Sudan - Slaves

Uncle Osama's slightly used,

low mileage slaves

Apparently bin Laden, according to the Sunday Telegraph, is snapping up deals on small children from the LRA and using them to pick marijuana on his farms in Nile valley just north of Khartoum. He also has large sunflower plantations worked by Sudanese slaves. Apparently bin Laden's boys pay one AK for every healthy young'un-Kony had complained that he had been cheated once, only getting 98 guns for 100 kids. The young Ugandan children are snatched by the LRA and then marched to Jabelin, Kony's HQ in the southern Sudan. Many of the girls are sent to Nsitu camp, 15 miles off Juba, where they are sold to Arab slavetraders. The children are sold and then flown out of Juba to their new owners. Kony's camp is supposedly just one of 17 terrorist training camps in Sudan. The LRA is an Acholi group that gets its leadership from Gulu. According to politician Betty Bigombe, who talked to Kony in 1994, Kony said, "Most of my commanders have AIDS, and if it was not because God gave me the power to cure AIDS they would all be dead by now."

The LRA began when 21-year-old Acholi woman Alice Lakwena said she was possessed with the spirit of an Italian priest who worked in the region a century ago. They had minor successes at first but then realized that they were not bulletproof, were wiped out and Lakwena fled to Kenya. Her cousin Joseph Kony (born 1959) created the LRA.

Yes Virginia, slavery still exists in the Mahgreb and Sudan. Slave traders like to strike during dry weather in carefully planned raids. The women and children are snatched and then sold off as domestics or cheap labor. Since 1995 over 11,000 slaves have been freed in Sudan by the Swiss based group Christian Solidarity. They buy women and children for around $50 a head, and then take them back to the south. They have bought back over 5,000 slaves since 1995. The United Nations Children's Fund says the practice of buying back slaves actually encourages the practice.

E-mail: Cos-int@csi-int.ch