The Peace FAQ:

Slavery, Slaves

Frequently Asked Questions:

How brutal was the African slave trade in the Arab world?
Are the Arabs still buying and selling Africans?
Why then have those in the Nation of Islam, and other Black Muslims adopted (Arabic) slave names and their master's (Islamic) religion?
Why doesn't the United Nations stop the Arab slave trade?

How brutal was the African slave trade in the Arab world?

The narrative of the last days of the Flatters mission, published in another column according to the text of the Paris Figaro, contains in its terribly dry detail suggestion of horror almost unprecedented. Most of the victims, as their names show, were spahis belonging to the race of the desert's children; but they had long been accustomed to the comparatively civilized life of Algeria or the Senegal colonies, and their last struggle took place in a region known only to the wildest and fiercest of all nomad Arabs, who sweep through it on their way to carry off a sable booty of slaves from the black cities of the Niger, leaving behind them on their return a track marked with skeletons. In these latitudes time has stood still for uncounted thousands of years,--naught has been changed since the primeval sea dried up. It is all a dead and ruined world like the Moon.
- by Lafcadio Hearn, in A STRANGE TALE OF CANNIBALISM, The Times-Democrat (1882-oct-15)

Are the Arabs still buying and selling Africans?

Religious persecution of Christians in the Middle East has reached extreme forms of human degradation: In Sudan, abundant reports by international human rights organizations have documented the enslavement by the northern fundamentalist forces of southern African Christians. According to the reports and experts, there are today between 600,000 and one million Black slaves from Sudan, who have either been taken to the north of that country to work as domestics or tending farms, or sold in other Arab countries.
- Prof. Walid Phares, before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Near East and South Asia Subcommittee on "Religious Persecution in the Middle East." Washington DC, April 29, 1997
"In Sudan radical Islamists in Khartoum use slave raids as a weapon in their self-declared jihad on black Christians and animists in the south Arab militias storm African villages, shoot the men and capture the women and children."
- American Anti-slavery Group research director Charles Jacobs (Boston Globe, July 8, 1997)
SLAVERY LIVES
As the United States continues to cope with problems growing out of our slaveholding history, it's sobering to realize slavery is still practiced in the 1990s-in Africa. In the Sudan, a charitable organization called Christian Solidarity International is buying slaves (for a few hundred dollars each) and setting them free. There are reports of slavery in West Africa, too, including in Nigeria and Mauritania (where an estimated 90,000 persons are owned outright, and another 200,000 are indentured servants). Many of these slaves are Christians held in non-Christian lands.
When Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam insisted in a National Press Club speech that slavery did not exist in Africa, the Baltimore Sun sent reporters Gilbert Lethwaite and Gregory Kane on a risky mission to the Sudan, where the reporters purchased two half-brothers, ages 10 and 12, in the village of Manyiel. The reporters paid about $1,000, then delivered the boys back to their father.
The Arab slaver, Adam El Haj, said that the abduction of children into slavery was being organized by the Islamic government in the Sudan. The U.S. State Department and human rights groups estimate there are tens of thousands of other slaves in the Sudan.
- THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1998

Why then have those in the Nation of Islam, and other Black Muslims adopted (Arabic) slave names and their master's (Islamic) religion?

Ignorance.

Why doesn't the United Nations stop the Arab slave trade?

Arab slave trade continues. U.N. condemns Israel. World thirsty for Oil.
Nur Muhammad al-Hasan emerges from the Sudanese bush. His loose, once-bright white jalabiya flutters as he strides towards me. I in turn step through the long, dry grass towards him, stooping slightly as I walk under the weight of a U.S. army kit bag full of grimy Sudanese bank notes. It is April 1999 and the midday sun is oppressive. Nur and I greet each other with a handshake and "Salam 'alaykum." We slip under the shade of an enormous mango tree where we have some important business to discuss: The liberation of slaves, mainly women and children.
Our enterprise is not to everyone's liking. Last spring, Sudan's government, the radical Islamist regime of the National Islamic Front (NIF) headed by Hasan at-Turabi and Gen. 'Umar al-Bashir, protested to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights about our work. The regime claims that my organization, Christian Solidarity International (CSI), is the main source of the abduction and kidnapping of children in southern Sudan. In April, the Khartoum regime also initiated proceedings to deny CSI its consultative status at the United Nations (U.N.), alleging that we act contrary to the purposes and principles of the U.N. charter.
About the same time, the world's richest and most influential child welfare organization, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), ended its long silence on the enslavement of Sudanese woman and children. Instead of condemning the slavers, UNICEF-whose mandate requires it to work in partnership with the government of Sudan-echoed Khartoum by calling our liberation of slaves "absolutely intolerable," and by accusing us of violating the Slavery Convention. Others, with agendas of their own, perhaps working with the Sudanese regime or trying to salvage their own tarnished reputations, have spread rumors of fraud about these activities.
Then in late October, the U.N. Economic and Social Council voted by a tally of 26 to 14 (with 12 abstentions) to withdraw our consultative status, thus effectively excluding CSI from the U.N. system. Yet if anything is "absolutely intolerable," it is that the international community has allowed slavery and other crimes against humanity to be institutionalized by a member state of the United Nations.
All of this campaigning has had some effect, making the "out of sight, out of mind" attitude less tenable. In February 1999, soon after Dan Rather of CBS News highlighted the plight of Sudanese slaves and CSI's role in freeing them, UNICEF broke its silence and admitted: "Slavery in Sudan exists." Even as it said this, however, UNICEF appeased the Khartoum regime by condemning the redemption of slaves as "absolutely intolerable."
...UNICEF's executive director Carol Bellamy made a series of widely publicized press statements attacking CSI's antislavery campaign, claiming that Dinka efforts to retrieve their enslaved women and children contravenes the Slavery Convention and is not in their own best interests.
...The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, has also kept mum on the issue, despite her own staff and independent U.N. special rapporteurs confirming the existence of slavery in Sudan and the government's key role in abetting the slave trade-in particular, the reports submitted by the former Special Rapporteur on Sudan Gaspar Biro and his successor Leonardo Franco. The 1999 Sudan Resolution of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights failed even to mention the word "slavery." The U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has also never publicly condemned the revival of slavery in Sudan.
And the U.S. government? It too is reluctant. In 1999, for the first time in six years, Washington declined to serve as the main sponsor of the Commission on Human Rights' Sudan resolution, leaving this responsibility to the lukewarm European Union; and the Clinton administration assented to the commission's "slavery-free" resolution. Why the change? Because in return, the Sudanese were prepared not to press hard for a condemnation of the United States for the rocket attack on Khartoum's Ash-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in August 1998. However, with an eye on the abolitionist movement at home, the State Department tried to maintain the moral high ground by condemning the (U.S.-supported) Sudan resolution as "deeply flawed" for failing to "confront fully the practice of slavery." This did not convince; just four days later, the Clinton administration announced a weakening of sanctions on Sudan (by allowing the sale of agricultural goods and pharmaceuticals).
...The sad truth must be acknowledged: Sudanese slaves and other victims of the NIF's genocidal jihad count for little in a world preoccupied with other matters. Millions of lives have been lost and disrupted while the world has largely turned a blind eye toward gross violations of human rights in Sudan.
Whatever may be the future of the international abolitionist movement, the Dinkas are right not to wait for help from the U.N. or any state but to find their own ways to liberate their people from bondage. Still, they can count on my colleagues and me, as well as a growing number of abolitionists for support until the last slave is free.
- John Eibner, historian and human rights specialist, assistant to the international president of Christian Solidarity International. He has led over twenty fact-finding visits to Sudan and neighboring countries and has pioneered CSI's antislavery program. Source: The Middle East Quarterly

RELATED SECTIONS:
Islam, Arabs, Christians, Muhammad, Apartheid, Racism, Women, Democracy, Double Standards, Automorphism
WWW RESOURCES:
BOOKS & PRINTED MATERIAL:
- Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America, by Francis Bok, Edward Tivnan [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- Slave, by Mende Nazer, Damien Lewis [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery, by Samuel Cotton [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, by Ronald Segal [VIEW BOOK HERE]

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