Slave trade in Africa reported to be decreasing

Saturday, July 24, 1999

GENEVA [MENL] -- Slave trade in the Sudan and other parts of Africa is decreasing, a Christian rights group says.

"Far fewer slave raids and the capture of fewer slaves have taken place in 1999, compared with last year," said John Eibner, spokesman for the Geneva-based Christian Solidarity International.

Eibner said traditional chiefs and other civil authorities in northern Bahr El Ghazal are resisting slave traders. He said his human rights group has redeemed 2,035 black African slaves during a week-long mission to Sudan that ended on July 7.

Since 1995, CSI has freed 11,147 Sudanese slaves and returned them to their communities in Bahr El Ghazal as a result of CSI's Slave Redemption Program. Eibner said the program includes delivery of food and medicines, and support for educational programs for returning slaves and others affected by slave raids.

The group pays about $50 for the release of each slave "Slave raids in Sudan take place in the context of the government of Sudan's declared Jihad against the ethnic and religious communities that resist its policies of forced Islamization and Arabization," Eibner said. "The Sudanese civil war has assumed genocidal proportions."

CIS estimates that hundreds of thousands of women and children have been abducted by Sudanese troops and forced into slavery.