posted on the web on April 20 2003

Country Data

Full Name: Republic of the Sudan Capital: Khartoum Population: 37,090,298 (2002 est.) Location: Africa Total area: 2,505,810 sq km Language: Arabic Ethnic groups: Black 52%, Arab 39%, Beja 6% Religions: Muslim 70%, indigenous 25%, Christian 5% Currency: Sudanese dinar IGO memberships: UN, WHO Internet site: Ministry of Foreign Affairs Source: CIA World Factbook

Most Americans and Europeans imagine that slavery ended decades or centuries ago, while in fact there may be more slaves in the world now than ever before. Slavery exists across the globe in many forms, but one of its most blatant, recognizable manifestations is in Sudan, where a busy slave trade is a byproduct of that country's long civil war. In Sudan, government-supported Muslims from the north carry out raids in the south, seizing booty and human chattel from members of the Dinka tribe, who are Christians and animists. While this practice has occurred since the war broke out in 1983, the plight of these modern-day slaves attracted the West's attention only about seven years ago. Since then, Western aid groups have organized efforts to buy back the slaves from their masters—a process known as "slavery redemption"—but observations over the past few years indicate that the plan may have backfired. The efforts of well-meaning, but shortsighted, foreigners to help end slavery in Sudan have probably compounded the slavery problem. The failure of slavery redemption to eat at the root causes of the problem, or even to reduce the number of slaves, stands as a classic lesson to the West of how incomplete comprehension of the nuances and complexity of an issue can doom well-intentioned projects.

Sudan’s slaves make up only a fraction of the world’s slave population, but they have received an overwhelming amount of international publicity since 1995, when the president of the group Christian Solidarity International (CSI) traveled to Sudan in response to rumors of a revived trade in Christian and animist Africans. In Sudan, CSI president John Eibner did in fact discover that, in the midst of a devastating civil war, members of the Baggara tribes are raiding Dinka settlements and abducting women and children. The raiders then take their captives north, where they sell them to slave traders. The horrifying story of modern-day Christian slaves made headlines and mobilized financial support to combat this practice. But few people involved in the campaign against Sudanese slavery, and even fewer of its financial supporters in the West, fully understood the place of slavery in the context of the larger civil war and cultural history of Sudan. The media and public relations frenzy over the Sudanese slaves predictably missed another important point: the scourge of slavery is not uncommon around the world.

Slavery around the world

The UN estimates that at least 27 million people are enslaved across the globe; 20 million of them are Asians in debt bondage (1). Modern-day slavery has many faces and manifestations; while most slaves today are not bought and sold on an auction block, they are subject to the same fate: involuntary servitude, with little chance of escape. In southern Asia, desperate parents send their children off with men who promise them good employment, only for the children to find themselves sex slaves or unpaid carpet weavers far from home. Debt bondage is the most common form of slavery, especially in Asia. People who need quick loans in times of emergency sign contracts that promise their own labor as security against a loan. But interest rates ensure that the debtor must often work until his death, passing the loan and enslavement on to his children. Thousands of Haitians live as slaves on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. Some were kidnapped, and others were lured by jobs, only to find that they were unable to leave. Mauritania is home to the largest number of chattel slaves in the world; there an estimated 90,000 black slaves live in similar circumstances to the Sudanese slaves (2). But these blacks are Muslims and have not received the sort of attention that their Christian counterparts to the east have garnered. Most slavery stories do not lend themselves to such easy media coverage and fundraising; while the Sudanese found themselves in the spotlight, the rest of the world’s slaves have remained in the shadows, overlooked by a whimsical aid community and ignorant publics in the West.

Civil war in Sudan

To understand the issue of slavery in Sudan, it is imperative to look beyond the tragic stories of child abduction to see the larger political crisis that has spawned the recent slave trade. Since 1983, civil war has torn Africa’s largest country apart, causing two million deaths from violence, famine, and disease, and displacing four million people (3). Chattel slavery merely stands out to the rest of the world as the most anachronistic, barbaric feature of Sudan’s civil war, when it actually represents just one aspect of the misery afflicting southern Sudan. The violence has only increased since the National Islamic Front seized control in Khartoum in 1989. Like many African conflicts, the roots of Sudan’s war lie in colonial divisions. Upon independence, the British colonial government left Sudan intact but gave power to the northern Arabs, while the country has a slightly larger Christian and animist majority (4). Since 1955, Sudan has experienced only eleven years of peace between the north and south. In 1983, an agreement under which the South operated autonomously fell through, and the war has raged since then. Currently, the Islamic fundamentalist government in Khartoum is waging a brutal war against a group of secessionist rebels in the south called the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The government uses slave-taking as one of its instruments of terror in the South; it also denies southerners access to food, and bombs villages.

The practice of northern Sudanese Arabs enslaving southern Sudanese dates back centuries. The black Christians and animists of the south have long been treated as inferior members of society. The colloquial northern word for the southern tribal people, "abd," even means slave (5). However, the British, who along with the Egyptians ruled Sudan until 1956, eradicated slavery during the First World War. The current slave trade stems from Sudan's civil war, but it also represents the continuation of an old practice and reflects long-lasting ethnic tensions. The current conflict perpetuates the slave trade.

The Khartoum government, operating under the assumption that the Dinka support the SPLA, has cheaply armed the cattle-herding Baggara. These tribal militias, called muraheleen, raid the Dinka lands, killing men, stealing cattle and grain, and abducting women and children to sell as slaves (6). Khartoum’s tacit, and sometimes overt, support for these slave raiders has given them their lifeblood. In the North, Arab slave traders sell the women and children into bondage, and they are then forced to work as laborers, concubines, domestic servants, or herdsmen (7). Slavery in Sudan is, however, often temporary. Some escape; some are released by legal means or because they are unfit to work; some are bought back by their families; and others are released based on agreements worked out between the Dinka and Baggara tribes. A Dinka Committee of elders has operated since the 1980s to secure the release of hundreds of slaves through local authorities (8).

Estimates of the number of slaves held in the North vary widely. CSI sometimes claims that Sudan has 100,000 (9), and often says that Sudan has 200,000 slaves (10), a number the Economist calls "surely an exaggeration," saying "CSI’s numbers are warped by the group’s habit of buying slaves in order to set them free" (11). Anti-Slavery International (ASI), the world’s oldest human rights group, says, "between 5000 and 14,000 people have been abducted in Sudan since 1983," (12) and the SPLA estimates that 25,000 slaves are held in any given year (13).

Most modern slaves are owned by people of the same race, and these slaves are not usually traded as chattel. In Sudan however, Arab northerners enslave their poorer southern countrymen, and the slave trade is very much alive. Sudan’s slave market functions as such; prices fluctuate with demand and supply. Slaves can be inherited; they are never paid anything; and they are forced to work. Perhaps the similarities between the Sudanese practice of slavery and the usual Western conception of chattel slavery accounts for the attention that Sudanese slaves have received from the U.S. and Europe. While 20 million Asians are locked into debt bondage, their plight is slightly more morally ambiguous because they are not bought and sold as property. Though the modern-day slave trade in Sudan has been alive since at least 1985, it attracted little notice until 1995, when a flurry of international media attention following CSI’s fact-finding mission to Sudan brought the suffering of the Sudanese slaves to Western television sets and newspapers.

The cure-all: redemption

The story had everything: it pitted Muslim enslavers against Christian slaves; it took place in a desperately poor area of the world; media coverage was heart-wrenching and dramatic; and most importantly, it had an apparent solution in which Westerners could play a part. A media frenzy erupted, and Christian aid groups rushed to organize a way to end the oppression. In Sudan, Americans and Europeans saw a perfect opportunity to do a good deed, to contribute to ending a practice that struck a particularly sharp chord in the Western historical conscience. People who knew and understood as much about the situation as you do from the preceding paragraphs hatched a simplistic answer to a complicated problem. Since Sudanese slaves could be bought and sold, and since relatives of slaves regularly scrapped together money to emancipate them, Western aid groups decided they could go in and buy slaves their freedom. More money would equal more freed Christian slaves, and life for the southern Sudanese would improve. While few doubt the initial good intentions of slave redeemers, the consequences of their actions have proven far more complicated than they acknowledge.

Geneva-based CSI launched the largest campaign for slavery redemption, and aid group representatives traveled to Sudan under dangerous conditions and began to figure out how to buy slaves their freedom. After CSI’s appearance on the scene in 1996, the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) also joined the fight for slavery redemption. The fight to free black Christian slaves appealed particularly to African-Americans and Christians. The story of the Sudanese slaves passed across the country, into schools and homes. For only fifty dollars, you could free a slave; who could say no to that? The story of schoolchildren in Colorado who gave their lunch money to free the slaves attracted media attention and inspired tens of thousands of dollars in donations to CSI. Money poured into the aid groups, and the project of redeeming slaves began. Observing that Dinka had for years redeemed enslaved members of their tribe by paying Arab middlemen, CSI has followed a similar path. John Eibner and his colleagues use Arab middlemen to find child slaves and buy them from their masters, and then CSI triumphantly returns home with them. CSI claims to have freed over 70,000 slaves since 1996.

Or maybe not…

The history of slavery redemption since 1996 shows that the presumed solution to Sudan’s problem has had a more ambiguous effect than its initiators had hoped. Undeniably, CSI and other slave redemption groups have freed thousands of legitimate slaves and improved many lives. However, on the aggregate level, the picture is more complex, and slavery redemption has been sharply criticized. While CSI and other redemption groups maintain the integrity and effectiveness of slave redemption, a growing body of evidence tells a different story.

In addition to freeing enslaved children, slavery redemption has led to a host of unintended, but predictable, consequences: it has raised the price of slaves and created a busier market in them, providing more incentives for northerners to conduct slave raids; it has also led to hoaxes, with southerners pretending to be slaves in order to be bought back; it has disrupted the Dinka traditional ways of finding and buying back slaves; and it has enriched corrupt officials on both sides, allowing them to buy more arms with which to continue the civil war.

While exact data are impossible to find, CSI’s estimates of numbers of redeemed slaves are higher than seem possible, given the original number of slaves. In 2000, the Canadian special envoy to Sudan, John Harker, investigated human rights abuses in Sudan and produced a scathing critique of slavery redemption. Harker reported that, "Reports, especially from CSI, about very large numbers were questioned, and frankly not accepted. Mention was also made to us of evidence that the SPLA were involved in ‘recycling’ abductees" (14). While CSI has reported redeeming thousands of slaves from the North, aid workers have not noticed any change in the population, and workers in the south have noticed no increase in requests for food and water (16).

Slavery redeemers have also created a more active market in slaves. They pay far more than the going rate for slaves in the north, which presents an enormous opportunity for profit making. Carol Bellamy, the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and an early critic of slave redemption, said in 1999, "the practice has added a clear profit motive to the host of other factors that have allowed slave taking to flourish in that strife-torn country…to pay cash for slaves, even to liberate them, is to enter a vicious circle. At $50 a head in a country where most people subsist on less than $1 a day, the practice has only encouraged more trafficking and criminality."16 In the end, no one knows where the money from slave redemptions ends up. The practice naturally enriches the slave traders from whom the slaves are being redeemed, and fraud on the SPLA side undoubtedly funnels money to that movement. This money may go to buy both sides arms that perpetuate violence. Signs point to increasing raids from the Baggara, indicating that they have responded to the lucrative possibilities in slave trading, and that they may now be taking more slaves.

The desperately poor southerners have themselves sometimes duped the aid groups. In some cases, village children have paraded as slaves, and aid groups have "redeemed" them. Also, lighter-skinned southerners have been forced by the SPLA to pretend to be Arab slave traders. The SPLA has been implicated in scams to corrupt the slave redemption process. James Jacobson represented CSI in Washington from 1995 to 1998, until the American branch of CSI became independent, with Jacobson at its helm. Jacobson, once a fan of redemption, has described the fraud that he has witnessed on trips to Sudan. Jacobson, whose organization no longer participates in slave redemption, said, "We’ve made slavery more profitable than narcotics" (17). Baroness Caroline Cox, the head of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), another group involved with slave redeeming, has maintained that her organization has not been duped (18). However, CSW halted its slave-redeeming program two years ago, citing safety reasons, and the Times of London’s has criticized her as "well meaning but… ever so slightly unhinged" (19).

Apart from the many practical arguments against slavery redemption stands a powerful moral case against the practice. Opponents argue that by buying slaves their freedom, Westerners are legitimizing the idea of slavery. We should not play a part in the slave trade in the same way that we should not negotiate with terrorists, they say. Slavery redemption presents a "real danger of fueling a market in human beings," worries Reed Brody, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch (20).

Onward Christian soldiers

Since 1999, a growing consensus has acknowledged that slavery redemption may be counterproductive. Human Rights Watch’s March 2002 report on Sudan says, "With all the good intentions in slave redemption, it does not end slavery," and announces that it opposes slave buy-back schemes (21). More and more organizations, including some that started the slavery redemption project, are wary of continuing the process. At the same time, John Eibner pleads on CSI’s website, "Thousands are waiting to be freed. I beg you from my heart to help them!" (22). South Sudanese have been ambivalent towards the program; they appreciate the help, and especially the publicity, that slavery redemption projects bring them. But some Dinka are coming to acknowledge the failure of redemption. An article last February reported, "Samson Kwaje, the SPLA spokesman, said he recently advised an Ontario-based church group called Crossroads to give up redemption and spend its contributions on other projects, such as well-digging" (24).

The international community has condemned the Sudanese government for permitting, even facilitating, the slave trade. In 1999, the government, which will not utter the word "slavery," acknowledged that "abductions" are a problem in the south, and established the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children (CEAWC),24 but it has been largely inactive. Until government complicity in slaving ends, the slave trade in Sudan will continue. The U.S. State Department applauded a report of the International Slavery Commission issued last May that called for the Sudanese government to enforce anti-slavery laws; to control the raiders that abduct slaves; to strengthen anti-slavery institutions like the CEAWC; and to stop running the north-south supply train that brings raiders into the Dinka lands (25). Last May, a panel of several Western countries, led by the United States, analyzed the situation of slavery in the Sudan and issued a report condemning the Sudanese government. But the report also criticized the practice of slave redemption (26). And in June, President George W. Bush called on Sudan, now a partner in the war on terrorism, to end its civil war and stop slavery (27).

Rather than pursuing a policy of slavery redemption, the current focus in Sudan is on ending the civil war, and the two sides have made significant progress in the past year. Last November, the Khartoum government and SPLA signed an agreement in Kenya that extends a cease-fire and declares unimpeded aid access. The memorandum also includes plans for power sharing in a peacetime government. The sides will meet again in January to work towards a peace agreement, though the Khartoum government and SPLA face strong domestic pressures that threaten to derail such a plan (28). But the hope for peace still stands as the best bet for the Sudanese slaves. Human Rights Watch wrote in March 2002, "When the crises in Sudan are brought to an end, slavery will also come to an end" (29). For now, Westerners continue to believe their $50 donations are going to free another human being from bondage, and CSI "redeems" ever greater numbers of slaves.

Robert Richardson is student at Princeton University, USA.

Bibliography

1. Modern-Day Slavery, "Global Hangover Guide, available at http://www.hangoverguide.com/over/factbook/dayslave.html. Source of article is NYT
2. "Slavery: Worldwide Evil," available at www.anti-slavery.com/today/background/worldwide-evil.htm
3. Jok Madut Jok, War and Slavery in Sudan, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, p. 42
4. Jok, 182
5. Jok, 9
6. "Slavery and Slave Redemption in the Sudan: HRW Backgrounder," Human Rights Watch, March 2002, available at www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/sudanupdate.htm
7. Jok, 164
8. "Slavery and Slave Redemption in the Sudan," HRW, March 2002
9. Eibner, John, "It takes 2 goats, or $33, to free a slave in Sudan," International Herald-Tribune, 11 June 2002
10. CSI Website, available at http://www.csi-int.ch/csi-art_030102.htm
11. "Charities who buy slaves their freedom may be doing harm," The Economist, Feb 7, 2002
12. Anti-Slavery International Website, available at http://www.antislavery.org/archive/press/pressRelease2002-UNmeeting.htm
13. Jok, 3
14. "The Reality of Slave Redemption in Sudan," The European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council, 2001, available at www.sasociety.com/issues/reality.htm
15. Declan Walsh, "Scam in Sudan," The Independent on Sunday, 24 Feb 2002.
16. Jok, 174
17. Richard Miniter, "The False Promise of Slave Redemption," The Atlantic Monthly, July 1999.
18. Ibid.
19. "The Reality of Slave Redemption in Sudan," The European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council.
20. Miniter, "The False Promise of Slave Redemption."
21. Slavery and Slave Redemption in the Sudan, HRW, March 2002.
22. CSI Website, available at http://www.csi-int.ch/
23. Karl Vick, "Ripping off Slave ‘Redeemers,’ Washington Post, 26 Feb 2002
24. Mike Dottridge, "Dollars and Sense," New Internationalist, August 2001
25. US Department of State, "Sudan, Report on slavery, abductions, and forced servitude," M2 Presswire, 24 May, 2002
26. New York Times, 22 May 2001
27. "Bush Presses Sudan to end civil war, slavery," Agence France-Presse, 21 June 2002
28. "Power and Wealth Sharing: Make or Break Time in Sudan’s Peace Process," International Crisis Group Report, 18 Dec, 2002, available at www.crisisweb.org/projects/showreport.cfm?reportid=854
29. "Slavery and Slave Redemption in the Sudan," HRW, March 2002.