Khartoum reiterates that “no slavery exists”

The government of Sudan has again asserted at the United Nations that the particular issue of abduction of women and children in southern Sudan was “exclusively one of abduction and was not slavery.” The Sudanese delegate at a recent meeting of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (human rights sub-commission) dealing with contemporary forms of slavery said the government admitted the occurrence of cases of abduction, which was an old phenomenon involving tribes from southern and central Sudan, but challenged the figures put forward by foreign organisations and media, according to a UN press statement. The envoy also spoke of the work being done by the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children (CEAWC), established in 1999 and attached to the Ministry of Justice, and the financial constraints it faced. The Sudan condemned slavery, which was a criminal offence punishable under the law, the Sudan representative added. David Littman, of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, said among those who had seen their dream of freedom come true in these past four months were 6,706 black African slaves, both Christians and traditionalists [animists], freed from bondage in southern Sudan. Since 1995, 10 networks of humane Arab retrievers, working in association with official black Sudanese community leaders and with Christian Solidarity International, had helped in liberating as many as 54,426 slaves, he said. Tragically, tens of thousands of women and children still remained enslaved in northern Sudan, according to estimates of the Civil Commissioners of the six counties of Northern Bahr al-Ghazal region, he added. Of the freed Sudanese female slaves interviewed by US campaigners last month, 82 percent reported having been repeatedly raped by Arab soldiers following raids on their villages, and 47 percent stated that they had been gang-raped while being forced to march from their destroyed villages to their northern masters, Littman said. Meanwhile, 16 percent testified that they were subjected to female genital mutilation by their Arab masters during their captivity. Another speaker at the ECOSOC session gave an account of his organisation’s recent visit to the Sudan, saying that slavery remained a reality and that abducted persons still awaited release. According to the available information, the victims came mostly from north Bahr al-Ghazal in southern Sudan, and belonged to the Dinka ethnic group; the raiders came from northern Sudan. [Most of the abductions are the work of armed militia based in northern parts of the country, but there have also been violations perpetrated by tribal militia operating in southern Sudan. The abductions generally take place during offensive and punitive raids on rebel-held villages by pro-government Murahilin Arab militias, who accompany and protect government troop trains, according to humanitarian sources.] That visit aimed at assessing the impact of the work of CEAWC, and observers noted that while it had secured the release of some abducted women and children, progress had been slow, the ECOSOC session was told. The speaker regretted that CEAWC had not pursued its mandate by prosecutions, said this inaction was encouraging more abductions, and maintained that the government of Sudan was not taking any preventive measures. It was essential that abductions and related practices be recognised as illegal practices and the abductors prosecuted, the session was told. A group of Christian ministers and anti-slavery campaigners claimed in July to have freed - in conjunction with the NGO Christian Solidarity International http://www.csi-int.ch/- more than 6,700 Sudanese slaves, most of them women and children, at a cost of roughly US $33 each. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), while condemning the abduction of women and children, and working with CEAWC in an effort to eradicate the problem, has criticised ‘slave redemption’ practices. “As a matter of principle, UNICEF does not engage in or encourage the buying and selling of human beings,” executive director Carol Bellamy stated in March 1999. Despite the well-intentioned efforts of privately-funded groups to purchase the freedom of individual slaves, “the practice of paying for the retrieval of enslaved children and women does not address the underlying causes of slavery in Sudan: the ongoing civil war and its by-products of criminality,” she added. Human Rights Watch has also said that buying back slaves creates a “real danger of fueling a market in human beings” in a country as desperately poor as Sudan, but slave-redemption campaigners argue that it is intolerable to leave these women and children in the hands of brutal captors. [for more details on the debate, go to: http://www.anti-slavery.org/pages/updates/unicef-debate.htm]