When people are too poor to loot, they may be enslaved instead.
Sudan, one of Africa’s largest countries, is in the middle of a civil war that has destroyed its economy, driven millions from their homes, and left 60% of its farmland untended. The Rapid Support Forces, a militia that controls most of the country, used to support itself by looting, taking people’s valuable, portable possessions.
But now, the country has gotten so poor that there isn’t much portable property to loot.
So the RSF has turned to slavery and kidnapping instead, to raise revenue.
The Washington Post reports:
Since civil war erupted in Sudan last spring, paramilitary fighters battling the country’s army have carried out a campaign of abductions, kidnapping civilians for ransom or pressing them into forced servitude….The Rapid Support Forces, which have captured most of the capital, Khartoum…have made these abductions a lucrative source of revenue…
Some of the victims said they have been enslaved and sold to work on the farms of RSF commanders, and others recounted being held while their families were forced to ransom them. Some victims said they were seized several times. Among those abducted, witnesses and activists said, have been girls and young women who were chained, bound and sold as sex slaves….the RSF has been primarily responsible for the wave of kidnappings. The RSF is composed mostly of ethnic Arab militiamen, and the victims interviewed for this story are Masalit, an ethnic African tribe, though Sudanese of other backgrounds have also been abducted.
Muhammad Arbab Musa, 21, said he was hiding under a bed when fighters from the RSF stormed the military garrison in the suburb of Ardamata, just outside the Darfuri city of El Geneina, in early November….The fighters dragged them from their hiding places and berated them as “slaves,” a term that ethnic Arab fighters previously used to describe ethnic Africans during the previous Darfur war, which began in 2003 and lasted two decades. Atrocities by the military and its allies the Janjaweed — a mostly Arab militia that eventually morphed into the RSF — were so widespread that the International Criminal Court charged the Sudanese president at the time with genocide.
The RSF fighter “said, ‘Get out, you slaves, ’” recalled Musa, who was interviewed in a refugee camp in Chad like others cited in this story. “He killed one of my friends with an ax. … We were beaten with whips.”
Musa said he was taken to another house, where six corpses were sprawled outside, and ordered to work repairing cars….the RSF fighters were ordered…to take the men to the Ibn Sina School. There, Musa said, about 500 people were being held. Eventually, he said, he and a group of others were forced to work on local farms….he overheard a man on a motorbike say he had come to take ownership of them. Their captor told the man to return the next day after completing his payment. Before he did, Musa and a friend escaped…
Adam Hamed, 24, who … survived a mass execution in El Geneina, was also taken to the Ibn Sina School…“One person was killed on the spot, and after that, our people were asked to pay an amount of 200,000 Sudanese pounds ($330), or we would all be killed,” he said. Their relatives collected the money within about 90 minutes and paid the ransom. The group was released. But an hour later, more fighters came and took them to come to the school. Hamed said the faded concrete classrooms of the school were full of terrified captives — men and women, soldiers and civilians….guards would only release people for another $330 ransom, which his family eventually paid again….
Fatima Ishaq, 40, said RSF forces had killed her 17-year-old son when they stormed her house in Ardamata. Her youngest, 15, was seized as they tried to flee, she said. She paid about $80 for his freedom, but his captor handed him over to another fighter, who ordered her to pay again. Ultimately, she had to pay three times. An RSF fighter eventually told her he would keep her son enslaved to carry looted goods but that he would not kill him…..
Multiple witnesses and activists say they have also seen captive young women being sold in Darfur as sex slaves. One resident…overheard two RSF fighters in the market discussing selling two girls in October. He struck up a conversation, and the fighters took him to see two women, aged 18 and 22, locked in a house. The RSF soldiers demanded about $1,000 for both girls… girls and young women are typically sold from the backs of cars [in] Darfur, Khartoum and other places. “Eyewitnesses saw them chained in cars,”…The markets for young women appeared at the beginning of the conflict…Armed ethnic Arabs arrive at dawn in pickup trucks with bound women and girls in the back…
Sex slaves have been seized even from areas far away from the battlefield. In East Nile state, 13 women have been missing since November. Two more escaped and returned home, recounting horrific tales of rape and violence. One described how RSF fighters had kept her for five days, raping her repeatedly. The other woman was detained in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, near its international airport. She ended up with 50 other women in an apartment building used to hold women to be raped in.
Many of the sex slaves are from the Masalit ethnic group. But sex slaves from Sudan’s capital and especially northern Sudan fetch a higher price, especially those who are not as dark-skinned. By American standards, most Sudanese are black — even Sudanese Arabs — but a minority of the Arabs in northern Sudan are white-looking.
The higher prices for women who are lighter follows the preference of Arab slave traders in past centuries — to use mostly black men as slave laborers, while preferring lighter-skinned women as sex slaves. Arab slave traders enslaved between 12 million and 15 million Africans. As Wikipedia notes, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast of North Africa.” The Ottoman Turks also preferred lighter-skinned women as sex slaves: “Girl sexual slaves sold in the Ottoman Empire were mainly of three ethnic groups: Circassian, Syrian, and Nubian. Circassian girls were … fair and light-skinned…They were the most expensive, reaching up to 500 Turkish lira and the most popular with the Turks. The next most popular slaves were Syrian girls, with ‘dark eyes and hair’, and light brown skin. Their price could reach to thirty lira….Nubian [black] girls were the cheapest and least popular, fetching up to 20 lira.”
The RSF is composed mostly of Arabs from western Sudan. They are fighting the Sudanese army, which is led by Arabs from the north of Sudan near the Nile River.
Slavery is also making a comeback in the war-torn country of Yemen, which is next to Saudi Arabia. The Toronto Sun reports that the Houthis who rule northern Yemen “are enthusiastic advocates for the vile practice” of slavery…. there are 1,800 slaves” taken by Houthi leaders. Asharq Al-Awsat reports that the “Houthis are working tirelessly to restore slavery in Yemen.”
Tens of thousands of Sudanese have died of starvation during the war. Thousands of bodies were left decomposing in morgues in the country’s capital. At least 50,000 civilians were killed in fighting between Sudan’s warring factions.
Frankenstein’s monster has turned on its creator, in Sudan. Over a decade ago, Sudan’s military created the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a genocidal militia it used to wipe out villages inhabited by some African tribes in Sudan’s Darfur region. Now, this Frankenstein’s monster, the RSF, is beating the Sudan’s military in a civil war, and has taken over Sudan’s capital region, its breadbasket region, and its vast western expanses. The RSF is looting much of the populace, selling the loot at so-called “Dagalo markets.” It is slaughtering males from western Sudan’s black African Masalit tribe. And it is turning some women into sex slaves, while raping others.
Recently, the RSF renewed its bloody mass killings and rapes to drive the Masalit ethnic group from Sudan into the neighboring country of Chad. The RSF slaughtered 1600 people, almost all Masalit, at a camp for displaced people in Western Sudan.
