Spectator's Journal: Slavery in Our Time
Aikman, David
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by David Aikman Slavery in Our Time Slavery. The very word has an ugly feel to it. For one thing, it reminds us of a blot on our own history that was removed only at horrific...
...The Independent Women's Forum has repeatedly challenged leftist women's groups to speak out against chattel slavery...
...The "Dateline NBC" footage showed ex-slaves with skin worn completely off their legs after being led along for days by ropes attached to camels...
...The biggest stir came when the panel took up the question of why Farrakhan had denied slavery even existed in the Sudan and other African countries, and why other African-American leaders had been silent on the subject...
...For $4.,000 the Sun reporters actually bought the freedom of two slaves in southern Sudan who had been seized in a raid by the government-supported Popular Defense Force...
...This involved stuffing tiny insects into the victims' ears, then sealing them with wax or small stones, and a scarf tied tightly around the head...
...And you look inside the Sudan, and if you find it, then come back and tell the American people what you have found," he said...
...Steve Wondu, a black, southern Sudanese attending the conference as an observer, jumped up to declare that Farrakhan had personally discussed Sudanese slavery with him at a meeting in Kampala, Uganda, in April 1994...
...But the overall passivity of much of the rest of the black media and political establishment appears to have provoked a grass-roots movement among African-Americans to campaign against African slavery...
...It may not be blowing in the direction of silence about slavery much longer...
...Malwal said that during two44 Slaves who try to escape are beaten savagely, tied down in the sun without water, or subjected to the 'insect treatment.' days of breakfast meetings in Nairobi in September 1994, Farrakhan admitted to him that he had noticed black African children on the streets in Sudan whom he knew to be slaves, and had raised the issue with Khartoum's militant Islamic regime...
...The vituperative denials in Final Call were predictable enough...
...Before, it was like risking your life...
...As it happens, these "damn lies" had been documented not only by other American reporters, such as Tim Sandler of the Boston Phoenix, but by German television, London's Times, and Baroness Caroline Cox, deputy speaker of Britain's House of Lords...
...After his five-part series on Mauritania appeared, Samuel Cotton, a great-great-great-grandson of slaves, testified before Congress in March 1996 and began receiving speaking invitations from across the country...
...I t's not just African-Americans who are puzzled and angry, and not just at Farrakhan...
...Shocked, he called several human rights groups to protest...
...His group, Congress on Modern Pan-African Slavery (COMPAS), has a staffer working full-time to publicize the issue...
...For one thing, it reminds us of a blot on our own history that was removed only at horrific cost and still casts a deep shadow on relations between black and white nationwide...
...The COMPAS newsletter reaches thousands of black churches and groups...
...The American Spectator ?February 1997 53...
...As for Charles Jacobs, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Jacobs sent three packages of complete information to Jesse Jackson at PUSH in Chicago...
...Singleton also just happens to be on friendly terms with Jackson, who now allows it to be said in his name that there is indeed "a serious slavery issue in Sudan and Mauritania...
...His angry five-part report in New York's black-owned City Sun touched off a wave of TV and radio discussions, mostly in the black community...
...Last spring, Gregory Kane and Gilbert Lewthwaite from the Baltimore Sun, along with a crew from "Dateline NBC," accompanied a slave-buying expedition into Sudan organized by the Swiss-based group Christian Solidarity International...
...Slaves could be purchased or sold in Sudan, readers and viewers learned, for as little as $15...
...Much of the resentment at Farrakhan and others boiled over last December at a press conference in Washington at the National Press Club...
...One of the Washington participants was Rev...
...Cox has made repeated visits to Black America slowly rediscovers slavery—in Africa...
...Clay's membership in the ALC is through a group called the International Coalition Against Chattel Slavery...
...52 February 1997 • The American Spectator south Sudan to publicize the plight of the slaves...
...More disturbing, not a single influential black American group—neither the NAACP, nor the Congressional Black Caucus, nor the Southern Christian Leadership Conference —would speak publicly against African slavery...
...They stick up their finger in the air and see which way the wind is blowing...
...Before that happened, many slave-owners would subject their human chattel to forcible genital mutilation...
...Chattel slavery has also been reported from time to time in Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Chad, and seems to be flourishing in the west Saharan state of Mauritania...
...That's exactly what five American journalists very quickly did...
...Many African-Americans are puzzled by Farrakhan's defense [of Sudan...
...Later, returning to the rostrum after having almost left the press conference, the former Episcopal choirboy jabbed his finger angrily at his questioner...
...These reports have been confirmed even by the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on Sudan, Gaspar Biro...
...ment, usually reluctant to report human rights abuses in "friendly" countries, acknowledged the existence of "vestiges" of slavery in Sudan...
...We've caught Farrakhan in a box," said Nate Clay, an African-American newspaper publisher and radio commentator from Chicago...
...Gaspar Biro issued his own report last March with almost identical accusations gathered over a period of four years...
...Even the State DepartDAVID AIKMAN is a former Time magazine foreign correspondent...
...What I am finding is that there is less and less censure of those who have criticized Farrakhan...
...He found that all of them were well informed about African slavery, but none was willing to focus on it...
...Samuel Cotton, a black American reporter, spent several days in Mauritania a year ago interviewing and filming slaves and escaped slaves...
...Though overwhelmingly African-American, the group also included a representative of Christian Solidarity International as well as Charles Jacobs, a Jewish management consultant from Boston and a persistent anti-slavery campaigner...
...Jesse and Bill Clinton are very much alike," says Nate Clay...
...In some countries, in fact, slavery appears to be thriving...
...Eyewitness reports and interviews with escaped slaves, slave-traders, and captured slave-raiders have been collected by human rights groups (particularly Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Africa), by Sudanese Roman Catholic bishops and Protestant clerics and missionaries, and by numerous international reporters for several years...
...Take Sudan, for example...
...Jacobs was told by Jackson aides that the Reverend was "busy with affirmative action...
...When he finally sent a fourth package requiring a recorded delivery receipt, it was returned to him unopened...
...Farrakhan at the time had been shut-fling between the Islamic leadership in Khartoum and southern Sudanese opposition leaders outside the country in an effort to negotiate an end to the civil war...
...in the 1960's, he first heard about African slavery from a management client who told him that their representative in Mauritania could purchase a slave for $15...
...Then another tall southerner bounded to the microphone, Bona Malwal, a former Sudanese cabinet minister and currently the editor of the London-based opposition newspaper, Sudan Democratic Gazette...
...At a press conference afterward, Farrakhan was asked how he could embrace a Sudanese regime that tolerated slavery...
...Some victims, according to eyewitnesses, simply went insane...
...But it certainly serves notice to Farrakhan—who sometimes refers to Jackson as one of his very few non-Muslim friends...
...I would have expected Farrakhan to keep quiet about the issue of slavery," Malwal said, "not to deny it...
...Invariably, the stories related tales of rape, chattel slavery, and torture carried out by PDF raiding parties in the Nuba mountains and in southern Sudan...
...The NBC crew conducted powerful interviews with women and children who had beensnatched from their families by the same PDF militia, sold or taken into slavery, and returned to their village only after an Arab slave-trader agreed to sell them back to their relatives...
...During the Capitol Hill hearing last March, she asserted that "[Sudanese] government troops and government-backed Popular Defense Forces (PDF) regularly raid black African communities for slaves...
...It is so ingrained a part of our national self-image that we seem hardly aware that slavery has persisted in other parts of the world...
...Several representatives of an 11-member anti-slavery group called the Abolitionist Leadership Council had gathered to express their anger at the continuation of African slavery...
...But others familiar with the PUSH operation said Jackson was receiving substantial funding from Arab-American groups and didn't want to lose a source of revenue...
...The unstated reason: fear of offending the Arabs...
...Kaukab Siddique in the July 16 issue...
...No one had ever proved slavery existed in Sudan, bristled Farrakhan...
...Don't let the Zionists get away with damn lies...
...For Jackson, Farrakhan, and others who have benefited from Arab financial largesse, this is probably not good news...
...It was thus a surprise to many when, last March, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, still preening in the afterglow of the Million Man March, flatly denied that slavery existed in Sudan —one of the militantly anti-American regimes he had visited early last year on a 27-day tour that also included Iran, Iraq, and Libya...
...That comment, late and grudging as it is, may not set the house on fire...
...Increasingly, American blacks are themselves going to Africa, gathering evidence about slavery, and returning to publicize it in their communities, much to the Nation of Islam's fury and the embarrassment of black American leaders...
...Partly in response, the House International Operations Subcommittee held a hearing last March on slavery in Africa...
...Although Farrakhan has made no effort to rebut the reports, the Nation of Islam's official organ, The Final Call, was ready with an appropriate response: "The Sun is a Zionist Jewish daily which has a track record of opposition to and condemnation of all Islamic, African and Arab nations that show any semblance of independence in foreign policy," wrote Dr...
...Why don't you go as a member of the press...
...If they were female and nubile, the price could be as much as several hundred dollars...
...Slaves who tried to escape or who displeased their owners were either beaten savagely, tied down in the sun without water, or subjected to what some escapees called "the insect treatment...
...According to Cotton, those vestiges could amount in Mauritania to as many as loo,000 slaves...
...Charles Singleton, pastor of one of the largest black churches in the U.S, the ii,000-member Loveland Church in Los Angeles...
...Officials there said that none of them was received...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
