Slave ‘redemption’ won’t save Sudan (excerpts)

By Eric Reeves, The Christian Science Monitor, 26 May 1999

Though arguably the greatest humanitarian crisis of our lifetime, the catastrophe engulfing Sudan remains largely invisible to the American public. And in a thoroughly perverse irony, this is at least partly because of the intense media attention that has recently been commandeered by the issue of slavery and slave redemption (the freeing of slaves through ’humanitarian’ purchase) in this deeply troubled region of Africa...

...Slave redemption has been the subject of many recent news stories and indignant editorials...But what goes unspoken in so much reporting on the issue are the ugly realities of redemption.

First, these redemptions introduce hard currency into one of the most volatile and militarily unstable regions in the world...Scores of slave redemptions can easily fund the purchase of arms that might make possible the enslavement of thousands.

Second, increasingly numerous reports from southern and central Sudan, many from tribal leaders, make it undeniable that slave redemptions encourage more slave-taking...A hideous law of supply and demand has been put in place.

Also there are increasingly numerous reports that significant numbers of those ’redeemed’ were never slaves in the first place. Rather, they were simply elements of the local populations, often children, available to be herded together when cash-bearing redeemers appeared...

...if Americans demand of Sudan simple truths, it can yield only one: If the civil war does not end, neither will the dying, or the conditions that produce famine and epidemic disease—or slavery. Only an end to the civil war can stop the suffering...