Evidentia

Simon Deng & George Tombs

On a visit to New York City last weekend, I met Simon Deng, originally from the Shilluk tribe in Southern Sudan, then a child slave, a competitive athlete, and now an American citizen and human rights advocate. Simon strikes me as a modern-day Martin Luther King: this smiling, soft-spoken, humble man in tennis shoes, full of compassion and rage, is resolutely fighting for the right to life, freedom, dignity and self-government of his people.

I would like to quote part of a speech Simon just gave to the Geneva Summit on Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy.

“My name is Simon Aban Deng. I am from Southern Sudan. I am a Shilluk by tribe. I am a Christian by religion. For decades, the people of Southern Sudan have been persecuted by various radical, jihadist regimes in Khartoum. Twice we have been the victims of prolonged genocidal campaigns by these Islamist regimes, seeking to destroy our people and our cultures through murder, rape, enslavement, and forced conversion to the Islamic faith AND the Arabic culture. First from 1955 to 1973, then again from 1983 to 2005, what are often referred to as ‘civil wars’ brought death and destruction to my people. Yet these wars were far from civil: they fit a well-defined pattern of Arab imperialism, which seeks to destroy the indigenous African peoples of Sudan in whatever ways possible. During these years, over three million Southerners were killed. Millions more became refugees. The same pattern is seen still in Darfur, but also in less-frequently-discussed parts of Sudan, including the Nuba Mountains, Beja in the east, Nubia in the north, and still throughout the South as well. Indeed, the majority of the population of Sudan consists of marginalized peoples. They are ruled by a small, powerful minority in Khartoum.

Massacres in Sudan

“I am living proof of the many crimes and de-humanizations that occur in Sudan. When I was a child, my village was raided by Arab troops contracted to kill by the Khartoum regime. As we ran into the bush to escape, I watched as my best friends were shot dead and the old and weak who were unable to run were burned alive in their huts. The survivors rebuilt our village and buried our dead, only to have the whole process repeated, over and over again. The same calculated atrocity has happened across Southern Sudan, and for many many years.

“When continuing to live in my village became impossible, my parents moved us to the capital of the Upper Nile region of Southern Sudan, the city of Malakal.

Malakal

“There, at the age of nine, a neighbour asked if I would help him with his luggage. He told me to carry his bags onto a steamship on the Nile, and to wait there until he returned. I waited, but he did not return, and soon the ship left the dock, and I, terrified, began screaming and crying. He neighbour then appeared out of nowhere, and calmed me down by saying that since we had left the station already, we would have to wait until the end of the journey when he would put me back on a ship to head back home. He promised it would be OK. Of course this was a lie.

“When we arrived at our destination, in the northern city of Kosti, it turned out that the neighbour had brought three other children with him on the same ship, and we were all unloaded with him. The other children soon disappeared, probably handed off to someone else. I don’t know. I was brought to the man’s village in a suburb of Kosti. There I was given to a family, his relatives, without any knowledge of the arrangement between them, and immediately put to work. After three miserable days, I asked them where my neighbour had gone, for he had promised he would return me to my loved ones back home. It was then I was told that I would not be going home, because according to them I was given to them as a gift. A “gift”, ladies and gentlemen. When you look at me, do you see a gift? Do I look like an object or a commodity? I am a human being, a person created in the image of God. The simple truth is denied by the jihadists and slave-traders who continue to kidnap and enslave children in Sudan to this day.”

Simon has been very active speaking out in the United States, Canada and Europe on behalf of his compatriots in Southern Sudan. “The whole Arab world was behind the war in Sudan,” he says. “If you look at the goals of the war, forced conversion of Christians was a big objective.” He and other Sudanese in exile, such as Catholic Bishop Macram Max Gassiss, lobbied the American government, drawing attention to the violation of basic rights of Sudanese, such as the right to life. While a peace agreement brokered by the United States has calmed things down to some extent, Simon notes that “injustice is being done, atrocities are being committed, crimes are being committed and we should not feel fear and run away just because religion is serving as an umbrella for these crimes… The Sudanese regime in Khartoum takes any accusation of slavery in Southern Sudan as a conspiracy against an Islamic state. In Sudan, we are not just talking about human rights, but about gross atrocities against human life itself…”

Simon says the next ten months will be critical: “it is easy to walk away, to turn one’s back on the situation. The Southern Sudanese should not be denied their right to go to heaven or to go to hell, to determine themselves.”

It is difficult to assess the number of slaves in Sudan at the present time. But there are many of them.