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504 Cannon House Office Building · Washington, DC 20515
For Immediate Release Slavery
in the Sudan Last
week I met a former slave named Francis Bok.
Francis is a 21 year-old native of southern Sudan. At the age
of seven, he was captured and enslaved during an Arab militia raid
on the village of Nimlal, outside Aweil. Francis saw adults and
children brutalized and killed all around him. He was strapped to a
donkey and taken north to the town of Kirio. For
ten years, he lived as the family slave to Giema Abdullah, forced to
sleep with cattle, endure daily beatings, and eat inedible food.
Always called abeed (slave), Mr. Bok was given an Arabic name
and forced to recite Islamic prayers. In
December of 1996, Francis escaped to the nearby town of Matari,
where local policemen enslaved him again. Again he escaped and
eventually reached Khartoum, the capital, where he was arrested by
the security forces and jailed for seven months. After
being released, Mr. Bok was able to purchase a visa to Egypt, and
soon made his way to Cairo. In 1999, the United Nations resettled
him in North Dakota. Mr. Bok is now an Associate at the American
Anti-Slavery Group in Boston. Writer
Richard Miniter wrote in the Atlantic Monthly last year
“Sudan is Africa’s largest country and its saddest case.
Every ancient scourge lives here: war, famine, disease,
pestilence, rape, mutilation, and slavery.”
Mr. Miniter’s description is no understatement.
The sheer horror of what occurs in Sudan on a daily basis is
enough to enrage the most jaded of men.
The fact that the international community has hardly lifted a
finger to change the situation is enough to tempt one to despair. The
Clinton Administration, which has seemed so eager to intervene in a
multitude of foreign conflicts, has done nothing to stem the death
toll in the Sudan. Nearly
two million have died in 15 years, and more die every day.
A new effort called the Sudan Campaign is now dedicated to
shining a spotlight on Sudan and pressing the Clinton Administration
to diplomatically address this issue. Like
many former European colonies, the idea of political boundaries is
largely a contrivance in Sudan.
Twenty-seven million people live in Sudan, but they include
50 distinct ethnic groups and 570 distinct peoples.
There is no language, no culture, no religion, and no ethic
heritage to bind this nation together.
The extremist Muslims in Khartoum dominate the country both
politically and economically and have for ages oppressed the black
animists and Christians in the south. The
diverse peoples of Sudan had fairly little contact with each other
until the Turko-Egyptian invasion of 1821.
From that time forward, transportation improvements prompted
slave raids from the north that only ceased when the British Empire
forced them to end. Independence
from Britain in 1955 brought the return of slavery as well as the
start of a long and brutal civil war. Over
the last century, Christian conversions in the south have occurred
at a rapid rate. Their
addition to the small Coptic and Syrian Arab Christian communities
has made the Christian minority a substantial part of Sudan’s
population—and a brutally oppressed one.
Christian children are regularly abducted from their parents
during slave raids and put into Muslim reeducation camps where they
are beaten until they convert to Islam. Churches are burned to the ground and their pastors doused in
kerosene and burned alive in wells.
Christian women are subjected to genital mutilation and
forced to live as concubines. Aside
from politically isolating Sudan and adding it to the State
Department’s list of nations that support international terrorism,
the United States has done little to change the situation in Sudan.
The American missile attack on a Sudanese pharmaceuticals
factory in Khartoum—the same day Monica Lewisnky was testifying
before a grand jury—actually made it more difficult for the United
States to play a constructive role.
Sudan enjoyed a wave of international sympathy after no
evidence was found to substantiate our claim that the factory was
making precursor elements for chemical weapons. Last
week saw the kick-off in Washington of the Sudan Campaign, an effort
to press for a resolution to the conflict in Sudan.
The saddest part of the Sudan story is how grossly
underreported it is. The
Sudan Campaign seeks to shine a spotlight on the situation and press
the Clinton Administration to get involved diplomatically.
The day included a rally and a march to the White House. I
have made international human rights causes a priority during my
tenure in Congress, co-founding the Congressional Religious
Prisoners Task Force and joining the Congressional Human Rights
Caucus and the Helsinki Commission.
What is happening in Sudan is tragic.
America fought a war to rid itself of slavery, and it should
not sit idly by while another nation seeks to do the same. # # # NOTE
TO EDITORS: Francis Bok will be speaking at Congressman Pitts’
Human Rights Conference at Paradise Mennonite Church (Lancaster
County) on June 17th.
Information on the conference is available from Rep. Pitts'
offices (Kennett Square: 610 444-4581, Lancaster: 717 393-0667,
Washington: 202 225-2411).
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