War and Slavery in Sudan. Jok Madut Jok
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were ‘married’ by Arab men for years and after giving birth to a child or two, the women were told to go back to Dinkaland. Some went back upon the realization that the children they had given birth to were not going to be their children anyway, and others decided that they could not leave their children behind. They now linger in limbo. No children, no going home, no job, so they sometimes accept enslavement.”32
Another former slave whose freedom was obtained by his relatives provided an insight to the lives of slaves. Arop Ajing is a fifteen-year-old boy from the Tuic Dinka who was captured while grazing south of the Kiir River near Abyei. He had been a slave in a place called Chiteb in Kordofan. His aunt who was living in the North purchased his freedom. He explained why many slaves got killed in the North instead of being used as laborers. “When the Misseria hear that some Arabs have been killed by the Dinka in the South, revenge is carried out against the slaves. After all, it is easy to go back to Dinkaland for more during the next raid. The life of a Dinka person does not count for much in the eyes of the Baggara.”33
The southern captives were sold and distributed, and those unfit for anything were left to die or to live in limbo between Arab villages, for they did not know their way back or were too weak to travel back to the South without adequate food. Some of them managed to make their way into one of the northern cities after a year or two. By this time their captors would have forgotten that their arrival in Khartoum, for example, might expose the practice of slavery to expatriates or human rights activists residing in the capital city. Many of the stories of slave’s lives became known in Khartoum through the narratives of the few captives who were deemed unfit for enslavement and were let go. Other narratives came from children who were very young at the time of capture and were taken to Islamic schools in the northern cities, and managed to sneak out of such schools.
One concern that investigators of slavery in Sudan have had is whether or not slave markets exist and what the going rate for slaves might be. Officially the slave trade is illegal, but the only effect of this has been that the slaves are not sold openly in any known markets. For fear of being found, the slavers have made sure that there were no slave markets that lasted for more than a few hours following the arrival of slaves from the South. The longest the slaves were allowed to stay in the zariba was one day. Only in rare cases did the newly abducted slaves congregate in one place for as long as two days.
But what the slavers fear is not legal redress from the government, but rather outsiders learning about their activities and reporting them to the world. What became the tradition with the slave raids was that after the slave raiding forces had crossed the Kiir River on their way back to the North and felt safe in their territory, they would stop at some established points of rendezvous on the outskirts of the towns. Here, the slavers would divide the slaves and the booty taken among themselves, thus scattering the slaves in the slaving communities, leaving behind very little trace of their activities. The division of the loot is based on several factors: the taxes to be given leaders back home; the individual firepower of those carrying weapons; and the decision that each militiaman may keep the slaves he individually captured. Any remaining slaves that could not be sold quickly were sometimes offered as presents to local government officials. These local officials have quickly learned the language of the central government of categorically denying the existence of slavery in Sudan while becoming prime movers of this practice. One escaped slave boy from the Tuic Dinka, Achuil Deng, testified to this point.
The government does not question the Arabs about their activities against Southerners. In Angreb near Muglad, one Dinka slave boy held by somebody called Khojli Muhamed one day refused to herd cattle. He told the Arab that he wanted to leave and the Arab took him to the police station of Angreb. The police officer in charge ordered the boy to return to work and warned him against attempting to run away. He told him, “if you try to escape they will kill you.” The police are usually Misseria, and they help their brothers to retain their slaves. An Arab killing a Dinka slave boy is very easy. If he suspects that you are being disloyal you get a bullet without warning.34
The absence of slave markets has been held by the government of Sudan as the main argument against allegations of slavery, and has discouraged researchers trying to investigate reports of slavery. In addition, the area that has become the slavery zone is extremely difficult to enter. Educated South Sudanese and foreigners are heavily scrutinized in the area. Because foreign aid is needed, however, expatriate relief workers are allowed to go to the area but are not permitted to make any contacts with displaced Southerners without permission of government intelligence. The international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the transitional zone are required to employ only the local staff recommended by the government, so the NGO local staff are actually security agents who monitor the movement of expatriate staff. Expatriate aid workers cannot visit the camps unless they are with local staff. Any displaced persons seeking to talk to the foreign aid workers during visits are secretly taken and tortured. Displaced Southerners in the North, therefore, are unable to report their experiences to foreign investigators.
Children and women slaves, however, who had changed hands from one slaver to another, some many times over, related terrifying experiences with the slave trade. They talked about transactions involving the sale of children by their original abductors soon after they arrived in Baggaraland. These former slave children have also talked about the forced Islamization of slave children by their masters. As my interviews with former slave children indicate, almost every child or woman who has been captured and sold into slavery was subsequently forcibly converted to Islam. Conversion to Islam means being forced to drop their Dinka names, learn some Koranic verses, pray five times a day, fast during the month of Ramadan, and undergo certain North Sudanese rituals including female genital mutilation. I spoke with one woman who had been “circumcised” and three men whose wives had also been forced to undergo the procedure. Those resisting these practices were beaten, verbally rebuked, or killed.
In response to reports of slavery, the Sudan government has angrily issued statements denying that slavery and slave trade are practiced in northern Sudan. In fact, the government of Sadiq el-Mahdi reacted to such reports by arresting Ushari Mahmud and Suleiman Baldo, the two university professors who were the first and only northern Sudanese to report on slavery in writing. They were accused of wrongfully defaming the nation. Various Khartoum governments have since obstructed efforts by human rights groups and aid agencies to investigate these reports. In response to the large number of western media reports, especially from the United States, the National Islamic Front government has claimed over the years that what is happening in southern Kordofan and Darfur is a part of the traditional tribal abduction that has been practiced by the Dinka and Baggara throughout history. It also said that the constitution of the country prohibits slavery and that if it were taking place, the culprits would have been punished. More recently the government responded to the increasing evidence of slavery by forming a committee to investigate the issue. But what is certain is that there is already evidence implicating the government in the practice of slavery, and that the committee is merely a part of a campaign to disinform the world. Otherwise, the government should have invited journalists, members of nongovernmental organizations, diplomats, human rights groups, and members of the civil society including Southerners to participate in such an investigation in order to end these accusations, if they are false, once and for all.
Chapter Two
Slavery in the Shadow of the Civil War:
Problems in the Study of Sudanese Slavery
Studies of human rights in Sudan since 1983 have blamed the resurgence of slavery in Sudan solely on the civil war. From raids in 1986 to the famine of 1998 in Bahr el-Ghazal, an estimated two million died in the South and four million were displaced.1 These deaths, unprecedented in number in Africa and the most since World War II, were caused by both famines and genocidal practices of the government of Sudan. As a result the UN and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) established Operation Life-line Sudan (OLS) in 1989 to provide humanitarian assistance.
This war has blighted the central as well as the regional economies, and has caused the political landscape between North and South to crumble. The war caused more destruction in each succeeding year than the year before, most of rural Sudan became increasingly impoverished, and political