U.S. MEDIA IGNORES SUDAN ATROCITIES

By: Nat Hentoff Columnist Wonders Why Civil War Isn't Covered


Last Nov. 20, armed forces of Sudan's National Islamic Front
government executed seven black African schoolboys following a
mid-morning slave raid on an elementary school in southern Sudan.
Two boys who escaped reported that soldiers shot the boys in the
head to instill fear and obedience in the other children. All the
children were forced to watch the killings.

On Dec. 20 -- as also reported by the Switzerland-based Christian
Solidarity International -- "Government soldiers systematically
gang-raped and enslaved black African women and girls after raids
on villages in southern Sudan."

You are not likely to have seen either story in American
newspapers or on TV. I reported them in The Village Voice
in New York and in my United Media/Newspaper Enterprise
Association syndicated column as part of my coverage over the
past five years of slavery and other human-rights atrocities in
Sudan.

Among my other sources have been the American Anti-Slavery Group
in Boston, Agence France-Presse (AFP), the National Post
in Toronto, and interviews with escaped slaves. Only in the last
year or so has there been brief, albeit unsustained, reporting on
Sudan in a few American newspapers. And there has been nothing
that I have seen on the evening TV newscasts or even on Ted
Koppel's "Nightline."

A sense of the vastness of this largely ignored story was
captured by Kate O'Beirne in the National Review on March
5 -- 18 years after the start of the civil war between the
Islamic government in the North and black rebels in the South,
with disastrous consequences for the black Christians and
animists in villages in southern and central Sudan. O'Beirne
summarized "the scale of human suffering: Two million people have
been driven from their homes in a systematic campaign by the
Sudanese government to annihilate or forcibly convert Christians
and practitioners of traditional African religions in the
southern and central parts of this country."

The slave raids, during which many men in the villages are
killed, are part of a jihad (a holy war) -- the continuation of
which was declared in November by Sudanese President Omar el-
Bashir and reported by AFP. The abducted women become house
slaves and concubines in the north, their children forced into
Muslim schools, where they are indoctrinated into that faith.

But there is also an increasing economic impetus behind these
slave raids. There are very profitable oil fields in southern
Sudan, and the government is engaged in systematic ethnic
cleansing of that part of the country. U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-
Va., who has been to the Sudan and seen escaped slaves, has tried
to spread the word of bombings by government planes of schools
and churches in that area, with the attendant death of civilians,
including children.

Amnesty International also has investigated what it describes as
these "massive human rights abuses," but its documentation --
along with that of the American Anti-Slavery Group, Wolf, and
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who has been to Sudan -- has been
getting scant attention in the press until recently, in some
columns and a March 16 editorial in The Washington Post
and a series last month in the New York Post.

Amnesty International notes, for example, that to provide "a
secure environment" for exploiting the oil fields, the government
has been "strafing villages from helicopter gunships" -- along
with its "killings, torture, rape, and abduction."

If this had been going on somewhere in Europe, I expect American
editors would find some continuing space for this story and would
send reporters there. Then, journalists might ask U.N. Secretary-
General Kofi Annan why he remains resolutely silent about the
genocide that has caused Rabbi Irving Greenberg, chairman of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, to say in a Washington
Post Op-Ed piece, but not in a news story: "One does not
lightly invoke the specter of genocide -- the intentional
physical destruction of national, ethnic, racial, or religious
groups, as such. But the horror that afflicts Sudan is
staggering. ... Remembrance of the Holocaust has instilled in us
a profound appreciation for the cost of silence."

Aluel Mangong Deng, 20, tells of being captured in a slave raid:
"I struggled to get away, so they held down my hands and feet and
cut my throat and chest with a knife. As I grew faint, one of
[the slavers] named Mohammed raped me then and there. That night,
I was again raped by different men. They came one after another.
This also happened to other women, and even to young girls. This
kind of rape happened just about every day along the way."

The U.N. war crimes tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, convicted
three Bosnian Serbs on Feb. 22 of being responsible for mass-rape
camps during the war in Bosnia. It was the first time anyone has
been convicted of sexual enslavement as "a crime against
humanity." That story made a number of front pages. Those sexual
slaves were white.



Nat Hentoff is a writer for The Village Voice. His "Getting It Right" column appears monthly in E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.