West Hartford, Conn. — On March 28, ten days before Passover, I flew illegally into south Sudan to witness the redemption of 2,952 enslaved black women and children and one man. My seders will never be the same.
A Muslim holy war in Sudan has rekindled the slave trade there. Decades after the British stopped most slaving in Africa’s largest country, the Muslim fundamentalist regime in Khartoum employs slave raids to impose Koranic law on all Sudanese.
Arab militia, armed by Khartoum, storm African villages, kill the men and take the women and children as slaves. An estimated 100,000 black slaves, mostly from the Dinka tribes, now serve Arab masters in Sudan.
Stories of their lives in bondage are known primarily because of the work of Christian Solidarity International (CSI), a Zurich-based group that redeems slaves. My organization, the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), has for years supported CSI’s Underground Railroad. It was time for me to go see the results.
I landed in Bahr el Ghazal with former Washington, D.C., Congressman Walter Fauntroy and D.C. radio personality Joe Madison. For four days we watched several mass emancipations and spoke to dozens of slaves.
Under a tree, in the 115 degree heat, Abuk Gar told me how she saw her parents shot and how the raiders tied her wrists together, then attached the rope to a long line of young girls. Away from her village, the rapes began.
Four girls she knew resisted and were brought to the front of the group, where their throats were cut as a warning. Abuk was gang-raped for all of the ten days it took to bring her north, where she was given to a master.
I met a woman whose baby was shot in the head because there was no room on the raider’s donkey to tie it. The pots they stole from her had greater value.
I met the lone man, who survived because he decided to be the most servile being he could, pleasing his master at every chance. He saw other young men resist and be killed. He wondered if he should have done that.
Two million have been killed in Sudan’s jihad, more than in Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, Kosovo, Somalia, put together. The U.S. Holocaust Museum put Sudan on its “Genocide Watch.”
But the West lusts for Sudan’s oil; and who wants another confrontation with Islam? So the south Sudanese, like the Jews of Hitler’s Europe, have been slated for slaughter as the world turns away.
Meanwhile, the New York Times tells us we should not rescue the slaves with cash, that the slaves should wait until this, the longest lasting armed conflict since World War II is “resolved.” So the West told the Jews.
We will not wait. The charge that buying slaves back foments more raids sounds right. But it doesn’t work that way.
If redemptions led to more of these murderous pogroms, the Bishop of Sudan and all the Dinka chiefs whose villages these are would bar CSI from Bahr el Ghazal. Instead, they implore us to continue.
Taking women and children out of the hands of monsters is not the solution to slavery as long as the war continues. Jewish law speaks to this.
When Jews were kidnapped for ransom in the Middle Ages, Maimonides ruled that congregations must pay for their freedom, even with money collected to construct a new synagogue. The only caveat: don’t pay more than the going price.
That’s CSI’s policy. Maimonides has Christian adherents.
I told the slaves that my people were slaves in Egypt thousands of years ago, but that our God redeemed us; and that He is their God as well, who, I pray, is working now to find ways to take them from bondage.
Dr. Charles Jacobs is president of the American Anti-Slavery Group (http://www.anti-slavery.com).
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