These are the words of Simon Deng, once a Sudanese slave. He is
addressing the Durban Conference in NY.
I want to thank the organizers of this conference, The Perils of
Global Intolerance. It is a great honor for me and it is a privilege
really to be among today’s distinguished speakers.
I came here as a friend of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
–I came to protest this Durban conference which is based on a set of
lies. It is organized by nations who are themselves are guilty of the
worst kinds of oppression.
It will not help the victims of racism. It will only isolate and
target the Jewish state. It is a tool of the enemies of Israel. The UN
has itself become a tool against Israel. For over 50 years, 82 percent
of the UN General Assembly emergency meetings have been about
condemning one state - Israel. Hitler couldn’t have been made happier.
The Durban Conference is an outrage. All decent people will know that.
But friends, I come here today with a radical idea. I come to tell you
that there are peoples who suffer from theUN’s anti-Israelism even
more than the Israelis. I belong to one of those people.
Please hear me out.
By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it,
the UN has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger
scale.
For over fifty years the indigenous black population of Sudan --
Christians and Muslims alike --- has been the victims of the brutal,
racist Arab Muslim regimes in Khartoum.
In South Sudan, my homeland, about 4 million innocent men, women and
children were slaughtered from 1955 to 2005. Seven million were
ethnically cleansed and they became the largest refugee group since
World War II.
The UN is concerned about the so-called Palestinian refugees. They
dedicated a separate agency for them. and they are treated with a
special privilege.
Meanwhile, my people, ethnically cleansed, murdered and enslaved, are
relatively ignored. The UN refuses to tell the world the truth about
the real causes of Sudan’s conflicts. Who knows really what is
happening in Darfur? It is not a “tribal conflict.” It is a conflict
rooted in Arab colonialism well known in north Africa. In Darfur, a
region in the Western Sudan, everybody is Muslim. Everybody is Muslim
because the Arabs invaded the North of Africa and converted the
indigenous people to Islam. In the eyes of the Islamists in Khartoum,
the Darfuris are not Muslim enough. And the Darfuris do not want to be
Arabized. They love their own African languages and dress and customs.
The Arab response is genocide! But nobody at the UN tells the truth
about Darfur.
In the Nuba Mountains, another region of Sudan, genocide is taking
place as I speak. The Islamist regime in Khartoum is targeting the
black Africans - Muslims and Christians. Nobody at the UN has told the
truth about the Nuba Mountains.
Do you hear the UN condemn Arab racism against blacks?
What you find on the pages of the New York Times, or in the record of
the UN condemnations is “Israeli crimes” and Palestinian suffering. My
people have been driven off the front pages because of the
exaggerations about Palestinian suffering. What Israel does is
portrayed as a Western sin. But the truth is that the real sin happens
when the West abandons us: the victims of Arab/Islamic apartheid.
Chattel slavery was practiced for centuries in Sudan. It was revived
as a tool of war in the early 90s. Khartoum declared jihad against my
people and this legitimized taking slaves as war booty. Arab militias
were sent to destroy Southern villages and were encouraged to take
African women and children as slaves. We believe that up to 200,000
were kidnapped, brought to the North and sold into slavery.
I am a living proof of this crime against humanity.
I don’t like talking about my experience as a slave, but I do it
because it is important for the world to know that slavery exists even
today.
I was only nine years old when an Arab neighbor named Abdullahi
tricked me into following him to a boat. The boat wound up in Northern
Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For three and a half
years I was their slave going through something that no child should
ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the
clock; sleeping on the ground with animals;eating the family’s
left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word
“no.” All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”
The United Nations knew about the enslavement of South Sudanese by the
Arabs. Their own staff reported it. It took UNICEF – under pressure
from the Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group -- sixteen years to
acknowledge what was happening. I want to publicly thank my friend Dr.
Charles Jacobs for leading the anti-slavery fight.
But the Sudanese government and the Arab League pressured UNICEF, and
UNICEF backtracked, and started to criticize those who worked to
liberate Sudanese slaves. In 1998, Dr. Gaspar Biro, the courageous UN
Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Sudan who reported on slavery,
resigned in protest of the UN’s actions.
My friends, today, tens of thousands of black South Sudanese still
serve their masters in the North and the UN is silent about that. It
would offend the OIC and the Arab League.
As a former slave and a victim of the worst sort of racism, allow me
to explain why I think calling Israel a racist state is absolutely
absurd and immoral.
I have been to Israel five times visiting the Sudanese refugees. Let
me tell you how they ended up there. These are Sudanese who fled Arab
racism, hoping to find shelter in Egypt. They were wrong. When
Egyptian security forces slaughtered twenty six black refugees in
Cairo who were protesting Egyptian racism, the Sudanese realized that
the Arab racism is the same in Khartoum or Cairo. They needed shelter
and they found it in Israel. Dodging the bullets of the Egyptian
border patrols and walking for very long distances, the refugees’ only
hope was to reach Israel’s side of the fence, where they knew they
would be safe.
Black Muslims from Darfur chose Israel above all the other Arab-Muslim
states of the area. Do you know what this means!!!?? And the Arabs say
Israel is racist!!!?
In Israel, black Sudanese, Christian and Muslim were welcomed and
treated like human beings. Just go and ask them, like I have done.
They told me that compared to the situation in Egypt, Israel is
“heaven.”
Is Israel a racist state? To my people, the people who know racism –
the answer is absolutely not. Israel is a state of people who are the
colors of the rainbow. Jews themselves come in all colors, even black.
I met with Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Beautiful black Jews.
So, yes … I came here today to tell you that the people who suffer
most from the UN anti-Israel policy are not the Israelis but all those
people who the UN ignores in order to tell its big lie against Israel:
we, the victims of Arab/Muslim abuse: women, ethnic minorities,
religious minorities, homosexuals, in the Arab/Muslim world. These are
the biggest victims of UN Israel hatred.
Look at the situation of the Copts in Egypt, the Christians in Iraq,
and Nigeria, and Iran, the Hindus and Bahais who suffer from Islamic
oppression. The Sikhs. We – a rainbow coalition of victims and targets
of Jihadis -- all suffer. We are ignored, we are abandoned. So that the
big lie against the Jews can go forward.
In 2005, I visited one of the refugee camps in South Sudan. I met a
twelve year old girl who told me about her dream. In a dream she
wanted to go to school to become a doctor. And then, she wanted to
visit Israel. I was shocked. How could this refugee girl who spent
most of her life in the North know about Israel? When I asked why she
wanted to visit Israel, she said: “This is our people.” I was never
able to find an answer to my question.
On January 9 of 2011 South Sudan became an independent state. For
South Sudanese, that means continuation of oppression, brutalization,
demonization, Islamization, Arabization and enslavement.
In a similar manner, the Arabs continue denying Jews their right for
sovereignty in their homeland and the Durban III conference continues
denying Israel’s legitimacy.
As a friend of Israel, I bring you the news that my President, the
President of the Republic of South Sudan, Salva Kiir -- publicly
stated that the South Sudan embassy in Israel will be built--- not in
Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
I also want to assure you that my own new nation, and all of its
peoples, will oppose racist forums like the Durban III. We will oppose
it by simply telling the truth. Our truth.
Thank you |
