Slavery still alive in Sudan [Arab Islamic Slavery Today]

CNN's David McKenzie travels to Bahr el Ghazal in Southern Sudan, where he speaks to former slaves who say thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of Sudanese people are still held in bondage...

MCKENZIE: Forced to sleep with animals they tended, deprived of food yet toiling for their owners. They all tell us of enduring cruelty. Branded like her master's cattle, Habouk (ph) shows us the scars that will forever identify her as a former slavery.

Hatoul (ph) wants the world to know her story. She was taken so young, she can't remember when the beatings and rapes began.

MCKENZIE: They gave him an Arab name, Musa (ph), and this Christian shows us how he was forced to pray.

DENG: Well, it changes their identity. If you are a slave, you are - - you feel that you are not human, really, in the real sense. So you -- you think that everything told to you, you get the command and you -- you don't -- you don't feel that you want to resist...

CNN Transcript - March 7, 2011

[...]
Coming up, we're shining the spotlight on slavery across the world, not just today, but across the entire year. It is a special CNN initiative and we begin tonight in Sudan, where former victims are still trying to make sense of their stolen years.

[...]

And straight ahead, today, CNN is launching an ambitious, year long project, shining the spotlight on the worldwide problem of modern-day slavery. We will see you the incredible scope of the problem and how even when victims are set free, they can find it difficult to fully escape.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SWEENEY: Today, CNN is launching an ambitious year long initiative aimed at raising awareness about modern-day slavery. We are calling it the CNN Freedom Project. Of course, slavery isn't a problem we can solve with our coverage alone. But over the course of this year, we're committed to putting a spotlight on the victims, the perpetrators and the thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to this cause.

The problem is massive. At least 10 million people live like slaves in the world today. But that number could also be as high as 30 million. And the average price of each of those slaves, just $90.

One group working to bring about change is freetheslaves.net, a non- profit organization with one objective -- to end slavery worldwide.

Take a look at the their interactive map, which really helps visualize the scope of the problem.

Freetheslaves.net reports there are 27 million slaves in the world today. Here's what the colors on the map represent -- green, fewer than 500,000 people are enslaved; yellow, 500,000 to five million; red, Asia- Pacific, more than five million people are estimated there to be enslaved.

Well, even people who manage to escape slavery can find it difficult to move on.

CNN's David McKenzie met several people struggling to get back to normal after being forced to live as slaves in Africa.

He joins us now live from Nairobi, Kenya to tell us about it -- David.

DAVID MCKENZIE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Fionnuala, here in Kenya, slavery is often an economic factor, people coming from this part of the world, being es -- going to the Middle East, particularly to work as domestic workers. And when they get there, the promises of a decent job are just not there.

But recently, we traveled to Sudan. And there in Sudan, the scars of war are very deep and slavery has shattered lives.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(singing)

MCKENZIE (voice-over): A Dinka herdsman sings a song of war and loss, of land taken by the Arabs.

(singing)

MCKENZIE: And of the people they stole during Sudan's long civil war.

(on camera): During the war, Arab tribesmen on horses would sweep through these villages. They'd kill the men and then they would grab the women and children and then take them back to the north as slaves.

(voice-over): Peace came here in 2005. And with it, many thought slavery was dead. But traveling to remote Northern Baragazal, we found slavery in Sudan very much alive.

LUKA DENG, DOCTOR: So this is a recent one.

MCKENZIE: Dr. Luka Deng introduces us to a group of former slaves. They say thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- are still held in bondage.

DENG: They were altered and through the rape.

Hatoul (ph) wants the world to know her story. She was taken so young, she can't remember when the beatings and rapes began.

Ahmou Kouch (ph) says he was ordered to convert to Islam or face death.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Allahu Akbar.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: .

MCKENZIE: They gave him an Arab name, Musa (ph), and this Christian shows us how he was forced to pray.

(on camera): What does being a slave do to someone's identity?

MCKENZIE (voice-over): I sat down with Habouk for some hibiscus tea. He says he had 25 years of his life stolen.

"If you look at me, I look like a human being," he tells me, "but psychologically, I'm not human. Even young children there would kick my tea away. I wasn't a human being."

Each time he tried to escape, he was caught and beaten. On his fifth try, he made it. But in his freedom, he says he's alone.

"The worst thing in my life is all the time I spent without having a wife," he says, "the time I spent without my family and friends, the time I spent alone, without my culture. That was the worst thing."

Dehumanized and without an identity, Habouk (ph) is like thousands of escaped slaves in Sudan, trying to make sense of his stolen years.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

MCKENZIE: Well, Fionnuala, we can throw around statistics like millions of slaves around the world, but, really, it's the individual stories of these people, the people like Makuch (ph), who spent 25 years of his life under slavery, direct slavery. This is not sort of modern-day or economic or anything. This is just slavery. He was held as a slave for all of that time. And, really, that is the impact of the spirit of -- of the world.

SWEENEY: And, David, presumably when one is free, there is a huge psychological impact or consequence.

What's it like meeting former slaves like that?

MCKENZIE: Well, really, you got a sense that these people had their lives stolen from them. I mean many of the people we met have been held five, 10, 20, 25 years. They were held north of the south-north border in Sudan. They were made to tend the -- the cattle, the goats of their masters. If they were Christians, they were forced to become Muslims, at least in the eyes of their masters, and pray and speak Arabic.

You know, we met people who came back to Sudan who didn't even know how to speak the Dinka language, who were unsure of how to interact with their fellow Dinkas.

As Makuch (ph) said there, his life was basically stolen from him. And the awful thing is that despite the peace in Sudan, there are still, potentially, thousands -- tens of thousands of slaves, Fionnuala, north of that border line who are still held as slaves. And, really, not enough has been doing -- done about it right now.
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1103/07/ctw.01.html
Slaves deprived of religion and branded
When the Civil War ended, many thought slavery was dead in Sudan, but CNN's David McKenzie found it's still alive.
http://my.uscable.com/video/?vid=512231&vendid=18&catid=3256

Sudanese survivor, enslaved as child, asks Marin Catholic to help build school
March 9th, 2011
By Valerie Schmalz

Francis Bok puts a human face on the reality of human slavery in the 21st century – and on building a country.

Bok, a Catholic Dinka tribesman from southern Sudan, was 7 and on his first trip with older children to sell peanuts and boiled eggs at a marketplace when he was captured during a raid by Arab Muslim marauders from the country's north in 1986. He spent 10 years as a slave to a wealthy Arab Muslim family in northern Sudan, sleeping with animals, herding goats and sheep, and then cows, and eating food scraps, often rotting, from the family's table. He was forced to become a Muslim, even as he was taunted as "abeed" – or black slave. The wife of the man who captured him regularly threatened to kill him, the man threatened to cut off his arm if he fled, and the children beat him.

"When you are in trouble, you have to turn to God," Bok told the students at Marin Catholic during a March 4 visit to thank the students for their prayers and ask their help in building a 12-classroom school, complete with a traditional boarding high school, in his village in the newly created country of South Sudan.

At 17 – on his third escape attempt – Bok walked away from his life as a slave, making his way to Khartoum, Sudan's capital, then to Egypt and finally to the U.S. In 2000, Bok was the first escaped slave to testify before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of his work with the American Anti-Slavery Group. Bok told his story in his 2003 book co-written with Edward Tivnan, "Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity – and My Journey to Freedom in America."

The book was an all-school read at Marin Catholic High School when Bok visited for the first time in 2008 and is now required reading for the freshman class. Bok's return was something of a homecoming, with the 6-foot 6-inch Sudanese terming theology department chairman Joseph Tassone "a big brother" who kept in touch, often via notes sent to Bok's Facebook site at facebook.com/pages/The-Francis-Bok-Foundation.

But the visit also had a concrete goal. Bok, a married father of two living in Kansas, spoke with the students about building a school in the village where he was born on his father's land. Bok's parents and sisters were killed during the raids on southern Sudan, but he did not know what happened to them until more than a decade later, his hope of seeing them keeping him going through much of captivity, he said.

"My father was someone I looked up to. He actually served his community with zeal and care," Bok told the students, and he said he continues to live his life with the example of his parents in mind. In regard to the genocide, and his time as a slave, Bok said he is working for his country's future. "What you do is everything you can to keep it from happening again," he said.

By prayer and sacrifice during Lent, Marin Catholic's community plans to raise between $6,000 and $11,000 for the school that Bok hopes to break ground on this year, Tassone said. Marin Catholic plans to be involved with Bok's work for years to come, Tassone said. The school will include primary school classrooms and also have an adult education component for parents who are mostly illiterate, Bok said. A compound to house volunteer American teachers and Sudanese teachers is part of the plan.

There is no high school in the region and because students have nowhere to go beyond primary school, they are losing hope. "I want that school to be preparing the leadership of tomorrow," Bok said. "To compete with the modern nations we have to work hard, we have to educate ourselves."

Since a 2005 peace agreement ending decades of sectarian civil war between Sudan's north and south, security has improved in the south and hundreds of thousands of refugees have returned to their ancestral lands. Bok's brother, his only remaining immediate family member, now lives on the land of their father and is helping with the school. Children from first to seventh grades learn under trees on their land, Bok said.

Bok's village of Gor-Ayen is part of the new country of South Sudan, which was created with the overwhelming approval of a referendum in January. South Sudan, which officially becomes a nation July 9, is mostly Christian and animist and is rich in oil reserves but remains undeveloped.

"People are coming back who migrated during the war," Bok said. "During the war, the entire village was completely destroyed and everybody left and went to either to Khartoum to the refugee camps, to Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya – you name them, all those places we actually fled to because of the war."

Michael Hill, senior communications officer for Catholic Relief Services, said South Sudan is the newest country in the world and one of the poorest. Churches, including the Catholic Church, have been the only organizations to provide any structure in the decades of destruction there, he said.

During the war militia from the north destroyed villages, killed nearly 2 million, enslaved 200,000 and displaced 4 million. Some 35,000 Sudanese are believed to remain enslaved in north Sudan, according to Christian Solidarity International.

For more information, www.thefrancisbokfoundation.org; iabolish.org; crs.org/sudan.
http://www.catholic-sf.org/news_select.php?newsid=25&id=58295

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