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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 2 (October 2000)
by Antero Leitzinger
translation: Anssi Kullberg
Slave-trade is flourishing at large in Southern Sudan. We know this for it has been widely covered in news by, among others, the German TV company ZDF already in December 1995. Since then, journalists from various countries have been witnessing the slave-trade show several times every year. The show is every time arranged by a Zürich-based international human rights organisation "Christian Solidarity International" (CSI), which boasts for having bought free more than 33’000 slaves. The money comes from huge contributions that the organisation gets thanks to the publicity.
The government of Sudan is not happy of the slave-trade reports. In its opinion it is exactly the paying ransom for slaves to be released that makes slave-trade a profitable business. Also UNICEF and a traditional British anti-slavery organisation "Anti-Slavery International" are disapproving the running of slave-trade. Thus, the German filial of the CSI has removed from the activity of its mother organisation, and the former leader of the United States filial demands the contributions to be returned. Lately, the criticism has increased and the macabre show has risen ever more serious suspicions.
The slaves, who have been bought free, tell that they are South Sudanese Christians, who have been dragged as slaves for the Muslims by the soldiers of Sudan’s army. The credibility of these stories has weakened, however, when they have been researched more carefully. The slave children who are told to return home from the North, have been found carrying the identity wrist-bands of a humanitarian organisation working in the South. The interviewed as well as the interpreters have been chosen by the CSI, and no others are even allowed to enter the area to buy slaves free. When a Reuters correspondent used two separate interpreters, he heard two different stories.
The CSI claims it has bought the slaves free through a middle hand in the price of 50 USD for each slave. This is a big amount of money in Sudan. According to the investigation of the Canadian government, however, the middle hands share the money with the "Sudan People’s Liberation Army" (SPLA), which is demanding independence for South Sudan. The guerrillas, in their turn, bring "slaves" to be shown. After all, the whole "slave-trade" appears to be just a show, and what the media is actually witnessing, is a financing ceremony for the South-Sudanese guerrilla war!
To prevent same "slaves" to be traded many times, the CSI has started to collect fingerprints from the people they have "liberated". The experts, however, suspect that the technique used is not sufficient to identify the fingerprints. Dutch and South African TV reporters, who were invited to witness the collecting of fingerprints, paid their attention on the fact that the villages on the way to the secret meeting places were entirely empty.
In the civil war between Muslims and Christians more than two million people have been killed during seventeen years.
(Der Spiegel 30/24.7.2000)
However, the roots of the conflict go back much farther into history. When Sudan became independent in the beginning of 1956 - as the fifth independent state of Africa - it had been a British colony for no more than half a decade. The borderlands of South Sudan had belonged to native African tribal polities that had been the last to resist European colonial powers up until the early 1900s. That means that Sudan was an exceptionally disunited colonial creation from the very beginning.
In his memories in 1913, the former president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, who had favoured the "gunboat policy", wrote bitterly about the century-shift "anti-imperialists", who had opposed the colonial wars: "I remember one representative of their number, who used to write little sonnets setting forth the need that the Sudan should be both independent and peaceful. As a matter of fact, the Sudan valued independence only because it desired to war against all Christians and to carry on an unlimited slave trade. It was ‘independent’ under the Mahdi for a dozen years, and during those dozen years the bigotry, tyranny, and cruel religious intolerance were such as flourished in the seventh century, and in spite of systematic slave raids the population decreased by nearly two-thirds, and practically all the children died. Peace came, well-being came, freedom from rape and murder and torture and highway robbery, and every brutal gratification of lust and greed came, only when the Sudan lost its independence and passed under English rule." (Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, New York 1913/1943, s. 535-536)
Roosevelt’s religiously based bias is expressed for instance in the reference to the 600s. The so-called "Mahdi’s War" in late 1800s has also been described by some novelists - the Polish Henryk Sienkiewicz (in his youth novel "Across the Wilderness") and the German Karl May. The Britons have made several movies of the issue, in which also less honouring views upon the role of the British is being represented.
In fact the Sudan War has actually been continuing for more than hundred years already, and the involvement of the Western powers in it has not changed the settings. First Britain and France subdued the old states of the inner parts of Africa, and divided them into British and French colonial Africa, annexing parts of them into Sudan. Then an Islamic sectarian leader "Mahdi" tried to declare Sudanese independence, resulting the Britons to recruit allies among the Christian population of South Sudan. Human rights were presented in defence of colonialism. Half a century later the Britons themselves declared Sudan to be independent, as they wished it would become a pro-Western balancing power against the pan-Arabic policy of Egypt. When Egypt turned towards the Western powers in 1970s, Sudan in its turn took influences from Libya, adopting a hostile Islamist policy. Once again the South Sudanese Christians rose into a rebellion, and in 1985 the present Iranian-minded regime usurped the power.
The Christians in the region do not necessarily have only the role of martyrs. Acting from bases in South Sudan, there is a Christian fundamentalist guerrilla movement fighting the Ugandan government. They have used child soldiers and cutting off people’s hands. Also the Hutu guerrillas fighting against the troops of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, are Christians. All of the central Africa has been divided into two vast alliances, and researchers are already speaking about an "African World War", stretching from the Eritrean front to the farms of Zimbabwe.
Today the South Sudanese rebels are apparently supported by Ethiopia and Libya. Besides South Sudan, the aiding targets of the CSI include Armenia and the Armenian-occupied Karabagh. The activity of buying free slaves has significant similarities to what was happening in Chechnya a couple of years ago, when the Chechens accused Russia for provoking and financing the kidnappings, and when the oligarch Boris Berezovsky used to buy the hostages free with huge amounts of money from kidnappers who after all remained unknown.
Some time ago a representative of the CSI, Baroness Caroline Cox, published an open letter directed against the peace process and possible looming solution to the Karabagh conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijani governments. The Baroness used rather questionable language and implications that included general hostility and direct accusations against Turkey, Azerbaijan and Chechnya. However, the letter showed no disapproving at Iran and Russia, two powers backing the Karabagh separatists and hardly being examples of respect for human rights or Christianity. The sources of the Baroness’s "information" remained a mystery.