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Will Freedom Come for Sudans' Slaves?
so.... there you have it. one of the religions under discussion it seems is currently in the business of taking people slaves and force-converting them, while the other is currently in the business of helping to set them free...
darn those pushy Christians, they probably prayed for those people when they liberated, them, too...
On Jan. 9, the people of South Sudan began their week-long referendum to decide whether to separate from the Arab-Muslim North and form an independent country. But Achol Yum Deng didn't vote. Though she has more reasons to seek separation from the North than most of her countrymen, she couldn't register: Since 1998, Achol was a slave serving her master in the North and was only liberated just before the voting began.
The war booty of a man named Adhaly Osman, Achol was threatened with death, gang-raped, genitally mutilated, forced to convert to Islam, renamed "Mariam," and racially and religiously insulted. She lost the sight in one eye when her master thrashed her face with a camel whip for failing to perform Islamic rituals correctly. This mother of four saw two of her children beaten to death for minor misdemeanors. She also lost the use of one arm when her master took a machete to it in response to her failure to grind grain properly.
Achol is one of 397 slaves whose liberation was facilitated and documented by Christian Solidarity International and the American Anti-Slavery Group in the state of Northern Bahr el Ghazal as voting commenced.
The British suppressed black slavery in Sudan in the first half of the 20th century. But the practice was rekindled in the 1980s as part of the surge in Islamism in the region. In 1983, when Khartoum's radical leaders declared strict enforcement of Shariah law throughout the country, the Christian and tribalist South resisted. Shariah-sanctioned slave raids were used as a weapon to break Southern resistance...
There is a racist aspect to this slavery. Blacks were cursed as Äbd (black slave) and kuffar (infidel). Many were forcibly converted to Islam. The North-South war, lasting 23 years, was ultimately declared a "jihad" by Sudan's Islamist President Omar al-Bashir...
Cases like Achol's have been known to the elites in the international community from the early days of Khartoum's war against the South. But the U.N. and Western governments have been slow to tackle this internationally recognized crime against humanity. It was not until 1999, 16 years into the war, that Unicef, the world's largest child welfare organization, finally acknowledged the reality of slavery in Sudan.
But threats made by the government of Sudan against U.N. operations forced Unicef to backtrack. Meanwhile, in 1999, the Arab League declared that slavery was nonexistent in Sudan and that to say otherwise was an insult to Arabs and Muslims. For fear of offending Islam, many Western NGOs have turned a blind eye...
so.... there you have it. one of the religions under discussion it seems is currently in the business of taking people slaves and force-converting them, while the other is currently in the business of helping to set them free...
darn those pushy Christians, they probably prayed for those people when they liberated, them, too...