SHARON BEHN, Washington | Thursday
A DINKA tribesman who escaped from slavery in Sudan’s largely Muslim north has appealed to the United States to help him free other southern Sudanese still being held in bondage.
“Now I will use my freedom to free my people who are still in bondage and have no voice,” said Francis Bok, 21, at a news conference where US lawmakers announced a bill to condemn the Sudanese government for slavery and other human-rights abuses.
Bok said at the age of seven he and other children were taken from a local market in southern Sudan, where Christians and animists predominate, during a militia raid and walked to the north of Sudan to be sold. One small girl who was crying was shot in the head. Another had her foot blown off.
“I learned in that moment to be quiet,” Bok said.
The young boy was eventually handed over to Jim Abdullah, who beat him and called his family to beat him. “He called me “Abeed”. That means black slave,” Bok recalled.
“When I learned some Arabic and asked him why he beat me, he said: ‘because you are an animal.'”
From that night on Bok planned his escape, but did not succeed until he was 17. He ran to the police in nearby Mutare town, he said, where he was forced into bondage again.
Determined, he ran away again and eventually made his way to Khartoum where he stayed in a southern Sudanese camp until he was granted a visa to Egypt, where the United Nations eventually found him a sponsor to come to the United States.
Bok found out last summer that his parents had been killed.
At first, he said, “I was afraid to tell my story,” but now, having joined the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery group, “I will use my freedom to help others.”
Slavery and trafficking in humans remain problems in the Sudan, according to the US State Department’s recently-released human rights report, which blamed government security forces for the practice.
Pitting the country’s predominantly Muslim north against the Christian and Animist south, the Sudanese civil war is seen by experts as one of the most intractable and potentially destabilizing in Africa.
An estimated two million people have been killed and 4.4 million driven from their homes in 18 years of conflict, according to an international task force’s report. – AFP
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