War and Slavery in Sudan. Jok Madut Jok

Introduction

      Slavery in Sudan: Definitions and Outlines

      Many decades after independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan, the largest country in Africa, continues to make news headlines for calamities such as its war-ravaged lands, bankrupt economy, violent Islamic militancy, cultural and religious conflicts, and killer droughts and famines. But the disaster that has most engaged the attention of the Western world has been the revival of slavery and the slave trade, aided by the indifference and complicity of the Sudanese government. The successive Khartoum regimes since the start of the current civil war between the North and the South in 1983 have been notorious for encouraging enslavement of southern blacks, and increasingly Christian Sudanese, by northern Arab Muslims. Armed by the government as low-cost counterinsurgency militias, the Arab cattle-herding tribes of Darfur and Kordofan provinces, known as the Baggara, targeted in particular the Dinka of northern Bahr el-Ghazal and Abyei. The main reason for these atrocious assaults is that the Dinka are accused of supporting the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA), the southern opposition army confronting the North in the longest war of the twentieth century.¹ Khartoum governments have reasoned that if the SPLA’s support base were destabilized, the rebel army would be easy to defeat.

      The capture and sale of Dinka women and children from South Sudan into slavery in the North has been going on since 1983. The total number of captives at a given time is estimated at 10,000–15,000. I say at a given time because much of the slavery in Kordofan and Darfur could best be described as temporary. Some abducted slaves are released after they become regarded as unfit. Others escape. Others are redeemed through the assistance of Arab middlemen, or freed by legal recourse. This transitory character of slavery does not mean that while in captivity, the victims are any better off than those who are in bondage permanently. It simply means that some people become free as suddenly as they became slaves. In addition to people abducted for the sole purpose of enslavement, there are hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese displaced to the North by the raiding, the civil war, and the consequential famines that have plagued the southern region since the start of the war. Many of these displaced Southerners have also experienced enslavement. The impermanent nature of slavery does not bother the slavers, for they can always obtain more slaves. They have no fear of any legal measures since the government and the authority of the state stand behind them.²

      This situation has generated many puzzling questions about how slavery could be happening in this century. How can the government of a modern country encourage such a horrendous practice against its own subjects, simply because they are Africans and non-Muslim? How is it possible that the southern guerrilla force, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army, allows people in the areas under its control to be constantly raided and taken into slavery? Why is the world standing by, despite such misery, and not putting the necessary pressure on the government of Sudan to halt this practice?

      Some of the nagging questions surrounding the issue of slavery in Sudan have to do with its scale and volume. How many slaves are we talking about? How badly are they being treated in the North? How do we know about their conditions in captivity in the North?

      When I returned to Bahr el-Ghazal in 1993, ten years after the start of the war, the local authorities estimated that at least 14,000 Dinka men, women, and children had been abducted and driven to the North. Nobody knew anything about the fate of these captives. Many families had already started to venture into the North, particularly Kordofan and Darfur, in a tireless effort to find their enslaved relatives. Some have found their relatives and helped them out of slavery. Others have only recognized their cattle in cattle auctions in the North, and are still searching for their people. It is worth noting that many young boys were captured while grazing their herds and trying to prevent the raiders from looting the cattle. Therefore, when a man recognized his cows in the North, his hopes were raised that he might also find his child in the vicinity of cattle auction.

      The slaves are almost constantly in transit between capture, sale, release, redemption, escape, dumping, and capture again. No one has any idea how many slaves there are exactly. In 1987, human rights groups, including the Anti-Slavery Society, estimated that there were 7,000 children and women being enslaved in Darfur and Kordofan.³ Other reports put the number much higher based on the fluctuating market price of slaves. Between 1987 and 1988 the price of a slave boy went down from $90 to $10 (note that the price of a cow in northern Sudan was over $100).⁴ It is hard to determine the cause of the fall in price for slaves, but going by the usual determinants of market prices—supply and demand—falling slave prices in North Sudan may be attributable to an oversupply of slaves, which in turn could mean that Baggara raids have increased. Robert Collins asserts that the falling prices may have been due to the abduction of children from the camps of displaced Dinka in western Sudan. It is also suggested that, in the face of desperation, Dinka parents may have been pawning their children to Arabs who might feed the children.⁵ The SPLA authorities in the South, working closely with their own sources in the North, have estimated that 25,000 slaves are held in Darfur and Kordofan in a given year. They are victims of a devastating government retaliatory campaign. This campaign is compounded by the deteriorating climate in Darfur and Kordofan, which has pushed the Baggara to seek greater access to the grazing lands of the Dinka, as will be made clear in the following chapters.

      Slavery or Slander: Defining Slavery in Sudan

      Defining what constitutes slavery in the Sudanese contexts has been the persistent concern and subject of tense debate among human rights investigators and activists, government officials, social scientists, and other scholars since the first claims of slavery were made in the mid-1980s. Many have questioned the use of the term slavery as an accurate description of what has been happening in the border area between the Dinka and Baggara that has now become known as the “transition zone.” The government of Sudan continues to deny that the phenomenon of abducting women and children is slavery and insists that the whole matter is no more than traditional Dinka-Baggara tribal feuding over resources. I will show, however, that the practice is indeed slavery by any definition.

      The Slavery Convention of 1926 defines slavery as the status of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. Slave means a person in the condition or status of being owned. Slave trade is defined as all acts involved in the capture and acquisition of a person with the intent to sell, exchange, or dispose of him or her.⁶ The use of the term slave trade to describe the phenomenon in Sudan has been much debated. Some journalists have argued that slave trade does not apply in Sudan’s context since the term attempts to equate Sudan’s case with historical practices such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The government of Sudan, especially Hassan al-Turabi, the head of the ruling National Islamic Front, for example, has deliberately widened the definition of slavery to include all forms of exploitation. In this way, the government reduces the practice to a benign sort of aberration common in all societies, rather than the horrific case of chattel slavery practiced now in Sudan. Many people, however, have argued that evidence justifies the use of the term slave trade to describe the practice in Sudan, including the practice