It is a year before the millennium and Theresa Nybol Deng is a slave. In May, she was taken captive when the government-armed militia stormed her village in southern Sudan. Soldiers shot the men, looted the village and carted off as many women and children as they could. Theresa is 12 years old. She can be purchased for $50.
If her fate is anything like that of tens of thousands of black Africans who have become chattel in Sudan's civil war, Theresa has been sold and bought. She is likely serving a master somewhere in northern Sudan, Libya or the Persian Gulf. If she was selected as a concubine, she will have been genitally mutilated--to be acceptable in her master's culture--and then she will have been bred.
Theresa is a victim of a religious war, which also is this century's longest lasting armed conflict. For more than a decade, the Islamic fundamentalist government in Sudan has been using slave raids as the terror weapon of choice in its self-declared "holy war" on the African population in the south. While the goal is to Islamize and Arabize Sudan's Christians and tribalists, the Islamist extremists in Khartoum also have devastated the moderate Muslim Nuba peoples. Slaves like Theresa are given Arab names and forcibly converted to Islam.
Slavery in Sudan has been well researched. Among the first to report slave raids was a courageous Arab professor from the University of Khartoum. He was jailed for his effort. Since then, journalists, human rights organizations and the U.N. have documented these raids. U.N. special investigator Gaspar Biro visited Sudan several times and confirmed that human bondage was a tactic of this war. Reporting on "modern day slave markets," Biro found that "the racial dimension of the violations and abuses against children constitutes a particularly grave and alarming circumstance, which should be of particular concern from a human rights perspective."
Yet the fate of Theresa and her people has not been of particular concern in the West. Because of scant media coverage or because many people don't know or because this slavery doesn't fit the familiar black and white pattern or because we fear offending the Muslim world, a shameful silence pervades.
