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The price of freedom

Her belly swollen with her master's child, Abuk Arol lies beneath a bower of thorns outside the village of Yargot, in southern Sudan. The 19-year-old Dinka tribeswoman has no shelter but the thorn bush, no possessions except a water jug and the filthy cotton shift she wears. Her bare feet are cut by the rocks and roots of the night trails she has followed on her arduous flight from the north. But she has reached freedom, is again among people of her own language after three years of forced servitude and rape.

Twenty yards away sits the Arab trader who has brought Arol to this place, middleman in the drama being played out under the glowering equatorial sky. Dressed in an immaculate white djellaba, his face wrapped in a turban concealing all but his eyes, the trader declares that with the birth of Arol's baby imminent, he should receive the price of two for this woman. But he laughs to show this is a joke. He has spent much of the rainy season in northern Sudan, acquiring Dinka captives from their Muslim owners, then shepherding the column of 494 women and children down through the center of Africa's bloodiest civil war, traveling by darkness to avoid fast-moving squads of horse militia.

For the weary Dinka - Arol and the others in this group - this is liberation. For the trader, this is business - his end of a deal struck with the strange khwadjya, the white men who come by clandestine bush plane every two months to the battle-ravaged region called Bahr al-Ghazal. The white men with their duffel bags bulging with cash.

Business, yes. Now comes the payoff.

The pile of currency - Sudanese pounds in thick sheaves secured by rubber bands - growing on the cloth spread in front of the trader is already impressive but far from complete.

Opposite the trader, John Eibner, a 47-year-old New Yorker a long way from his native Westchester County, reaches into a battered olive-drab duffel bag and withdraws another brick of bank notes. "Two hundred twenty thousand," he announces to the trader's tallyman. The tallyman hefts the money, yells the amount, then scribbles the figure. The bundle is added to the heap.

Dragonflies drone. A small herd of lyre-horned cows forages noisily through the scrub, their gangly drover reciting their praises in melodic singsong, as is the Dinka custom. To the east, lightning jags from banks of dark clouds and rain pours to earth in dense gray tendrils. But here the air is hot, stultifying, dead still, the midday sun slamming against the skull with the ferocity of a war club.

"Two hundred sixty thousand," Eibner says, tossing another cash brick.

"Two hundred sixty," bellows the tallyman, apparently for the benefit of curious onlookers - the solemn herdsmen with their hand-forged spears, the crazy-eyed witch man in his animal-skin loincloth, the trio of raw-boned rebel fighters of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, AK-47 assault rifles slung from their shoulders with pieces of rope.

Eibner: "Two hundred and ninety thousand pounds."

The tallyman: "Two hundred ninety!"

And on as the blistering sun slips past the zenith.

Eibner is the point man in Sudan for Christian Solidarity International, a small Swiss-based human rights group waging an unconventional battle against Africa's oldest, most infamous commerce. A slave trade has sputtered back to life in this land of sorrow, a trafficking in human beings that has evolved against the chaotic backdrop of the war between the Muslim north and a hodgepodge of southern black tribes. The Sudanese conflict has been called the invisible war, since it rarely makes headlines, even though it may be the deadliest since World War II - nearly 2 million people killed and at least 5 million uprooted from their homes since 1983. The huge majority of victims are civilians. The war started more than four decades ago, at the instant Sudan gained independence from its British colonial overseers, but it has flared hottest in the past 16 years.

On this day in October, Eibner is paying the purchase price for the nearly 500 people who have followed the trader from bondage in Kordofan Province to the semi-sanctuary of Bahr al-Ghazal. Most are too footsore and frightened to celebrate their release. And most still face days or weeks of hard travel to their home villages, with little in the way of assistance except what charity may be mustered by hard-pressed villages along the route. Their children are naked or clad in ripped smocks. Some have the copper-colored hair that is an early sign of malnutrition. Too many of the babies cough and wheeze.

For each released slave, Eibner has paid 50,000 Sudanese pounds - a sum equivalent to $50 per person, or the price of two goats. In four years, he says, he has shelled out the ransom exactly 15,447 times. That's the number of slaves the organization claims to have freed.

For this work, Christian Solidarity was recently stripped of its accreditation with the United Nations and has been condemned not only by Sudan's radical Islamist military regime but by aid agencies and even human rights groups. The Western critics - while conceding that slavery is on the comeback - say the so-called "slave redeemers" don't understand the complexities of Africa and should butt out.

In public remarks, relief agency and UN officials describe Christian Solidarity - by far the best known of the slave redeeming groups - as well-meaning but misguided. In private conversation, many of those same officials become nearly apoplectic on the subject of the abolitionists, painting them as Bible-banging zealots whose real aim is to vilify Islam, not free slaves. Asked why their own organizations aren't doing more about slavery, the relief honchos beat a fast retreat to "structural complexities." The relief professionals insist that only they fully grasp the "context" of slavery in Sudan, i.e., there is a war going on, and, until the war is over, nothing can be done. Of course, the problem of slavery in 19th-century America was also complex. That didn't stop New England abolitionists from spiriting slaves to freedom in Canada. No one claimed the system of safe houses and woodshed hideaways would topple the institution of slavery - the abolitionists simply thought it was the right thing to do.

That's pretty much the argument of the slave redeemers.

"Of course, it's not the grand solution, but it's something," says Eibner. "People are being restored to their families. Their freedom may seem a small part of the big picture, as the UN sees it. That doesn't make them any less happy to be home or their dear ones any less joyous to have them."

Eibner is a devout Anglican (his wife is English) but otherwise doesn't come across as much of a Bible-banger. An intense but quiet-spoken expatriate, now living in Zurich but originally from Valhalla, New York, he winds down his long days in the bush with a camp cup of bourbon and a Dutch cigarillo, not recitals from the King James version. He and his partner on the risky runs, Gunnar Wiebalck, a German, live out of small tents and backpacks, surviving on dried meat, candy bars, biscuits, and water purified through a hand-pumped filter.

"Opponents like to pigeonhole us with the religious right. That makes it a lot easier to sidestep the issue of what's happening in Sudan," Eibner says while forging along a mud track leading from Yargot, canteens sloshing on his webbed belt, money duffel hoisted on his back. "The only thing I'm a fundamentalist on is human rights," he says. "This isn't about religion. It's easy to talk about the big picture when it's not your wife or your child disappearing into bondage."

Thousands of people are captured every year by Muslim raiders making attacks on southern villages, mainly in Bahr al-Ghazal. The captives are taken north to serve as farm laborers, house servants, or concubines. According to reports by the UN and international human rights groups, the raiders are Baggara tribesmen armed and encouraged by Khartoum, Sudan's capital, as part of a jihad, or holy war, against rebellious Christian and animist tribes in the lower third of the country.

The captives are overwhelmingly women and children; men and adolescent boys are usually just killed out of hand, assumed by the government-sponsored raiders to be potential rebel fighters or at least sympathizers.

Human Rights Watch, the New York-based watchdog group, stated in a recent report: "The abducted women and children often lead lives of extreme cruelty and deprivation at the hands of their masters. Many are physically and sexually abused. Beatings for `disobedience' are common. ... They are denied their ethnic heritage, language, religion."

Yet the reemergence of slavery in Africa has provoked relatively little outrage in the West. A few congressmen have speechified. Canada's government recently proclaimed the situation in Sudan "horrific," declaring that something really ought to be done. Newspaper editorials from time to time deplore the situation, but rarely with the Sturm und Drang that surrounded, say, the suffering of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group has tried to raise public awareness, with some success.

Even African-American groups are largely silent on modern-day slavery. "No human rights movement ever started out big, but indifference to slavery, that's a little discouraging, given our American history," says the Rev. Chuck Singleton, a pastor presiding over one of California's largest black congregations. "I don't think there is any black leader who isn't aware of the issue or isn't uncomfortable about it. The big question is what to do."

Despite public apathy, activists of Christian Solidarity and a few smaller groups - working with elders of southern villages and with the relief arm of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army - have nonetheless managed over the past few years to create a Sudanese version of the Underground Railroad. The most controversial aspect of the system, by far, is that it employs Muslim traders as middlemen. The traders round up large groups of slaves in the north, making payments to the masters, then guide them to rendezvous points in the south. There the traders are themselves paid off by abolitionist agents, and the slaves are freed.

The process is called "slave redemption," and it has drawn more virulent criticism from Western agencies than slavery itself. UN officials, especially, go into a lather on the subject, accusing Christian Solidarity of pointlessly antagonizing Khartoum, hampering relief efforts, and, above all, actually encouraging slavery by creating a new market. Instead of freeing individuals, humanitarian officials say, the world should concentrate on finding cures for the "root causes" of Sudan's civil war.

In one of the most publicized swipes at slave redemption, the United Nations International Children's Fund, the agency charged with protecting women and children in the world's poorest places, earlier this year denounced the ransoming of slaves as "intolerable."

UNICEF argues that slavery is just a small part of the humanitarian tragedy unfurling in Sudan. Redemption efforts are futile, the agency maintains, since there is a possibility that some released slaves will be recaptured by raiders and returned to bondage. Moreover, according to UNICEF, slave redemption is susceptible to fraud by wily traders who might try to pass off local women and children as escaped slaves and collect their reward. Also, in the view of redemption critics, attacks on slavery anger the fundamentalist regime in Khartoum. And this threatens the work of 40 or so Western relief agencies operating on both sides of the civil war, under the auspices of the UN, which requires Khartoum's permission.

"The practice of paying for the retrieval of enslaved women and children does not address the underlying causes of slavery - the civil war," says Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF. "As a matter of principle, UNICEF does not encourage the buying and selling of human beings." To ram home its irritation with the slave redeemers, the UN recently booted Christian Solidarity from the world body, where it held observer status as a human rights organization. The ouster came after repeated complaints from Sudan's military rulers, with support from China, Cuba, and other nations known for their suppression of freedom. Only the United States, Canada, Britain, and Norway peeped protests, to no avail.

Meanwhile, the slave raids continue.

"Every family in this region has had some loved one taken off to slavery," says Abdon Agaw Nhial, a Dinka from the Bahr al-Ghazal region and member of the National Democratic Alliance, a coalition of outlawed political parties and insurgent groups from the north and south. "Their absence is a terrible sadness that fills the air we breathe."

Modern times have little diminished humanity's appetite for inflicting evil on its own kind. There's not much moral progress to be measured between the caveman's cudgel and the mushroom cloud. Still, that slavery exists in the twilight days of the 20th century is shocking.

No one seriously disputes that the old scourge has reappeared in Africa. Despite its condemnation of the slave redeemers, UNICEF admits that "there is irrefutable evidence of an established and ongoing slave trade in Sudan."

This is not slavery as a catchy press-conference euphemism for abysmal wages or awful working conditions, but slavery in the raw - humans forced to labor without pay, people bought and sold like goats or cows. "The first thing, when I was traded, my master gave me brand marks, to prove that I am his," says Bol Malek Majok, 16, pointing to the manmade pattern of scars duplicated inside his left elbow and left knee.

No one knows how many slaves there are in Sudan. Estimates range from 20,000 to more than 100,000, but none can be verified. Some villages in the south keep careful lists of abductees. Other communities are too dispirited to bother. In any event, there is no central record, and local lists are often lost or destroyed in the cataclysm of war. So the details of the story must be pieced together in interviews.

Detail:

"The enemy came on horses as I was fetching water from the well," says Aweau Chol Alea, a woman in her 20s taken four years ago from the village of Aulic, just east of the government-held garrison town of Aweil. "The horsemen killed my father, cutting him with machetes as he stood defending the cattle. My sister and I were led away as they set fire to the tukuls," the conical thatch-roofed mud huts of central Africa.

Detail: "We were roped together, 16 people to a rope, and marched to the land of the Arabs," recounts Nynut Ben Majak, brushing flies from the eyes and lips of her listless infant son. "There, some of us were sold to a farmer, Ali Mohammed, who made us servants to his wives, Fatima and Zenib. I worked dawn to night, but never was given even a coin. My food was table scraps. Zenib beat me with a stick if I moved too slowly or broke a jug. But Fatima was kind and took pity. Once, she gave me a sugar piece."

Detail: "They said I must be a Muslim, that I must pray on Fridays, and that also I must be cut like an Arab lady," says Abuk Ayum Wek, describing how she was forced to undergo "circumcision" in a clinic attached to a mosque in the town of Muglad. The practice is found among a few Muslim tribes in Sudan.

Detail:

"Master never asked my true African name but told me, `From today, you are named Alima, a proper Arab name for a girl,"' says Nynut Majak Athian, who was held in slavery for two years. "What could I do? How could I fight? I was alone in a land that was unknown to me. If I wept every night, who would hear me?"

In southern Sudan, rainy season is ending and the season of dread beginning as floodwaters recede from the savanna, and trails connecting village to village become passable. Now is the time when military resupply convoys start to grind toward government-held garrison towns; the time when Antonov cargo planes refitted as bombers start to drop their lethal if wildly inaccurate loads on villages below; the time when the ferocious horse militias, called muraheleen, fan out in search of plunder and captives. It is the season of ground offensives and guerrilla ambushes.

"For a few months, as the rains fall, it is almost possible for people to have a normal life, to imagine that the worst problems are whether the crops will grow or the cows will fatten," says the Rev. William Chan, a Dinka Roman Catholic priest and one of very few ordained clerics still daring to look after a parish in southern Sudan. "But come dry season, when the men are off tending the cows and the sorghum is ripening in the fields, this is our time of trembling," Chan says. "The soldiers come like plague or pestilence. Except they come more often."

Chan's crumbling church, built by Italian missionaries in the 1950s, lies on the outskirts of the bomb-blasted market town of Wanyjok. A statue of the Virgin Mary presides over the altar, her face smashed by rifle butts, and sunlight pours through the paneless arched windows. As usual, Sunday Mass is jammed with hundreds of celebrants, many of them barefoot peasants who have tramped miles from outlying villages to gather in the dirt-floored structure of mudbrick. At the front of the church, the altar girls are radiant in spanking-clean T-shirts donated by some Italian charity. The shirt fronts are emblazoned with the Colosseum or cartoon depictions of the twins Romulus and Remus suckling from a grinning she-wolf. Gaudy, ridiculous, but strangely moving - some tourist shop's tax write-off become the Sunday best of these little girls with their scrubbed faces and pigtails. How many of them will survive the war? How many will survive even the year?

Instead of a pipe organ, there are African drums of hide and hand-carved wood. The drummers pound feverishly as the hymns of the worshipers swell in the sweet purity of faith. Then the singing hushes for Chan's short benediction:

"We pray for our brothers and sisters who are slaves. We pray that the ears of the world will one day open to the cries from Sudan. We rejoice in the knowledge that God, our father, hears us."

Rainy season is almost over. Within a few days, the bombs will start falling on Wanyjok. Soon, the parishioners know, will come the pounding hoofbeats of the terrible militia.

Sudan is Africa's largest country: 967,495 square miles stretching from the malarial swamps of the equatorial zone to the sun-scorched wastes of the Nubian desert, an area equivalent in size to the United States east of the Mississippi River.

The country's population of 33.5 million is 70 percent Muslim, 5 percent Christian, and 25 percent animist, the term for people adhering to Africa's traditional religions. The country is a babel of languages and ethnic groups: some 400 tongues spoken by more than 500 tribes and clans. Such diversity can be startling, as travel writer Edward Hoagland notes in his 1979 book, African Calliope: "In the same village you may meet women veiled to the eyes and women naked to the waist."

Southern Sudanese invariably refer to northerners as "Arabs," while northerners will often contemptuously refer to people of the south as abd, pronounced ah-bid, a word used interchangeably for "black" and "slave."

In fact, the skin of the northern Arabs is also dark, but their culture derives from the desert civilizations of the Middle East and from Islam - not from the steamy forests and savannas of black Africa. Culture, not color, is the true chasm between the two Sudans.

Northern Sudan is the land of Nubia, loosely wedded to Egypt in ancient times and part of the Arab-Islamic world since the seventh century. Even then, the notion of Nubian slaves was so common as to be almost cliche. Trade in humans has been the defining commerce of the region for millenniums, and written records of slavery date to AD 652, when Egypt demanded - and received - an annual tribute of 360 slaves. The borders of modern Sudan essentially reflect the far limits of Arab slaving routes curving down the White Nile to present-day Uganda and Congo-Zaire.

The trade peaked in the 1800s, when more than 2 million southern tribespeople were sold into slavery in the north. The British, who took control of Sudan in the 19th century, made suppression of human trafficking their colonial priority, finally stamping it out in the 1930s.

But loathing and mistrust between north and south never dissipated. Even as the Union Jack was being lowered in 1956, shooting broke out between the two regions of the new republic, a slaughter whose only hiatus came during an on-again, off-again truce from 1972 to 1983. Meanwhile, the government has been convulsed by coups and countercoups, with the last one, in 1989, putting Sudan under the heel of a party of Muslim fundamentalists, the National Islamic Front, which banned all "nonreligious institutions," meaning newspapers, unions, and opposition parties. The regime also imposed strict Islamic law - including amputation of limbs for thievery and stoning to death for sexual misconduct - and declared the war against the south to be jihad, a holy struggle between believers and the godless.

Sudan, meanwhile, became a haven for international terrorists, according to the United States, which started imposing economic sanctions in 1993 and two years later shuttered its embassy in Khartoum. In 1998, retaliating for bomb blasts at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, American cruise missiles slammed into suspected terrorist targets in Khartoum, one of which seems to have been a legitimate pharmaceutical factory. The missile strikes stirred world sympathy for Sudan and stifled support for the anti-slave movement.

Wretchedly poor though it is, northern Sudan is also better educated, more technologically sophisticated, and more economically developed than the lower third of the country. For that reason, Sudan's Arabs claim to be puzzled by criticism of their holy campaign, seeing themselves as carriers of progress and enlightenment to miserably backward people, not as oppressors.

Southerners, of course, take a different view.

"In the end, this is a war of cultures," says Bona Malwal, the Columbia University-educated editor of the Sudan Democratic Gazette, a newspaper aimed at Sudanese living in exile. A former politician, Malwal was jailed by the Islamic regime after becoming the first prominent Sudanese to speak out against slavery. "The Arabs simply cannot grasp that Africans want to live according to our own African values," says Malwal, who teaches international affairs at Oxford University in England. He was interviewed in his ancestral village of Turalet. "They want to wipe away our culture."

On this continent of despair, southern Sudan occupies a depth all its own.

There are no roads save for the few deeply rutted dirt tracks carved during the British colonial era, no electricity, no infrastructure at all, really, other than some wells dug by UNICEF together with the clinics and feeding centers operated by Western relief agencies. But even these few boons are a mixed blessing, since people flock to wherever there is food or medicine - thereby creating military opportunity for Khartoum. The government's bombers rarely challenge the antiaircraft batteries guarding genuine strongholds of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. But hospitals, relief convoys, and refugee camps count as strategic targets in a struggle in which the only "victories" are body counts, booty, and whatever morale boost comes from humiliating the other side.

Otherwise, the war is a murderous stalemate, with government forces hunkered securely in the main towns of the south but incapable of dealing the SPLA a decisive defeat. Meanwhile, the rebels - led by John Garang, possessor of a PhD in agricultural economics from Iowa State University - like to boast that they control an area the size of France. True enough, but it is a France of barren scrub broken only by ruined villages of mud huts whose inhabitants survive by subsistence farming or, more often, handouts from the 40 or so relief agencies coping with what has become a more or less permanent humanitarian disaster.

"Is there a name for a million square miles of suffering?" Robert Seiple, former president of the relief agency World Vision-US, once asked. "Yes, it's called Sudan."

Through the chaos runs a rail line. The band of steel connects Khartoum with a string of garrison towns in Bar al-Ghazal that - together with similar outposts along the White Nile, but those linked only by air and barge - represent the government's only credible presence in the south. Keeping the rail line open is of great symbolic importance to Khartoum, not just a matter of military strategy. But guarding the line would be nearly impossible using regular troops.

So at the onset of the decade, Khartoum started arming and organizing Baggara tribesmen into irregular units, known as People's Defense Forces, and even more loosely structured tribal militias, the muraheleen. The Baggara have preyed upon their pastoral Dinka neighbors for centuries and once ranked among Africa's most enthusiastic slavers. Now, they essentially have permission to loot, rape, and pillage as they please. The Dinka are helpless before the onslaught.

Human rights groups, while deploring Khartoum's role in setting loose the militias, nonetheless warn that groups like Christian Solidarity - by offering to buy back victims of the slave raiders - may provide an incentive for greater rapacity. "The risk is that you encourage slave-taking for profit," says Adotai Akwei, advocacy director for Africa with Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group. "The risk is that you are fueling the very market you are trying to suppress by putting fresh money out there." He adds: "You don't end this abomination by releasing a few dozen individuals here, a few dozen individuals there. You end it by erasing the conditions that cause slavery - in Sudan's case, the war."

But that argument irritates Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, the Boston-based organization that financially supports the efforts of Christian Solidarity. "By that logic, you don't fight to free political prisoners until every dictator becomes a democrat, you don't feed starving children until the `root causes' of famine are addressed," says Jacobs, who is seeking to persuade US policy makers to come to the support of southern Sudan.

"Slaves in Sudan are unlucky enough to have the wrong oppressors," he says. "If the Khartoum regime was white, slavery would be the hottest human rights issue since apartheid. But the plight of an illiterate Dinka enslaved by an equally illiterate - and black - Muslim raider doesn't seem to resonate in the US. We say, `Oh, must be some African cultural thing."'

Antislavery activists are particularly mystified by the seeming indifference to the issue among African-American leaders. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the US special ambassador to Africa, for example, has addressed the issue only in the fuzziest terms. Meanwhile, Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, praises Sudan as a plucky underdog daring to spit in the eye of the American superpower. Farrakhan's curious infatuation with Khartoum may be one reason more mainstream black groups are reluctant to take up the cause.

"Some African-Americans feel that criticism of slavery in Sudan involves a criticism of Islam, in general, and of Mr. Farrakhan, in particular," says Richard Newman, research officer with Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. "That makes it extremely sensitive."

It was in September that one of the traders working on Christian Solidarity's behalf paid Abuk Arol's head price to her master at a farm near the town of Muglad, in Kordofan Province.

And so it was that the pregnant young woman joined one of the weary columns headed for home. South they plodded, spirits rising as they crossed the muddy swirl of the Bahr al-Arab, which the Dinka call the River Kiir. In this part of Sudan, the waterway serves as a line of demarcation between north and south.

Now Arol is curled beneath the thorn bush in the village of Yargot as the khwadjya named John Eibner counts out money for an Arab trader. "Twenty-four million, seven hundred," he says, his voice raspy and raw. And as the equatorial sun beats down through the brambles, Abuk Arol gives birth to a daughter. The newborn is an "Arab baby," as the Dinka say. The progeny of rape, fathered by Arol's master, whom she had been forced to address by the honorific "Baba." He had never bothered to learn her Dinka name, calling her abd - black slave.

It happens all the time in Sudan. But the baby is hers. And the human heart yearns to love, even in a land of endless hate.

"I have birthed you, daughter, and I bless you," Arol croons. She holds the infant aloft, showing the girl to God, as is the custom; then she spits in the directions of the four winds, as the Dinka do - for luck. "May you live a good life," she says. "May the soldiers never come for you."