Buying Sudanese Slaves

GENEVA - The UN Children's Fund urged the Sudanese government to cooperate in stamping out slavery, and said that private aid groups who buy the freedom of captives are not helping the situation. Efforts should instead focus on ending the 16-year-old civil war, which has killed more than 2 million people, displaced 4 million more, and led to an upsurge in slavery. "While UNICEF understands the humanitarian instincts of school children in the US to purchase the freedom of slaves, the sobering truth is that these efforts will not end the enslavement of human beings," said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy.

Christian Solidarity International has paid out roughly $50 per person to buy the freedom of more than 5000 slaves in the past four years. The campaign has been especially successful in the US where pupils at a school in Colorado collected more than $50,000. But Bellamy rejected those efforts. "As a matter of principle, UNICEF does not engage in or encourage the buying and selling of human beings," she said. Human rights activists accuse Sudanese armed forces loyal to the Arab-led, Muslim-dominated north of systematically capturing Christian and animist black African slaves-particularly children-as a weapon against southern communities that resist forced Islamization. Sudan says the slavery charges are trumped up, part of a Western campaign to impose economic and political embargoes against the Muslim government. However, the government has tacitly acknowledged that slavery does exist by asking for UNICEF's help in overcoming the problem. Bellamy urged the government and rebels in the south to allow international aid workers in and to support efforts to trace abducted children and reunite them with their families.

"The practice of paying for the retrieval of enslaved children and women does not address the underlying causes of slavery in Sudan: the ongoing civil war and its byproducts of criminality," she said. "Until these root problems are addressed, there can be no lasting solution."

East Timor Military-Backed Killings Threaten to Derail Scheduled Election

End all US Arms Sales and Military Training Assistance to Indonesia

Congress Must Act to Ensure a Fair Election in East Timor in August

1) Call your Representative immediately and ask her/him to co-sponsor House Resolution #97 and HR 1063!

2) Call your Senators immediately and ask them to co-sponsor Senate Resolution #96

Lobby for East Timor June 5 - 9th. Join Constancio Pinto, Bella Galhos, Allan Nairn, and East Timor activists from around the country for ETAN's Spring Lobby Days June 5-9

Background and Update

On December 7, 1975, Indonesia brutally invaded East Timor. By the early 1980s, the subsequent occupation had claimed the lives of more than 200,000 East Timorese, one-third of the population.

Every day we are flooded with news of the war in the Yugoslavia, but there has been little US media coverage of recent mass killings in East Timor by paramilitary militias armed and trained by the occupying Indonesian military (ABRI). These marauding gangs have sown terror throughout the territory, murdering more 100 civilians since early April. An Indonesian military-brokered "cease fire" intended to placate international outrage has been repeatedly violated by more paramilitary killings; though the Indonesian government agreed to UN accords that grant the East Timorese the right to decide whether they will be part of Indonesia or move toward independence on Aug. 8, the regime still supports the death squads.

Thousands of East Timorese, terrorized by the militias, have fled their homes. Their displacement has aggravated an already severe shortage of food, medicine, and medical personnel; it is almost impossible to meet even their most basic needs. The US should demand an end to ABRI and paramilitary violence and provide emergency humanitarian assistance for the refugees fleeing that violence.

On April 6, Indonesian mobile police fired tear gas into a church filled with 2000 refugees from earlier violence. As the refugees streamed from the church, paramilitary killers hacked and shot to death at least 57. Eleven days later, at least 13 refugees camped on a resistance leader's property were massacred; many more are unaccounted for. Since then, more unarmed East Timorese have been murdered by paramilitaries.

The militias, their ranks filled with forced conscripts, are entirely a creation of ABRI. The Nation magazine revealed that the ABRI has made a secret "accord" with the militias authorizing them to assassinate members of local independence groups. The militias have no popular base, but they do have ABRI backup and weapons provided by the occupation regime. This regime in turn receives vital support from the US.

Bill Clinton has said military action in the Balkans is necessary because of a "moral imperative." But as the US military escalates the NATO war in Yugoslavia, Clinton could easily stop a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in East Timor, replete with rape, torture, mass killing and a refugee crisis, merely by ending all military support for the repressor. Given that the US has supported the Indonesian military's war in Timor from the beginning, this would be only just. Instead, the Department of Defense is doing its best to circumvent congressional intent with new military training programs and weapons shipments to ABRI, which, in addition to its brutal repression of the East Timorese, recently massacred dozens of civilan protestors in Aceh and continues to crack down on dissidents elsewhere in the archipelago.

For more information: East Timor Action Network PO Box 150753, Brooklyn, NY 11215-0753 USA; 781/596-7668; <timor-info@igc.apc.org> www.etan.org