Photo Essay: Abduction in Sudan

In May 2004 I traveled to the southern state of Bahr el-Ghazal in Sudan to interview women and children who had been abducted and now were being returned. Slave trading has a long-standing history in the states that developed in the Nile valley, and although the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium officially abolished slavery in 1924, the practice has continued among pastoral groups in northern and southern Sudan.

The desertification of western Sudan has led some Baggara, the Arab cattle-keeping peoples of western Sudan, to move further south in their search for water and grazing lands. Broader disagreements over control of the state, which culminated in a series of civil wars in Sudan, have given the practice of enslavement an additional dimension, as a failed judiciary and successive governments' support of the slave trade erased any semblance of accountability and exacerbated existing tensions between rival ethnic groups. The arming of the Baggara by the Government of Sudan has all but erased previously existing local dispute-resolution mechanisms by giving the Baggara license to loot and abduct their neighbors.

The Baggara have a variety of relationships with their captives. These include forms of economic exploitation, such as debt bondage; sexual exploitation, where young girls are made to be "wives" or are otherwise sexually abused; and occasionally even adoption. Some abductees return voluntarily, after escaping or being released from their captor's control, and make their way south on foot. Others are brought back by a joint committee established by the Government of Sudan in 1999 called CEAWC, the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children. This committee is comprised of both Dinka Chiefs and leaders of the Arab communities that historically conducted the slave raids in the South. It reports directly to the President of Sudan and receives funding from the Government of Sudan.

Some time after the creation of CEAWC, this organization began bringing women and children to Save the Children Fund-UK centers in the North without any documentation. Now, a difficult problem has emerged in northern Bahr el-Ghazal: Many of the abductees returned by CEAWC are claiming to have been brought back against their will, and some even say they were never abducted in the first place, but had fled north with their families during the war.

A number of Dinka Chiefs were killed in 1995 and 1996 trying to rescue abducted women and children, and at different points some Arab members of CEAWC have gone to the members of the Arab Misseria tribe to negotiate the release of abductees. These are only a few of many examples of heroism in the fight against the abduction of women and children in Sudan.

However, there are also examples of corruption and scandal. At the height of the slave buyback campaign's popularity in the West, allegations were leveled at the Dinka Chiefs for allegedly putting members of their own communities up for "sale," despite the fact that these individuals hadn't been abducted. Similar accusations were made during our visit to the region, as well as the accusation that some of the Dinka Chiefs are cooperating with the Government of Sudan in forcibly moving internally displaced persons (IDPs) to the South against their will.

On four occasions over the two months preceding our visit, hundreds of abductees were brought to Warawar, north of Malual Kon, accompanied by no documentation. They were packed into lorries like cattle, 50–60 persons to a truck. In each case, representatives of one aid organization were waiting in Warawar when the trucks arrived, accompanied by photographers taking pictures of them with the abductees. In a press release, the organization later hailed the returns as a victory and claimed it was providing aid and support to these women and children, even though its office in Aweil East was closed at the time. In general, very little support was available for the abductees upon their arrival—not only because resources were already stretched thin, but also because CEAWC members failed to notify local officials and aid organizations of the impending arrival of large numbers of women and children.

The...