The flagship news program of the American television network CBS recently aired a hard-hitting report revealing what most experts on Sudan have known for quite some time: that the so-called “slave redemption” programs run by charities such as Christian Solidarity International (CSI) are not what they have been made out to be.
Far from being a much-needed effort to redeem southern Christian slaves held by cruel Arab Muslim captors, the “slave redemption” programs consist mainly of a gigantic fraud serving a dual purpose … they are a strong propaganda tool used by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and its leader, John Garang, and provide millions in cash for rebel commanders and their co-conspirators.
The revelations about this scam and how it worked were first made public in an article published in the Irish Times last February. Father Mario Riva, a Catholic priest who worked in Sudan for 22 years and spoke the local Dinka language, had personally witnessed how rebel commanders rounded up children and other residents in an SPLA-controlled village for the benefit of visiting Western “slave redeemers,” and told them to pretend to be slaves. According to Father Riva, SPLA translators relayed questions from the visiting charity workers to the children and reinterpreted the answers. He noted that the translators changed the questions to obtain answers the charity people wanted to hear. A nurse who worked at a camp in southern Sudan was also shocked to see children from her feeding center being paraded as slaves awaiting redemption, but was warned not to speak out.
In the CBS program, a former CSI activist, Jim Jacobson, revealed how when he arrived at an SPLA-controlled location unannounced, he found no slaves waiting for redemption. The SPLA commanders told him to stay and he watched them round up the village children and gather them under a tree. A short while later, he was told that his slaves were ready. As had happened before, SPLA soldiers dressed up in Arab dress pretended to be slave traders. Jacobson broke up angrily with CSI and let it be known that he wanted no part in this hoax.
CSI officials insist the program is genuine. They claim to have freed thousands of slaves and estimate that 200,000 more await redemption. The charity often spends over $300,000 a week on this enterprise.
It is not that the phenomenon of abducting women and children does not exist in Sudan. Sadly it does, and too many civilians are being held captive against their will. However, the way SPLA propaganda has tried to portray the situation, as one in which Arabs are the only culprits and southerners the only victims, is willfully misleading.
The first time I heard about this phenomenon was in London in 1990, when a prominent Dinka intellectual living in exile in the British capital informed me that his wife and four children had been abducted by an SPLA commander, another Dinka man. The wife managed to escape from her captor four years later.
In 1991, Garang accused a rival SPLA faction of abducting women and children and admitted in an interview, with the London-based newsletter Sudan Monitor, that the bulk of SPLA fighters join the war “for cattle and women.”
The phenomenon was exacerbated from 1986, when the government began to arm Arab tribes in the war zone and encourage them to fight the SPLA. The Khartoum government was forced to do this because the army was unable to stem the tide of SPLA successes or halt its incursions into government-held territory. This, in turn, revived the old practices of abductions and enslavement.
Worse still, the government made no effort to confront the problem when it was brought to world attention in a 1987 book by two prominent Sudanese academics who were immediately imprisoned. When the government of Sadek al-Mahdi was overthrown in June 1989, the successor military regime pursued the same policy of denial.
It is a great irony that only days before the above-mentioned CBS program was aired, the Sudanese government, for the first time, finally made a formal admission that a problem exists and officially helped repatriate about a dozen abducted children to their families in the south. In the past, the government had refused to confront the problem, leaving the field open for propagandists like CSI to brand the Sudanese as a nation of slave runners. Islam was also slandered by the activists, with people from CSI and the SPLA repeatedly alleging that “slaves” hunted in Sudan were being exported to Libya and Gulf Arab countries.
The government disregarded advice from human rights activists and civil society groups urging it to confront the issue of abductions. Admittedly, the government had very little authority over the culprits, or over the scene in the war zone. And since all sides indulged in abductions, any one-sided action would have been ineffective and counterproductive.
However, the government’s persistent denial that the problem existed hampered efforts to deal with it. Even when, under intense international pressure, the Sudanese authorities began to act, the measures they took were half-hearted and largely cosmetic.
What is needed is a task force to deal with the whole issue … involving the army, the security forces, the ministry of justice, regional governments and civil society groups. The task force’s mission should determine the nature and magnitude of the problem and recommend long and short-term steps for dealing with it. The international community should be involved.
It is a disgrace to Sudan that it is not the national government, but international actors who are doing today what the authorities should have done years ago. In fact, there is plenty of disgrace to go around, and no party in this fiasco emerges without a blemish.
The SPLA is doubly guilty, having regularly and repeatedly engaged in slave-like practices, including the abduction of women and children, the forced conscription of minors or their use as “beasts of burden” to carry supplies under harsh conditions, which would have been cruel even to animals. Furthermore, the SPLA had the temerity to pose as the champion of “slave” children. (Recently, and as reluctantly as the government, Garang released some of his “slave” children to UNICEF).
Furthermore, the SPLA sought to exploit the question both politically and financially, creating its own mock “slave markets” to dupe well-meaning charities who should have known better. The SPLA has, in this regard, betrayed the trust of its own people and those who were moved to help the Sudanese in the wrong way and under false pretext. In the process, it also forfeited and devalued the sympathy the Sudanese deserved.
The Khartoum government is guilty of contributing to the problem, and doing too little to remedy it. The charities involved are also to blame. It doesn’t take the insight of men like Father Riva or Jim Jacobson to spot the fraud. Anyone who believed that so-called slave traders (there were usually only two of them in these charades) could march over 3,000 slaves at a time for hundreds of miles through a war zone, without anyone stopping them, and then collect hundreds of thousands of dollars and walk back home peacefully, needs his or her head examined. And they deserved to be duped and made fools of.
It is high time, however, now that the issues have become clear, for something serious to be done to address the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese civilians who are caught in this and other war-induced tragedies, and for those who commit these war crimes against civilians be brought to book.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. He wrote this commentary from Chicago for The Daily Star

Copyright © The Daily Star