.”

After leaving the State Department, Ms. Rice wrote an op-ed article in the Washington Post about the Sudanese government’s aerial bombings, in which she told of “people who had barely survived their wounds but were brave enough to tell their stories. We saw the craters and the shrapnel from these bombings.”

“I was especially outraged,” she further declared, “to learn that even as we arrived in Lui, these bombings were continuing. Just down the winding dirt road only 20 miles from us, four people had been killed the day before in a vicious bombing. Later we saw a child, three or four years old, whose hand and arm had been destroyed by one of the bombs. His mother had died on the way to the hospital.”

But despite the direct, detailed witnessing in Rice’s report, it went unnoticed by other newspapers and television. If these horrors had occurred through ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Kosovo, or any predominantly white country, would American networks have refused to send camera crews to graphically cover the gang rapes and slavery?

According to Charles Jacobs, American feminists may finally be showing solidarity with the black women and children of Sudan. After all, Jacobs says, “gang raping of slave women in South Sudan is a crime against humanity. Women around the world, and not only women, reacted strongly to this horror, gang rape, in Kosovo. Shouldn’t we expect the same response when the victims are black African women?”

And what of the white clergy, of all denominations, in this country? Black pastors have spoken and organized and challenged Congress on the Sudan issue. But few leaders of white religious organizations have shown any concern about the genocide of black Christians in Sudan.

The lack of media and government interest has not cooled the abolitionists’ fire. Joe Madison, former longtime board member of the NAACP and host of a widely popular radio talk show in Washington, D.C., has been networking with members of Congress and spreading the word in black publications. And the NAACP has finally been galvanized after years of merely sending out press releases about Sudan. It is pushing Congress to enact firm sanctions against the government of Sudan, and black members of Congress are joining in.

During the confirmation hearings for Colin Powell as secretary of state, Sam Brownback pressed Powell on the subject of Sudan and showed him photos of liberated slaves. The senator intends to keep the pressure on.

The current price to free a slave is $33, the local purchase price of two goats. Last September, after liberating 4,435 slaves, Christian Solidarity International declared that this caravan of rescued black Africans “had been returned to their homeland in southern Sudan over three months through an ‘underground railroad’ involving local black African community leaders, seven networks of Arab retrievers, and CSI. Thirty-eight thousand, four hundred eighteen slaves have been liberated through this system.”

Joe Madison was there when this group of former slaves came home. As John Eibner, CSl’s master orchestrator of this redemption, told me, these slaves had walked, in small groups, by night, from government areas in the North: “The CSl-sponsored underground railroad is conducted by Arab Muslim retrievers, who act at the request of black African community leaders. The retrievers are from Arab communities which have defied the government of Sudan’s call to jihad, forging local peace pacts with their black African neighbors …. It is estimated that over 100,000 black African women and children remain in captivity in northern Sudan as domestic chattel slaves or as prisoners, in government-run concentration camps.” In an unintentional nod to Orwell, the Sudanese government calls these “peace camps.”

In his recent book Islam’s Black Slaves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Ronald Segal-a South African who worked with the African National Congress to bring democracy to South Africa — describes the long history of Islamic slavery in Africa, which has “had millions of black victims, “ and precedes by centuries the Atlantic trade that brought slaves to the United States.

Segal describes the 1989 military coup in Sudan, which “suspended the constitution, banned political parties and trade unions, and provided for detention without charge or trial.” This Arab government brought back the jihad against unbelievers, fomenting a civil war against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the South. Those rebel forces have themselves committed serious human-rights abuses, but on nowhere near the scale of the Sudanese government’s National Islamic Front, which was built on the centuries-old tradition of forcing unbelievers into slavery.

Considering the continued silence of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the heads of European nations, and the largely indifferent American media, it is remarkable that so many slaves have been rescued from the despotic government of Sudan and its savage jihad.

The Washington-based Hudson Institute’s Project for Civil Justice Reform proposes two concrete, pragmatic actions that would have an immediate effect. The institute would like to limit access to American capital markets “by companies making major investments in Sudan and generating substantial income for the regime. Given that some European oil companies are now actively considering joining the China Petroleum Company and Canada’s Talisman Oil [in working with Khartoum to exploit Sudan’s oil reserves], this action [to limit American investments in these companies] is needed lest the Sudanese regime receive revenue streams sufficient to finance its jihad policies and gain significant financial independence.” The institute also suggests that all agencies providing American food aid to Sudan should send it directly to “starving Christian and animist populations against whom the regime wages its jihad.” What happens now is that most American food supplies go through the United Nations, which has agreed with the government of Sudan to prohibit food deliveries to the people they are killing and enslaving in the South.

Ronald Segal points out that “bans on arms, oil, and, decisively, financial credits, promoted the retreat of apartheid in South Africa. A corresponding movement of popular pressure for enforcement measures to eradicate slavery can scarcely come too soon.”

But where is the collective political force to move President Bush, the secretary of state, and Congress to take these first and vital moves?

The Hudson Institute emphasizes that there already exists a diverse, growing coalition of groups speaking out for human rights in Sudan. Included in the ranks are the Congressional Black Caucus, black ministers, and radio talk-show host Joe Madison. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has passed a strong Sudan resolution. Evangelical leaders Franklin Graham — Billy Graham’s son, whose hospital in Sudan has been repeatedly bombed — and Chuck Colson (a Nixon-administration official convicted in the Watergate scandal who now ministers to prisoners) have been particularly outspoken, as have the Southern Baptists and the National Association of Evangelicals. Christian college students have been galvanized through the Campaign of Conscience for Sudan, organized by the Center for Religious Freedom, which is headed by Nina Shea (who also serves on the congressionally mandated U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom) of Freedom House, a non-denominational Christian religious-freedom organization. Neoconservatives Bill Bennett, Midge Deeter, and Max Kampleman have joined the fight, as have prominent Jewish figures Elie Wiesel, Elliot Abrams, and Rabbis David Saperstein and Irving Greenberg.

This coalition — and the highly articulate public figures in its leadership — may be able to move not only the U.S. government but should be able to finally awaken the press, in all of its forms, to begin covering, on the ground, the concentration camps and killing fields in Sudan.

After all, the South African apartheid regime — for all its evils — was not as rampantly murderous as the government of Sudan. And yet, although it seemed impermeable to outside pressure, South Africa did finally succumb to organized economic and political sanctions.

On February 22, 2001, a United Nations war-crimes court in The Hague convicted three former Bosnian Serb commanders for having been in charge of mass-rape camps during the war in Bosnia. It was the first time anyone had been convicted of sexual enslavement as “a crime against humanity.” The American press gave considerable space to that historic event. But those sexual slaves were white. When will Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir and the commanders of his armed forces involved in gang rape in southern Sudan be indicted before this court?

An answer may come from a new abolitionist — Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) — who is pushing legislation to get the United States so involved in ending the holocaust in Sudan that the repercussions may finally awaken the silent European nations, other African states, and the United Nations. Moreover, Tancredo has succeeded in getting Secretary of State Colin Powell to understand our responsibility, as Americans, to abolish slavery once again.

Tancredo got to know 23-year-old Francis Bok, a former slave who at the age of seven was abducted in a raid on his village in Sudan. Bok spent the next ten years in slavery before escaping. He now lives in Boston and is active in the antislavery movement. In March, Bok went to Washington, D.C., and publicly endorsed Tancredo’s bill to end slavery in Sudan. There is a companion bill in the Senate that was introduced by Republican Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee.

This legislation goes beyond just condemning the Sudanese government. It calls for economic and political sanctions and authorizes Colin Powell to use money in the budget, plus diplomacy, to bring an end to the civil war in Sudan. The bill also mandates a presidential study to find out whether the government of Sudan has financed its bombing of civilians, and other atrocities, with funds from the United States.

Then, at a House International Relations Committee hearing, Tancredo asked Colin Powell directly to pledge United States action on Sudan. After telling Tancredo that he would schedule a special State Department staff meeting to explore what can and should be done, Powell said to him and to this nation, “There is perhaps no greater tragedy on the face of the earth today than the tragedy that is unfolding in the Sudan.”

Echoing that belated concern, on March 22 two of the most powerful members of Congress (and continual antagonists on almost all issues), Charles Rangel (D-New York) and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (A-Texas), led a Washington press conference on what Armey called “a nightmare of unspeakable proportions.” “People are being tortured, mutilated, and killed solely because of their Christian faith,” Armey declared. Added Rangel, “The world is faced with a human-rights nightmare of the first order. We have the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to use our international leadership to help end the civil war and the heart-breaking enslavement of women and children.” But despite the prominence of these two congressmen, there was only marginal media coverage of their urgent news conference.

Similarly, there was scant attention paid when, on April 13, Joe Madison, the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, and Michael Horowitz of the conservative Hudson Institute were arrested after they handcuffed themselves to the front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington to protest the Sudan holocaust. Madison tells me those arrests are only the beginning of such acts of civil disobedience to come.

And the Reverend Al Sharpton, immediately after his return from Sudan in April, asked for a meeting with Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary General Annan to explore options to end the Sudan horror — especially by calling for sanctions against oil companies who do business in that nation.

“Slavery is wrong no matter who the slave master or the slave is,” Sharpton said. “This is not about Muslims versus Christians. This is about right versus wrong. It is time for us to really deal with taking the profit out of the trade.”

On May 3, President Bush took the first step directly involving this country in stopping the slavery and genocide in Sudan. In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, the president, describing Sudan as “a disaster area for all human rights,” said he will send much-needed food and medicine directly to the black villages in the South.

The National Islamic Front government has been exercising veto power over food deliveries in the South by the U.N.’s Operation Lifeline Sudan. The United States will no longer abide by that veto.

Meanwhile the United Nations has elected Sudan to its Human Rights Commission while kicking the United States off that body. Also on that commission, which purportedly monitors human-rights violations around the world, are such big-time, constant violators as Libya, Pakistan, and Cuba.

As Joanna Weschler of Human Rights Watch told the New York Times, this alleged Human Rights Commission has become “a rogue’s gallery of human-rights abusers.”

Accordingly, it will be up to the United States to once again abolish the slave trade.

[We did check, and although the Anti Slavery contact has gone the way of history, the genocide contnues today. Christian Solidarity International has moved homes, yet remains some 30 years later an active and sadly necessary effort. -Ed.]

For more information, contact the American Anti-Slavery Group: (800) 884-0719, www.anti-slavery.com; and Christian Solidarity International: www.csi-int.org. Even within these brief pages, you can expand your views of how this happens even in modern society by looking at China — and even the Mormon Church.