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Songs and tears as Sudan’s slaves
begin
long journey home
By Declan Walsh
Jan. 17-- It was as if the dead had risen. Sixteen years after being
snatched into slavery, Abuk Dut walked into Majak Gei village in southern
Sudan. A waiting crowd exploded with emotion. Women rushed around, singing
and weeping. Overjoyed elders hailed her.
An uncle rushed forward with news of family. A chief sprinkled the overwhelmed
woman with water from a bowl, a traditional blessing. It was her first
day of freedom since the age of seven.
That day, armed raiders on horseback swept through Abuk’s village
like a malevolent storm. Houses were torched, men killed, women and
children abducted. Abuk was bound and forced north into captivity in
government-held territory. Years later she was forced to marry a member
of the PDF, a notoriously ruthless local militia. As time passed Abuk
forgot her native Dinka language and learned Arabic.
Last May, everything changed. Charity workers and local officials came
to take Abuk home. Her husband made frantic phone calls to prevent her
leaving; others tried persuasion. It was desperately poor in the south,
they said. There would be no proper medical treatment for her two infant
daughters. Abuk remained unswayed. “God will treat my daughters,”
she said defiantly as she packed her belongings.
The return of the slaves has started in Sudan. An estimated 14,000 women
and children have been abducted from the war-racked south since 1986.
Now aid workers say the Khartoum government, embarrassed by its association
with the phenomenon, is prodding the slave-raiders to send their captives
home.
A trickle of abductees has returned. As the burgeoning peace process
takes hold, thousands more are expected to follow. The charity Save
the Children UK is helping organize the returns.
“I can’t even watch some of the reunifications,” Chol
Changath, a program officer, said. “The people cry, and so do I.
There are tears of bitterness, from being separated, and happiness,
from coming home.”
Slavery has deep and tangled roots in Sudan. In the 19th century, Turko-Egyptian
forces brutally suppressed the southern tribes, establishing vast slave
routes to the north. The trade slowed under British colonization but
was reignited by the latest round of civil war, which started in 1983.
Khartoum deployed horseback militia known as Murahaleen to frontline
areas. In return for protecting a strategic railway line, the Arab tribesmen
were allowed keep whatever booty they found, crops, cattle, or humans.
The raids have ceased in the past year, but thousands of southern women
and children still live in servitude on northern farms. They get no
money and are beaten if they refuse to work. Some, reports say, have
been forced to convert to Islam. “I do not want to be sold again,”
pleaded Acho Ommail when she reached Nyinboli village last year. The
35-year-old mother told aid workers she had had been traded several
times, and lost her four children.
The Conservative peer Baroness Cox and other Christian campaigners highlighted
the slaves’ plight and the complicity of the Khartoum government.
Some also became involved in the controversial practice of “buying”
slaves out of captivity. The US group Christian Solidarity International
claimed to have redeemed more than 70,000 slaves, a figure five times
greater than the total slave tally estimated by British and Sudanese
researchers.
The contradiction bolstered claims by missionaries and aid workers that
exaggeration and fraud blighted the “redemptions”. CSI denied
the accusations but “buy-backs” have slowed in recent years.
Instead, slaves are returning voluntarily, on foot. About 175 crossed
the perilous front line last year, and 125 others were flown in on aid
agency planes. The returns can trigger great celebration, but are often
complicated by the human and logistical hurdles of Sudan’s isolated
war zone.
The return of 10-year-old Adhal was fraught with difficulties. First
the plane dropped him at the wrong airstrip. Then he had to rest because
he contracted malaria. Finally, he found the people who claimed to be
his relatives. But they did not know his third or fourth names, the
equivalent of not having an address in southern Sudan. Even worse, they
were expecting a girl.
“It can be difficult with the names,” Chol Changath said.
There are thousands of missing people in the south, and you can have
three families claiming for one child.” The returns also turn up
enigmas. One man, who had spent a decade tending his “master’s
goats”, had forgotten his relatives and showed no emotion when
told his parents had died. Aid workers thought him mentally injured.
But to their puzzlement he still spoke fluent Dinka despite his long
exile in the Arabic-speaking north.
The looming peace deal has encouraged high hopes for the thousands of
remaining slaves. After 21 years of war, a peace deal between the Sudan
People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebels and the government of Sudan
is intoxicatingly close. Negotiators are expected to sign within months.
The agreement will probably set off a tide of southerners returning
from exile in the north, including thousands of abductees. But the influx
could cause another crisis; already there are worries about whether
they will find enough food or shelter.
Last year’s food shortages in Bahr El Ghazal province, for example,
were compounded by the return of freed slaves with no food in their
stores and no harvest. One desperate mother and her three children were
forced to pack their bags and walk back to the north.
After the clamor of celebration died down in Majak Gei village, Abuk
Dut got some bad news. Three brothers had died in the fighting. So had
her father, who had spent three years wandering northern Sudan, searching
fruitlessly for his lost daughter. Exhausted and broken-spirited, he
died shortly after he returned home.
But there was good news, her uncle added. Abuk’s mother, Ayak,
was alive, well and living in a nearby village. A day later the old
woman came to collect her daughter. Shortly afterwards they set out
on the journey home, together again.
Source: Independent (UK)
Death squads making a comeback in Venezula
By Humberto Márquez
Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 16 (IPS)-- A map of Venezuela would
be covered with red pins if all of the recent murders were marked. A
wave of extrajudicial executions of alleged criminals indicates the
re-emergence of death squad activity and there are daily reports of
assailants killed in gun battles with the police.
In one of the latest incidents, heavily armed men, dressed in dark clothes
and wearing ski masks, stormed a home in a deeply impoverished neighbourhood
of the central-west agro-industrial city of Barquisimeto.
The eight victims were taken to a dark street and shot to death with
machine guns. Several were given a coup de grace, shot in the head as
they lay on the ground, according to the police investigations following
the killings last weekend.
Col. Jesús Figuera, of the National Guard and chief of the regional
police, said the murders were a “settling of accounts” between
two gangs. He also said that the assailants wore jackets bearing the
logo of the national investigative police.
But local residents and lawmakers take a different view of the facts.
“There died Vladimir Ríos, an honourable worker, and the
boys Marcos Crespo, age 12, and Nelson Pimentel, age 6,” said legislative
deputy Luis Florido, of the opposition Justice First, a party of the
center-right.
Another opposition lawmaker, Guillermo Palacios, said the crime “could
be the work of a death squad from Lara state,” whose capital is
Barquisimeto. Witnesses told reporters that the attackers dressed like
a commando from the regional police.
“It’s a structural problem, one that occurs throughout the
year, but perhaps in the early days of January it achieves greater visibility
due to the journalistic routine of taking an inventory of crimes with
the new calendar year,” Carlos Correa, coordinator of Provea, a
non-governmental human rights group, told IPS.
In this country of 25 million people, 11,037 homicides were reported
last year, the equivalent of 44 for every 100,000 people, says criminal
expert and former police chief Iván Simonovis. In 2002, there
were 9,617 murders, or 42 per 100,000 inhabitants.
The rise in crime encourages a sort of “social legitimacy”
for extrajudicial executions and lynchings, warns Correa. “Often
the community feels that ‘justice is being done’ and approves
of the disproportionate use of force.”
Also creating fertile ground for crime is impunity. “Twenty-five
percent of the crimes [260,000 a year in Venezuela] are solved by the
police, but sentences are handed down in just three percent of the cases,”
says the Provea activist.
When judges and prosecutors showed up on Jan. 14 at the Barquisimeto
police headquarters to inspect weapons as part of the investigation
of last weekend’s massacre, the officers stopped them from entering,
and even posted sharpshooters on the roof.
“Criminal accomplices!”, “Go out and patrol the streets!”
shouted some of the justice officials at the police in response to the
show of force.
There is a long trail of cases of killings by the police. In three cities
of the eastern state of Anzoátegui, so far this year police have
shot nine assailants to death in clashes.
“We are faced with heavily armed criminals. In 2003, 15 of our
agents lost their lives in combat,” said local police chief Alberto
Morales.
But Noel Azócar, the regional representative of the People’s
Defender (Ombudsman), maintains that “at least one out of three
who die from police bullets in reality have been assassinated,”
not shot in self-defence.
In the northern state of Aragua, an industrial center west of Caracas,
three bodies were found on Jan. 14 with signs of having been executed.
Also that day, in Guarenas and Ocumare, in Miranda state, east of the
capital, five individuals were killed in gun battles with the security
forces.
Meanwhile, the police in the state of Táchira, bordering Colombia,
this week dug up four bodies from a clandestine grave. The four had
been shot, and investigators suspect that the killers could be members
of a death squad financed by drug traffickers.
In Guayana, in southeastern Venezuela, “So far this month, every
day an alleged criminal has been killed by the police,” says Luis
Tábata, spokesman for the non-governmental group Lucha por la
Vida (Fight for Life).
In the northeastern state of Monagas, a parliamentary commission launched
an investigation into a series of murders attributed to a death squad,
which according to denunciations by the victims’ family members
is made up of police from the region.
If the claims of such involvement prove true, it would mean a resurgence
of the para-police groups that achieved notoriety in 2001, particularly
when a death squad massacred 68 people in the state of Portuguesa, in
the southwestern Venezuelan plains, according to governor Antonia Muñoz
at the time.
Furthermore, the existence of death squads in the northwestern state
of Falcón is under investigation by the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights, an independent body of the Organization of American
States.
From October 2002 to September 2003, Provea received 156 reports of
“violation of right to life” blamed on Venezuelan security
forces. More than half of the cases were attributed to state police,
23 percent to municipal police, and the rest to other security bodies.
There are 95 police agencies in Venezuela, 71 of which are municipal,
with the rest under the jurisdiction of the states. There are also judicial,
political, and National Guard forces with nationwide jurisdiction.
The debate on a national police law, which would unify commands and
efforts, has gotten bogged down in parliament, caught up in the political
clash between the Hugo Chávez government and the opposition that
seeks to remove him from office through a recall referendum.
But the drama of violence, revived by the death squads, transcends political
affiliations. The state governments of Lara, Táchira, Falcón,
and Aragua are supporters of Chávez, while those of Anzoátegui,
Monagas, and Miranda back the opposition, and the government of Guayana
state has chosen the “independent” route.
100,000 demand Iraqi elections
US now seeks United Nations support as Ayatollah threatens
fatwa
Compiled by Eamon Martin
Jan. 21 (AGR)— On Monday, Jan. 19, as up to 100,000 Iraqis
marched and rallied in Baghdad for national democratic elections in
their country, United States and Iraqi officials, including US occupation
administrator Paul Bremer, met with a wary United Nations Secretary
General Kofi Annan in New York to urgently discuss a future UN role
in Iraq. The visiting officials asked Annan if the international body
would now be willing to send a team to the embattled nation to determine
the possibility of holding early elections.
But the United Nations, after months of fruitless campaigning for a
role in bringing democracy to Iraq is now hesitant about going there.
The day before, thirty-one people were killed and some 121 wounded in
a suicide blast outside occupation headquarters in Baghdad in the boldest
assault yet on the symbol of US power in Iraq.
Most of the dead were Iraqis but included at least two Americans working
for the US Defense Department, after a pick-up truck, crammed with more
than 1,000 pounds of explosives, detonated near the “Assassin’s
Gate” checkpoint crowded with people and cars waiting to enter
the walled compound.
The huge explosion turned the busy central Baghdad street outside into
a battlefield inferno strewn with charred corpses, but the headquarters
buildings inside the heavily-fortified area were unaffected.
If the United Nations returns to Iraq, they will have to look for a
new headquarters. The old one was blown up in another suicide bombing
on Aug. 10, killing the mission chief Sergio Vieira de Mello and 22
staff and visitors, and the world body has been gone from the scene
ever since.
This and other attacks against UN and aid agencies prompted Annan to
eventually pull out his international staff from Iraq, and the timing
of the latest carnage could not be worse as far as the US-led occupation
authority is concerned.
The United States wants the UN to return to Iraq to help prevent its
power transfer plans from being wrecked by mounting Iraqi opposition.
The US has pressed for limited elections by regional caucuses which,
some critics argue, are vulnerable to manipulation and would very likely
result in pro-US candidates being elected to the proposed Iraq transitional
government.
But Annan is reluctant to lend the UN’s imprimatur to what many
UN officials believe would amount to validating a process it has no
role in formulating, and submitting itself to a timetable dictated by
US President George W. Bush’s desire for re-election.
Annan, a vocal opponent of the war on Iraq, is now in the unusual position
of being asked for help from the Bush administration which defied the
United Nations in order to invade the oil-rich nation.
A November agreement between the United States and the Iraqi Governing
Council to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30 made no mention
of any United Nations role, and the omission was one that Annan said
he took as a snub.
On Monday, the UN Secretary General promised the visiting US and Iraqi
leaders he would weigh their request to send a UN team to study if Iraq
could have quick, direct elections for a new legislature.
But the appeals for UN assistance this week took on new urgency for
Washington in the wake of opposition from the spiritual leader of Iraq’s
Shiite Muslim majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has rejected
the US designs for the handover.
Any hope of a successful transition requires an accommodation with Sistani.
The Grand Ayatollah has emerged as the most influential man in Iraq,
even though his interpretation of Shiism, unlike Iran’s, is that
the clergy must stay clear of government.
Sistani, a moderate and usually apolitical cleric, but who is the most
powerful leader of the Shias of Iraq, wants the democracy that the occupying
powers promised, and says direct elections must be held instead of the
caucus system now being prepared to create a provisional government
by the end of June.
The US and US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council claim there is not enough
time to organize an election.
But Ayatollah Sistani insists that “each Iraqi must have the right
to vote.” It is his refusal to give his blessing that sent Paul
Bremer rushing to Washington to discuss with Bush the Shia leader’s
objections.
Ayatollah Sistani holds the upper hand. Neither a new Iraqi assembly
nor a new government will have much authority if the US does not allow
real elections.
For the past week, Sistani has drawn tens of thousands of supporters
onto the streets to protest putting an un-elected government in power,
and has threatened strikes and civil disobedience unless the United
States backs down on plans to defer full elections until late 2005.
“We are going to see protests and strikes and perhaps a confrontation
with the occupying forces if it insists on...designing the country’s
politics for its own interests,” declared Sheikh Abdel Mahdi al-Karbalai,
Sistani’s representative in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, this
week.
“If Bremer rejects Ayatollah Sistani’s opinion, he would issue
a fatwa depriving the US-appointed council of its legitimacy,”
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Mohri, a Sistani spokesman announced on
Abu Dhabi television this past week. “After this, the Iraqi people
will not obey this council. This US plan is not in line with Sistani’s
views.”
Sistani insists the current plans will create a flawed leadership still
in hock to Washington.
On Monday, as US helicopters flew overhead, the 100,000-strong protesters
marched through Baghdad to al-Mustansiriyah University shouting “Yes
to elections” and “No to occupation.”
Amar Abdul Hassan, a student protester, said: “The Americans want
to choose our leaders for us. We want to choose them ourselves through
elections.”
“Yes, yes to Islam, yes, yes to the Hawza, no, no to terrorism,”
shouted the protesters who swarmed peacefully through the capital.
The Hawza network of Iraqi Islamic seminaries is headed by a coterie
of clerics considered a religious authority, or marjaa, including Sistani.
“We demand that the will of the marjaa is respected and the provisional
government is elected by the people,” said one protester, as others
brandished placards declaring, “Real democracy means real elections.”
“We are demanding democracy. And that’s what America came
to give us,” cleric Faras al-Tatrasani, said. Another protester,
Hassan al-Nouri, said the Americans “want to fill the assembly
with people who support them. We shall march and march until they agree
to an election.”
Many agree that it would be embarrassing for the US to hold elections
denounced as undemocratic by the Grand Ayatollah and the largest Iraqi
community.
But the crisis created by Sistani’s rejection of the US plan highlights
yet again the isolation of the occupation authority, said Salim Lone,
a former UN spokesman in Baghdad.
“It is Sistani’s implicit support for the American occupation
which has been instrumental in restraining a Shiite revolt in Iraq,’’
he pointed out.
“The [Coalition Provisional Authority] has to start learning lessons.
We don’t want them to learn lessons the hard way, but if they keep
on being pigheaded, they will be hurt,” said Mouwafak Rabii, a
Shiite and a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, who has been present
during most of the council’s discussions with Sistani.
Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated
Press, Financial Times (UK), Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Inter
Press Service, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, United Press International
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