jbe (OT), Heck where is the US, Russia, the UN , or NATO or anybody to help in this sordid situation....
]
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News Article by TTB on March 25, 1999 at 11:02:45:
Editorial: The scourge of slavery
The Toledo Blade
March 24, 1999
The U.N. children's agency's (UNICEF)
has created a plan to end slavery in
Sudan. That's the good news. The bad
news is the fact that there exists a place
on this earth where such trafficking in
human beings still exists.
Reports of sexual slavery have surfaced
from the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and
Bosnia after young women lured from
hard times to the promise of jobs abroad
found themselves charnel house captives
or housekeeping slaves in foreign lands.
The stories of child slavery have the
power to disgust us more, as
non-governmental organizations say it is
Sudanese government forces that raid
rebel villages to capture and abscond
with children they would enslave.
The official government response is that
institutionalized enslavement is illegal. It
blames tribal warfare and the Dinka tribe
in the mainly Christian south and the
Baggara tribe of the mainly Moslem north
for abducting one another's children and
sometimes enslaving them.
No matter who's to blame, UNICEF says
the practice will end with cessation of the
civil war that has ravaged this east
African nation south of Egypt and the Red
Sea since 1983.
That war, in which Sudan's Islamist
government battles Christian and animist
rebels in the south, has claimed 1.5
million lives -- a shocking fact given the
low level of world outrage that surrounds
it.
UNICEF's hope is to get the warring
parties to talk and end the fighting and the
practices it says have devolved from it. It
wants all sides to commit to ending
slavery, to permit international
inspectors, and to reunite families and
communities that slavery has divided.
Change is possible, given that the
government in Khartoum, the capital, has
asked for UNICEF's intervention. But
uncertainty remains because of Sudan's
history, defined by religious, political,
and class strife with no government
having yet devised an umbrella under
which all citizens are comfortable.
The outlook is particularly disheartening
knowing that slavery in Sudan -- which
the British waged war toward the end of
the last century to eradicate -- still exists.
Since it gained independence from
Britain and Egypt, protests of the
non-Muslim population against the
Muslim-dominated government in
Khartoum have characterized national
life.
This is a nation in need of all the outside
help it can get, but one that must reach
deeply into itself for the resources of soul
its people need to get along with one
another, to treat one another fairly. |
