Note #9208 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:
(Retransmitting to correct date in last paragraph -- 2010, not 2001)
06169 March 17, 2006
Ex-captive taking steps against genocide and slavery in Sudan
'The whole world is talking about Sudan.
But nothing gets done. Just talk, talk, talk.'
by Alexa Smith
LOUISVILLE - Simon Deng is walking south along the highway near Fort Lee, NJ, this morning.
He says it is windy.
"But we're all right," he adds reassuringly.
He's got about 30 folks with him, some still carrying Sudan Freedom Walk signs. Others have gotten tuckered out fighting the wind and put their placards in a car that is following Deng's procession. The group left New York City Wednesday morning and is headed south to Washington, DC.
Deng, like the Pied Piper, is hoping to pick up other supporters along the way.
This is Deng's personal protest against ongoing genocide and the slave trade in Sudan, most notably in the eastern province of Darfur, where United Nations and U.S. officials accuse Sudan's central government of arming Arab militia who have killed and displaced more than 3.5 million black Africans.
A cease-fire has been in place between the militias and Darfur rebels since April 2004, but it is often violated. The situation is monitored by 7,000 ill-equipped soldiers from the African Union.
Reuters news service reported on March 17 that a major invasion by Chadian rebels appears imminent on the Chad-Sudan border and in southern Darfur. About 200,000 Sudanese have fled to neighboring Chad.
"It's a good question you asked - why I am walking," Deng says, puffing occasionally as the wind whips by. "Everybody is now talking about Sudan. The whole world is talking about Sudan. But nothing gets done. Just talk, talk, talk.
"Why not walk the walk?" he says, using a sound bite he's prepared for the times along the way when he'll talk with press and anyone else who is willing to listen.
The Sudan Freedom Walk Campaign - which is Deng's idea - is backed by The Sudan Campaign, a coalition of organizations pushing to end Sudan's conflict by a variety of means, including divestment. These groups include The American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston, MA, the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, both in Washington, DC.
At points along his 300-mile trek, Deng will be accompanied by former NBA player Manute Bol, the second-tallest player in U.S. professional basketball, who holds the record for the most blocked shots per minute. Injured in a traffic accident in 2002, Bol now walks with a cane.
What he has in common with Deng is southern Sudan.
Bol was the son of a chief. Deng ended up a slave.
"I tried to put that behind me. To tell you the truth, at that time (when he was rescued from the Arab family that enslaved him) I decided not to talk about being a slave at all. It is not easy to talk about it ...
"But then something opened up in me," Deng says, as an anonymous driver beeps a horn in the background. "I can talk to you now, and nothing can happen to me. So, why not be the voice of those who have no voice? Silence is not doing me any good. So why not talk about it?"
So he talks, only alluding to the most painful of his memories.
Deng is 45 years old. He has lived in the United States for 15 years, and works seasonally as a life guard on Coney Island. He was trapped by a slave trader when he was a 9-year-old, and rescued when he was 12.
He was abducted one year after his village was burned by government troops. His father moved the family from the bush into the port city of Malakal, for safety's sake, but an Arab neighbor conned him into hauling his luggage onto a freighter - and trapped him there with three other black African boys.
Deng, a member of the Shiluk tribe, was presented as a gift to an Arab family at the freighter's first stop, Kosti.
Three years later, he recognized Shiluk men in the city from tribal markings on their foreheads. He told them his tale. One man then kidnapped him back.
"For three and a half years I was gone ... my father offered 10 cows as a reward. But I was never seen, and everybody assumed I was no longer alive," he says, adding that his rescuer cried when he realized that Deng was his father's missing son.
He wouldn't say what happened in the household where he was enslaved, but in other forums he has talked about sleeping on straw, eating scraps and suffering beatings. "It's the worst thing, the worst thing a human being can have to do ... be a slave," he says. "You can't say no to anything."
Except one thing.
He was told by his keepers that if he took an Arab name and became a Muslim, he could become part of the family.
To that he said no.
Deng remains a Roman Catholic.
But he's unabashed about his dismay at his church's lack of activism. Quiet diplomacy, he says, isn't enough anymore, when villages are still being burned, women raped and children enslaved.
He admires the exception, Bishop Macram Max Gassis, who defied the Khartoum government and flew chartered relief flights into his besieged diocese in central Sudan during the worst years of Sudan's grueling 50-year-long civil war.
He wants more bishops like Gassis.
Gassis was supposed to walk with Deng, but is ill.
"But I am talking as a victim," says Deng, "not as a person of authority. I'm talking out of the pain of those being victimized. I feel their pain. Maybe someone that has not gone through it is not able to feel it."
While Deng is modest about what escalating activism would look like, the Sudan Freedom Walk Web site is not.
It calls for efforts to pressure Sudan, recommending that:
Colleges and universities along the walk's route - Colombia, Seton Hall, Princeton, Rutgers, Georgetown, American and the University of Delaware - adopt divestment policies
States pass divestment legislation - especially New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia
The Bush administration cease from normalizing diplomatic relations with Sudan's government until peace is secured and press the government to establish a task force to eradicate slavery throughout the nation
Congress be pressured to pass the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, a bipartisan bill authorizing the administration to provide assistance to the African Union mission in Sudan, advocate NATO reinforcement to deter air strikes against civilians and deny entry to U.S. ports of shipments to Sudan's armed forces
Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, be charged with war crimes
Two Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) presbyteries are pushing for divestment actions against international companies supplying war materials to the Sudanese government. Three others are expected to sign on before the denomination's General Assembly in June.
The church already put a Canadian company, Talisman Oil, on its divestment list; that corporation later pulled out of southern Sudan and was reinstated in the denomination's portfolio. Talisman was the lead partner in a oil consortium building an oil pipeline from Sudan's interior to the coast. The central government used royalties and revenue from the enterprise to fund its military operations.
Deng acknowledges that he is angry.
"Maybe I'm walking it off," he says, his voice muffled by the wind. Thirty-six years after his life was stolen away, women and children are still being sold into slavery. "Probably. Probably."
Sudan now has a coalition government that provides for secular governance of the south and permits Islamic law in the northern Arab half of the country. The accords that put the government into place ended nearly 50 years of civil strife and violence.
In 2010, Sudanese voters will determine by referendum whether to remain one nation or to split into two.
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