Free, Feed and Heal the Captives As South Sudan begins the process of nation building, we are concerned about the fate of estimated tens of thousands of Southerners still enslaved in the north. Those freed report daily beatings, rape (of girls, boys and women), and forcible religious conversions. People murdered and mutilated in slave raids, branded like animals. Children sold off and separated from their parents forever.
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Passover for Sudan's slaves Only moments after gaining their freedom, 150 slaves were eating matzah, hard-boiled eggs and sipping wine as part of the demonstration Seder in Aweil, Southern Sudan led by Rabbi Joseph Polak. Their freedom was secured by Christian Solidarity International (CSI), an abolitionist group that over the past two decades helped South Sudanese to liberate nearly 100,000 of their countrymen. An estimated 35,000 continue serving their masters in Northern Sudan. Read the Full Story

Will Freedom Come for Sudan's Slaves? On Jan. 9, the people of South Sudan began their week-long referendum to decide whether to separate from the Arab-Muslim North and form an independent country. But Achol Yum Deng didn't vote. Though she has more reasons to seek separation from the North than most of her countrymen, she couldn't register: Since 1998, Achol was a slave serving her master in the North and was only liberated just before the voting began. Read the Full Story

Over 400 Slaves Freed In Sudan; A Former Slave Testifies in Congress

We had the privilege to accompany Christian Solidarity International-USA on its latest slave liberation mission to South Sudan. Over two days more than 400 South Sudanese were freed and provided with essential humanitarian aid.

Freed slaves with CSI's Sacks of Hope

Below please find a story of one of the freed slaves, Atong Mawien Tong, written by Pastor Heidi McGinness, CSI-USA Director of Outreach.

CSI-USA has also arranged for a former slave Ker Aleu Deng, who was blinded as a result of being brutally tortured by his master, to testify before Congress.

Emancipated Sudanese Slave Tells His Story To Lawmakers

Please watch CBN News report on Ker's testimony.

Ellen Ratner, the White House Correspondent and Bureau Chief for The Talk Radio News Service and a news analyst on The Fox News Channel who brought Ker to the United States, is now working on extending his visa to prevent a deportation.

October 17, 2011

We had the privilege to accompany Christian Solidarity International-USA on its latest slave liberation mission to South Sudan. Over two days more than 400 South Sudanese were freed and provided with essential humanitarian aid.

Freed slaves are waiting to receive aid

Terror in Sudan, terror in US

Ten years ago, on 9/11, I missed Mohammed Atta, the lead terrorist, by maybe a half hour at Boston’s Logan airport.

On that glorious morning, with its sun-filled cloudless sky, I caught the first flight from Logan down to Reagan National in Washington. Very shortly after I took off, Atta landed in Boston on his puddle- jumper down from Maine. At Logan, he changed planes for the fateful flight to New York.

For decades, I’d been involved in a campaign against modern-day human bondage. The American Anti-Slavery Group was working to awaken Americans to the plight of slaves around the world, particularly in northern Africa, where for decades the Muslim rulers in Sudan were waging war on that country’s Christian and tribalist south. As part of the onslaught, Arab militias stormed African villages, killed the men and brutally enslaved women and children.

The abolitionist movement had formed an unlikely left/right coalition. We recruited both Barney Frank and Pat Robertson. We attracted Christian evangelicals, who wanted to help Sudan’s Christians, and we organized much of the Congressional Black Caucus, which reacted viscerally to reports that black women and children were being captured, bought and sold.

I was bound for Washington on that 9/11 to join a coalition of Sudan activists at a press conference on Capitol Hill specifically to urge congressional leaders to place “capital market sanctions” on oil companies operating in Sudan and whose profits were fueling the dictatorship’s genocidal slave raids. The sanctions would proscribe Wall Street from trading their shares. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was animated in his opposition.

I was to speak alongside modern day heirs of America’s abolitionist struggle: John Eibner, head of Christian Solidarity International’s slave redemption program; Joe Madison, the “Black Eagle,” a national NAACP board member and Washington radio personality who had taken up the cause in 1995 and repeatedly risked his life to go to Sudan with Eibner to free hundreds of slaves. Rev. Walter Fauntroy – a civil rights veteran who was the main organizer of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington – would speak as well.

As I stood in the US Capitol, waiting to deliver my remarks, I reviewed my text, written on yellow legal sheets. It contained a warning: “Wall Street should not trade the shares of companies who do business with the slave-and-terror state of Sudan. … If we sit by and allow this terror in Africa, who is to say where such things will end?”

But I never got a chance to speak.

On televisions in the hearing room images appeared of a plane stuck in the middle of a building in New York City. A burly policeman burst into our conference room, yelling “Everybody out! This building is being evacuated.” As we were herded toward the exits, people spoke of planes striking the World Trade Center. Then we heard that the Pentagon was just hit. When the police said, “A plane is heading for the Capitol building,” we ran. In a flash of paranoia we imagined that terrorist operatives might be hunting down their adversaries. Khartoum had long ago made a list of the human rights advocates who had caused them to be the focus of scorn. None of us could get through to our families on our cell phones. We split up. Eibner and I rushed off in one direction. Fauntroy and Madison in another.

When we booked a hotel room and turned on the TV – there was no traveling that day – terrible ironies began to dawn on me. We learned how hijackers had attacked passengers with box-cutters. I recalled a woman I had met that previous April in Sudan during a liberation mission led by Eibner, with Fauntroy and Madison. In a low voice, she explained how the slave raiders would cut the throats of any women who resisted gangrape.

In Sudan, they didn’t need hidden box-cutters. Though I didn’t get to speak, the hijackers that morning had delivered my message: Trading with terrorists is not just morally wrong, it is deadly.

Even though I had traveled to southern Sudan to see the Ground Zero of slavery, the full scope of our struggle did not hit home until a hijacked airplane crashed into Washington.

As I thought of the American dead, I recalled the Southern Sudanese who had been on the frontlines against jihad terror for decades. We had been trying to tell the world their story for eight years, but the moment the hijacked planes struck our buildings, Americans and the blacks of southern Sudan became brothers and sisters. Ten years ago.

Ten years ago, on 9/11, I missed Mohammed Atta, the lead terrorist, by maybe a half hour at Boston’s Logan airport. On that glorious morning, with its sun-filled cloudless sky, I caught the first flight from Logan down to Reagan National in Washington. Very shortly after I took off, Atta landed in Boston on his puddle- jumper down from Maine. At Logan, he changed planes for the fateful flight to New York.

How black slaves helped set South Sudan free

This article was first published in The Jewish Advocate on July 21, 2011

By Charles Jacobs

On July 9, a new African nation – the Republic of South Sudan – was born and days later admitted to the United Nations as its 193rd member. This is an extraordinary development in the history of nation states, replete with marvels, contradictions and ironies: The partition of Africa’s largest country was the result of a halfcentury of armed struggle, yet it culminated peacefully via the ballot box. Courageous Muslim individuals contributed to freeing a Christian and traditionalist South from Islamic rulers. But most wondrous of all: It may well have been South Sudan’s black slaves who set their nation free.

Since the Islamic conquests a millennium ago, Arabs enslaved blacks in Sudan and throughout North Africa. The practice was largely suppressed by the British, but in the early ’90s, when Islamist rulers in the north declared a “holy war” to impose Sharia Law on the South, slavery dramatically surged. Arab militia, armed by Khartoum, stormed the mostly Dinka villages in the South, killed the men and enslaved the women and children. Rights groups reported that tens if not hundreds of thousands of slaves were captured to serve Arab masters in the north. Slave raids took place in the context of mass slaughter: In the ’90s, close to 2 million South Sudanese were killed in the conflict, according to US government agency reports. Reports in the Western media of what later would be called “genocide” were disappointingly sporadic. Christian groups in America dubbed the events in Sudan “the Hidden Holocaust,” but slavery and slaughter continued unabated.

During those years, South Sudanese intellectuals and activists who had fled to the United States tried to pressure American churches, human rights groups, lawmakers and the UN to stop the killings. They were ignored. A war in Sudan? It was one more African tragedy to an America with “compassion fatigue.”

In 1994, The New York Times broke the story of a modern day slave trade in North Africa – written by Mauritanian Muslim refugee Mohammed Athie and me. Athie and I met with leaders of the South Sudanese diaspora in New York and in Washington, D.C., and suggested they campaign against slavery in Sudan. Most agreed, but some were reluctant. Francis Deng, a prominent South Sudanese intellectual, worried that if the South brought up the slave raids, the Arabs would be shamed and then the two peoples could never be at peace. Some New York activists wondered why Americans, who did not bestir themselves over the slaughter of Africans, would care about slavery. Some felt it would be a humiliation to speak publicly of Dinka women and children serving Arabs as concubines and domestics. In the end, there was agreement. Human bondage is a crime against humanity. America is an abolitionist nation that almost tore itself apart over the issue of one man owning another. Americans disagreed on many things – abortion, homosexuality, war, taxes – but we were defined by our devotion to personal liberty. People would listen.

And they did. When the reports of slavery reached the United States, a neo-abolitionist movement took wing. In Boston and Washington, we created an unlikely left/right coalition that included Barney Frank and Pat Robertson; much of the Congressional Black Caucus; and Republican Senator Sam Brownback.

Most important, we linked with the slave liberator John Eibner of Christian Solidarity International (CSI) in Zurich. An American-born intellectualturned activist, Eibner patiently built an “underground railroad,” convincing Arab cattlemen who depended on Dinka grazing lands to return Dinka women and children from captivity. It was Eibner who trudged through the bush, arranging the emancipation of tens of thousands of slaves … all with personal stories of lives in captivity. We helped get these stories in the national press, and Americans took action. When the story of South Sudan is written, Eibner will emerge the shining, legendary figure.

Boston, the center of antislavery efforts during the Civil War, played a key role. Our organization, American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), educated congressmen, churches and synagogues. Through the Sudanese community here, we discovered Francis Bok, an escaped slave, and helped bring his voice and his story to hundreds of thousands in universities, churches and synagogues across the country. Bok became the first escaped slave to testify in Congress and published a book about his experience.

Prominent black pastors from Roxbury like Gerald and Cynthia Bell and Ray and Gloria White Hammond, along with news anchor Liz Walker, flew to Sudan to witness CSI’s liberations. In September 2000, Coretta Scott King and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino presented AASG with the first Boston Freedom Award for its abolitionist work.

The Sudan Campaign, a national umbrella of concerned organizations, pressed US administrations to intervene. Finally, George W. Bush did. In 2005, under pressure from the United States, South and North Sudan signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement that stopped the war and provided the South with the opportunity to choose independence. On Jan. 9, 2011, 98 percent of the South voted for secession.

This fight for freedom has its Muslim heroes: In 1987, Ushari Mahmoud and Suleiman A. Baldo, two Muslim scholars based in Khartoum, risked their lives documenting the resurgent Arab slave trade. Their report, “Al Diein Massacre and Slavery in Sudan,” evoked scenes that could have been right out of anti-Jewish pogroms and for me was a major source of inspiration. They were imprisoned for writing the report, a summary of which appears in the accompanying box. If these two men could take such risks to expose crimes of their fellow Muslims for the sake of humanity and justice, how could we sit and do nothing?

That lesson lives: Today South Sudan is free, and the slave raids are no more, but the political agreements failed to free the estimated 35,000 slaves remaining in the north. CSI and AASG are – still – determined, and working to set them free.

The massacre in Diein

Here is a summary of “The Diein Massacre and Slavery in Sudan,” written by two Muslim researchers, Ushari Ahmed Mahmud and Suleiman Ali Balbo: In March of 1987, in the town of Diein in Sudan, a group of Arab Muslims from Rizeigat ethnic group attacked a church and homes of their neighbors from an African Dinka tribe, killing five. When the news of the murder spread, thousands of Dinka fled to the nearby town to seek protection from the police and government officials. Some 500 Dinkas barricaded themselves at the police station, while the rest were sent to the train station. They were promised they would be taken to a safe place. As the Dinkas filled the wagons, hundreds of Rizeiga – armed with spears, swords, axes and guns – stormed the station. After preventing the trains from leaving, the mob set the wooden wagons on fire, burning the Dinkas to death. Grass huts were dissembled, the grass brought to the station to help build the fires. The same fate met those who stayed at the police station. More than a thousand Dinka men, women and children lost their lives. Hundreds more were abducted into slavery. One Dinka who survived described how an Arab woman stabbed her with a knife, stole her money and snatched her 4-month-old baby. The police did not intervene.

This article was first published in The Jewish Advocate on July 21, 2011

By Charles Jacobs

South Sudan becomes a free nation, but tens of thousands of its people remain enslaved in the North

Press Release

July 20, 2011

Contact: Charles Jacobs, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Boston - The American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) today congratulated the people of Southern Sudan on becoming a free and independent country. The Republic of South Sudan declared independence on July 9 and became the 193rd member of the United Nations a few days later. But as the celebrations subside and the process of nation building begins, there is a stark reminder that this "national liberation" remains incomplete: tens of thousands Southern slaves remain in captivity in the North.

"It is a sad irony," said Dr. Charles Jacobs, AASG President. "It was, after all, the enslavement of African villagers that animated and bolstered much of the rebellion in South Sudan. "And it was reports of modern day human bondage in Africa's largest country that awoke Americans to the tragedy in Sudan."

Jihad in Sudan Redux

Jihad In Sudan Redux

Posted by Charles Jacobs and Sasha Giller Jul 6th 2011 at 4:44 pm in Africa, Humanitarian, Islam, Islamic extremism, human rights | Comments (8)

On July 9, the mostly Christian South Sudan will legally and officially separate from the Muslim north and become a new, independent and free country. Fearing loss of its iron clad grip of other non-Arab regions in the north, whose people likely envy the freedoms won by the South, Arab/Islamist leaders in Khartoum have launched a military assault on the Nuba Mountains, a mixed Christian, animist and Muslim region. Reports from the area are gruesomely reminiscent of the decades-long assault Khartoum waged on the South. These include forced conversions to Islam, mass displacement, bombing of civilians and mass slaughter.

Anticipating the effects of Christians winning freedom from his rule already in December of 2010 Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity, laid out a vision for the future of his nation:

If south Sudan secedes, we will change the constitution and at that time there will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity… Sharia (Islamic law) and Islam will be the main source for the constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language, he told a group of supporters.

Al-Bashir made his statement as the people of Southern Sudan were preparing to vote in the referendum that secured their imminent independence. With less than a week left before South secedes, al-Bashir is determined to fulfill his promise not by changing the constitution, but through murder and ethnic cleansing.

After concluding a military occupation of the disputed border region of Abyei, which resulted in the expulsion of more than 100,000 (non-Arabs, mostly from the Dinka tribe), Sudanese army and government-sponsored Arab militias attacked the African tribes of Nuba Mountains, a region situated in the Northern state of Southern Kordofan. Reports indicate indiscriminate bombings of civilians and a systematic killing of the black-skinned Nuba, which forced estimated 100,000 to abandon their homes. One report described “door to door executions of completely innocent and defenseless civilians, often by throat cutting.” Another suggested the government might be using chemical weapons. The Bishop of Nuba Mountains described the events as genocide: “Once again we are facing the nightmare of genocide of our people in a final attempt to erase our culture and society from the face of the earth.” A well-respected Sudan analyst concurred.

Nuba embody the diversity of culture and religion that al-Bashir wants to destroy. Numbering some 1.5 million, Nuba people are Christians, Muslims and the followers of traditional faiths. It is not uncommon to find the adherents of all faiths within a single family. Comprising from more than fifty tribes and speaking an equal number of languages, the Nuba have an incredibly diverse culture.

Just like the Africans of the South, the Nuba have faced racial discrimination from the Arab governments and elites of the North, which led them to join Sudan’s People Liberation Army (SPLA) at the beginning of the second outbreak of Sudan’s Civil War (1983-2005). The government’s response, especially after the Islamist regime of Al-Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi seized power in 1989, escalated into the campaign of annihilation. The Nuba people lost their lands; they were murdered, starved and enslaved. In what some called genocide in the name of Islam, all Nuba-Christians, animists and even Muslims-were targeted for eradication; estimated 200,000 perished.

In the crackdown that reach the Nuba Mountains even before the outbreak of the war, Christian clergy was murdered; churches burned, while Christian children were abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and often forced to join the Sudanese army to fight against their own people. In the current attack Christian places of worship are also being destroyed. In January 1992, South Kordofan governor, Lt. General al-Hussein officially declared the war a “jihad.” Shortly after, in 1993, the religious leaders of Southern Kordofan issued a fatwa that legalized it:

The rebels in South Kordofan and Southern Sudan started their rebellion against the state and declared war against the Moslems. Their main aims are: killing the Moslems, desecrating mosques, burning and defiling the Koran, and raping Moslem women. In so doing, they are encouraged by the enemies of Islam and Moslems: these foes are the Zionists, the Christians and the arrogant people who provide them with provisions and arms. Therefore, an insurgent who was previously a Moslem is now an apostate; and a non-Moslem is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.

Following this religious ruling, Sudanese soldiers and allied militias began killing Nuba imams, burning mosques and desecrating Korans. Today, the same actors praise God as they kill the innoncent.

To destroy the social fabric of the Nuba society the government forces and the Arab militiamen systematically raped thousands of Nuba women, including girls as young as nine. The raping took place during abductions, in military camps, and in so-called “peace camps.” One victim, a 17 years-old girl named Fawzia Jibreel, told African Rights:

After dark, the soldiers came and took the girls to their rooms, and raped them. I was taken and raped… When you have been taken, the soldier who has taken you will do what he wants, then he will go out of the room, you will stay, and another one will come…Every day the raping continued… It is impossible to count the men who raped me. Perhaps in a week I would have only one day of rest. Sometimes one man will take me for the whole night. Sometimes I will be raped by four or five men per day or night; they will just be changing one for another.

The policy of rape is being used in the Nuba Mountains once again.

On July 1, during Friday prayers in a mosque in Khartoum, al-Bashir said that he ordered his soldiers to continue “cleaning” South Kordofan. As history shows all those who care about the plight of Nuba and other Africans of Sudan must take his words seriously and act to stop his religious genocide.

This article was first published in Big Peace on July 6, 2011

By Charles Jacobs and Sasha Giller

On July 9, the mostly Christian South Sudan will legally and officially separate from the Muslim north and become a new, independent and free country. Fearing loss of its iron clad grip of other non-Arab regions in the north, whose people likely envy the freedoms won by the South, Arab/Islamist leaders in Khartoum have launched a military assault on the Nuba Mountains, a mixed Christian, animist and Muslim region. Reports from the area are gruesomely reminiscent of the decades-long assault Khartoum waged on the South. These include forced conversions to Islam, mass displacement, bombing of civilians and mass slaughter.

John Eibner testifies before Congress

For over two decades we have been working to end slavery in Sudan by raising funds for slave liberation program of Christian Solidarity International (CSI-USA).

On June 16, CSI-USA's CEO John Eibner testified before a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights urging the lawmakers to take action to eradicate slavery in Sudan.

Since 1990s CSI-USA has freed more than 100,000 slaves, but according to the sources cited by Eibner more that 35,000 remain enslaved to this day.

"The aggressive Islamist power in Khartoum...bears primary responsibility for the revival of slavery in Sudan and its use as an instrument of collective punishment in its declared jihad against non-submissive Black African communities in Southern Sudan and other marginalized areas," said Eibner.

Eibner, who concluded that a long-lasting peace in Sudan and the stability of the newly emerging nation of Southern Sudan are unlikely as long as the practice of slavery continues, pleaded the US Government to take steps to stop it including the establishment of:

1. A financially transparent and functional Sudanese national institution for locating, liberating and repatriating slaves

2. A program of research on all aspects of Sudanese slavery

3. An institution, with international and indigenous components, to monitor slavery and its eradication.

To read CSI-USA press release "CSI Urges Lawmakers To Take Action on Ending Slavery in Sudan" click here.

For the full text of John Eibner's testimony click here

June 24, 2011

For over two decades we have been working to end slavery in Sudan by raising funds for slave liberation program of Christian Solidarity International (CSI-USA). On June 16, CSI-USA's CEO John Eibner testified before a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights urging the lawmakers to take action to eradicate slavery in Sudan.

Since 1990s CSI-USA has freed more than 100,000 slaves, but according to the sources cited by Eibner more that 35,000 remain enslaved to this day.

"The aggressive Islamist power in Khartoum...bears primary responsibility for the revival of slavery in Sudan and its use as an instrument of collective punishment in its declared jihad against non-submissive Black African communities in Southern Sudan and other marginalized areas," said Eibner.

Invasion of Abyei, Test for America

On May 20 Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) invaded Abyei, a disputed region situated on the border between South and North Sudan. The Khartoum regime reportedly razed villages and used tanks and helicopters to indiscriminately shell and bomb civilian population, causing at least 20,000 to flee. Armed government-supported militiamen were reported to burn and loot on a massive scale. The attack brought the largest African nation to the brink of all-out war and may severely harm the chances for peaceful separation of the South, planned for July 9. Abyei's oil reserves and fertile grazing lands are claimed by both the African South, where the residents are mostly Christians and the followers of traditional beliefs, and the Arab, largely Muslim, North. The region belonged to the South until 1905 when the British transferred the administration of Abyei from Bahr el-Ghazal province (South) to Kordofan (North). The majority of Abyei's population is African despite the Government's large scale settling of Messariya Arabs. The 2005 America-brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which halted the decades-long North/South war and provided for January referendum on South's independence, also included the Abyei protocol, which promised the citizens of Abyei an opportunity to choose between staying in the North and returning to the South. After preventing the referendum various Sudanese government officials, including President Hassan al Bashir, asserted northern ownership of the area. The timing of the attack - a day after President Barack Obama exalted the Arab revolutions and promised "concrete actions" to support human rights, democracy and the right for self-determination in the Arab world - suggests that al Bashir is testing whether America's commitment to supporting opposition to Arab oppression would also extend to Sudan. Experts believe that the US "incentive-oriented" policy toward Sudan created a situation where the regime "felt certain that it would face no international consequences for its attack."

The White House condemned the assault, but will it truly support the Arab world's African victims?

May 25, 2011