Government denies slavery accusations

The Sudanese government on Sunday denied the existence of slavery in territory it controls, AFP reported. Ali Ahmed Al-Nasry, head of a government committee set up in 1995 to investigate the issue, dismissed a report by the Swiss aid agency Christian Solidarity International that the NGO had ransomed more than 5,000 slaves in Sudan over the last four years. “Those CSI allegations are related to areas under the rebel movement,” Al-Nasry said in a statement. “If there is slavery in those areas, the rebel movement [SPLA] is to blame.” CSI said a group of 1,050 people, mainly women and children, were released earlier this month after the NGO paid US $50 each for their freedom. Mike Dottridge, the director of the London-based Anti-Slavery International, said a “pattern of slavery exists” in which “thousands of women and children captured in raids by government-armed militia have been enslaved.” He told IRIN that the captives seized, largely from Bahr al-Ghazal by Arab-speaking militia, are taken into southern Darfur and Kordofan. Sexual abuse and forced religious conversions of the abductees has been reported. “There is disagreement over the extent to which the government is involved,” Dotteridge said. “Clearly it is a by-product of its militia policy, and the government could be accused of being criminally negligent for not dealing with it.”