The slave and sudanese slaves’s beatings

Michael was one of the first slaves to tell his tale. His eyes were
red, fatigue showed on his weathered face. Scars marked the places
where wounds from beatings have never healed. He said his wife was
stabbed to death by their master’s wives, four Arab women who were
angry she was at the water well with them. Michael was beaten
unconscious because he charged his master when he heard the news of
his wife’s death.

Some of the men had been in captivity for more than 20 years, captured
by the Janjaweed (Arab for “Devil on Horseback”) and Arab slave
raiders during the so-called civil war.

The younger slaves, children like Ahkmed, were born into slavery. His
mother was killed by her master. Ahkmed has no idea where his father
is, no clue of his age. The reddish tint in his hair shows how
malnourished he is. His clothes were ripped and dirty, barely hanging
on him.

All of these people had lost hope they would ever be free to live
their own lives and have their own families.

There are reports of tens of thousands of men, women and children
still enslaved in Darfur and Kordofan.

A group of abolitionists, under the banner of Christian Solidarity
International based in Zurich, has been working quietly since 1995 to
free the slaves in Darfur as well as provide them with humanitarian
aid.

This organized rescue of slaves was begun about 20 years ago by the
Sudanese themselves. The Arab/Dinka Peace Committee is a grassroots
organization that liberates Sudanese slaves. The covert operation
generally begins in cattle camps in the north, where the underground
network trades slaves for cattle vaccine. Each vaccine is worth about
$40, and it costs one or two vaccines per slave. Livestock is much
more valuable to the Arab slave masters than are human beings.

In Germany in the 20th century, it was the Holocaust. Some 50 years
later in Rwanda, genocide again. And now, in the 21st century, as we
talk about smart cars that can park themselves and sending people to
Mars, we still allow the barbaric treatment of humans. Genocide rears
its ugly head again. We’re a society with short-term memory and
information overload.

Sudan and slavery are invisible to the Western world. Few if any
American journalists are telling the slaves’ stories. Why does CSI go
into Sudan? Because no one else will. It’s remote, it’s hot, and it’s
desolate, with no electricity, running water or cellphone or Internet
service in most places.

And, let’s face it. These victims are black. Politically, Darfur is in
bed with China, which is in bed with the United States. Slavery in
Sudan is a three-pronged issue: race, religion and politics.

There may be tens of thousands of slaves still in captivity in Darfur.
If after you read this you decide to do nothing, then at least you can
not say you didn’t know.

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Yalini, the protagonist of my novel “Love Marriage,” turns 25 this
month. “I was born in the early hours of the morning, on a day in late
July,” she says in the book. “And as I entered this new world, my
parents’ old one was being destroyed.” Moments after she is born, her
Sri Lankan father watches on television as the country he left erupts
into violence — the anti-Tamil riots known as “Black July.” With the
anniversary of those 1983 riots, Sri Lanka’s war also turns a quarter-
century old this month — and I find myself still debating how to
describe it. In practically every interview I give about the book, I
am asked an unanswerable question. This morning, in San Francisco, the
interviewer is Aimee Allison of radio station KPFA. We’re live,
talking about Sri Lanka.

“Can you lay out what the landscape is there, and what is the source
of the conflict?” she asks.

The conflict has cost about 70,000 lives, and counting. Both sides
have long been criticized for their human rights violations. On the
government side, there are mysterious disappearances and killings of
mostly Tamil civilians, journalists and aid workers and the long-
simmering but never-concluding investigations into those incidents.
Other evidence suggests that the government colludes with
paramilitaries who have conscripted child soldiers. The Tigers, too,
have a stained history: They have used suicide bombers and child
soldiers and have killed elected politicians, dissenting Tamils and
civilians. Many governments, including the United States, list them as
a terrorist group.

I first really tried to explain the situation last year, in a
graduate-level South Asian anthropology class at Columbia. I had
prepared to present a reading on a specific aspect of Sri Lankan
society, but the professor asked me to talk more generally about the
country instead. How would you explain it to undergraduates with no
knowledge? he asked.

I was completely thrown. I don’t even remember how I began. Perhaps I
picked up the chalk and drew the lumpy map of the country. (The
professor: Does it really look like . . . that?) Or perhaps I began by
trying to explain the ethnic conflict. (The professor: Who are these
different groups? How did they originate? Can you explain the
different groups of Tamils? What do you mean, Ceylon Tamil? And the
up-country Tamils, who work on tea estates? And are the Muslims Tamil?
No? But don’t they speak Tamil?) Whatever I did, it was wrong — or
not right enough, or not complete enough. When the class ended, I was
still trying to explain Sri Lanka. We hadn’t even gotten to the book I
had been assigned to discuss. I left the room stunned at my inability
to put the country’s history into brief, teachable terms. You’ll thank
me later, the professor said. Next year, when your book comes out,
people will ask you that question — and then they will dissect your
answer.

As a novelist, I should be free to write about whatever I want,
without worrying about the political significance people will attach
to it. Indeed, writing fiction means that I have license to diverge
from historical facts. It shouldn’t be my responsibility if some
readers have little knowledge of Sri Lanka beyond what they read in my
book or hear me say as a guest on a radio show. I also know, however,
that regardless of the caveats I put before what I say, my words may
carry the weight of an imagined community.

The threat followed quickly on from the announcement that Condoleezza
Rice signed a formal agreement with the Czech Republic to host the
radar for the controversial project.

Moscow argues that the missile shield would severely undermine the
balance of European security and regards the proposed missile shield
based in two former Communist countries as a hostile move.

“We will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with
military-technical methods,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said
in a statement.

After 14 months of negotiations, the US is struggling to clinch
agreement with its other proposed partner – Poland – where it hopes to
locate the interceptor missiles designed to shoot down any incoming
rockets.

“There are remaining issues, but the United States has made a very
generous offer [to the Poles],” said Dr Rice.

The signing ceremony seemed to bury that idea. Addressing Russian
anxiety about the anti-missile system in what used to be its backyard,
Ms Rice added: “We want the system to be transparent to the Russians.”

In Prague, where polls consistently show a majority of Czechs opposed
to hosting the US radar, protestors from Greenpeace unrolled a large
banner proclaiming “Do not make a target of us.”

After Prague, Dr Rice will visit Bulgaria and Georgia where she will
stress US support for Tblisi’s application for Nato membership,
another annoyance for Russia.

to Gerald Baxter: not you should mention functionality of brain cells.
Modern americans are descendants of bushrangers from Europe who tried
to escape punishment for crimes in motherland and killed indians to
occupy their territories. Nothing has changed since then. There’s
nothing to do with genes.

The thing that strikes me as strange is that if this is to stop
missles from Iran why position it where they are? The US has its new
colony in Serbia. Europe tends to forget these anti missle missiles
still wont stop the warhead landing in the EU and contaminating
European soil..

This is not a MISSILE COMPLEX it is an Anti-Missile Complex. The
Russians are using this situation to gain more global influence in the
world, Why the USA does not understand this beats me. USA cannot put
this on Russian soil because it consists of technology not available
in Russia

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 :In a blatant effort to scuttle tomorrows one-
day strike by hundreds of unions, the Sri Lankan government has
mounted a terrorist scare, claiming to have information that the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) could set off bombs in the
South this week.

Media and Information Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa, another
member of Rajapakses huge cabinet, was also present at the media
conference. Asked about the governments response to the strike, he
would only say: It is a secret. The government has extensive powers
under the countrys emergency regulations to suppress the strike or to
detain strikers. These include the imposition of essential services
orders to ban industrial action that is disrupting or threatening the
maintenance of supplies and services also essential to the life of the
community.

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