train. During their movement on horseback they pass through Dinka villages and cattle camps, which they attack, stealing cattle and taking slaves. They then return to the train with their booty, and as the train nears its destination, the horseback militia forces return back to the North as the trains enter Wau. To return to Babanusa, the PDF guards the train, and similar atrocities in Dinkaland recur.
My investigations indicate that the capture and movement of slaves to the North has been predominantly the work of the Murahileen. It has also been established that some of the regular soldiers and members of the other forces guarding the train have kidnapped women and children, whom they took to their barracks. Some of them have reportedly taken this human booty with them to their hometowns and villages when they went home on holidays or when they were transferred. Many children currently working as domestic servants in the towns and villages in northern Sudan were taken in this manner, under the pretext that they were being rescued from the ravages of the civil war in the South and were going to places of care rather than to enslavement. Some of them have been taken to Islamic schools in Khartoum to be trained as future Mujahideen to be used against their own people. Contrary to the stated goal of the army in establishing militias to boost its military situation, the government granted the soldiers free rein in the South to supplement their meager salaries with whatever loot they could come by.7
The Raids that Marked the Beginning of the Tragedy
The militias had been active since 1985 taking slaves from the Dinka. The first and most destructive attack on the Dinka communities of Aweil, Abyei, and Tuic occurred in February 1986. Jointly, the Rezeigat raided the Malwal Dinka of Aweil West County of the Bahr el-Ghazal region and the Misseria Humr raided the Abiem Dinka of Aweil East County. The Misseria Humr also attacked the Ngok Dinka of Abyei and Tuic during the same operations. During these violent attacks, many Dinka were killed, including the son of a Dinka paramount chief, Riiny Lual, in the village of Marial Baai. The Rezeigat and the Misseria Humr occupied a large area of Malwal Dinka for nearly two months. During this period, they conducted daily raiding and looting from their new bases within the Dinka territory, and some went back and forth between their homeland and the Dinka area to move their booty. They took two thousand women and children and thousands of cattle. The Dinka in the area were scattered, and large numbers were displaced to the North across the Kiir River into Baggaraland, where they hoped the government might protect them and provide them with shelter and food. The displaced also thought that their kin who had moved there in earlier years might help them. As will be shown later, they were soon disillusioned. Successive governments deliberately decided on a policy of exploitation of the displaced that amounted to slavery.8 Other Dinka communities in the vicinity of the border with the Baggara withdrew from their villages and cattle camps and moved to Dinka areas farther south and east of the region. The Dinka of Abiem in Aweil East County, Abyei, and Tuic were also displaced in massive numbers as a result of Misseria Humr raiding. Large numbers of children and women were captured and driven off to be sold into slavery or disposed of once they were determined to be unfit for the tasks for which they were taken. People found unsuitable for slavery were left to linger until they were able to find money for bus fare to other northern cities like Khartoum. These individuals have become an important source of information on the conditions of those who remain in bondage.9
The second raid took place in January 1987. Baggara raids take place almost exclusively in the winter because it is the dry season in Sudan. During the autumn, the rivers overflow their banks, making it difficult for the horseback raiding bands to cross into South Sudan. Horses also suffer from constant exposure to water, mud, and mosquitoes. Due to the difficulties experienced by their horses during the wet season, the Murahileen attack the Dinka only between January and April. Occasionally, they have raided up until May if the rainy season is delayed. The January 1987 raid targeted the area of Gong Machar in Aweil West County. The raid continued through February, and the Rezeigat took away almost all the cattle that remained in the area, killed many people, and captured about a thousand children and women.10 They took them across the Kiir River to “store”11 them in the zaribas12 (fenced enclosures normally used for cattle) while they conducted more raiding. After that, when the raiding bands were satisfied with their destruction and had accumulated enough booty, the captives were taken farther to such Baggara towns as ed-Da’ein and Abu Matariq, where they were distributed among the raiders and their families. The slave raids have taken place every year since 1985. In some years, multiple raids occurred in the same villages in one single dry season. For example, between January and April 1998, there were twenty-four raids in Aweil and Tuic Counties. There were approximately the same number of raids during the dry season of 1999.
By the time the second raid took place in 1987, the SPLA had increased its deployment of forces from the Tiger Battalion on the border areas of Aweil and southern Darfur under the command of George Kuac to protect Dinka civilians. The Baggara militias became aware that they could not do much damage to the forces of the SPLA, whom they were supposed to be fighting. In fact, they made a conscious decision to avoid SPLA forces by all means and instead attack civilian villages. Since the SPLA force in the area at this time consisted of only 4,000 men, it was not possible for them to completely block the marauding forces of the Baggara. The SPLA spent the whole dry season of 1987 trying to flush out the militias, running from one area to another whenever news came in about a raid. It became so difficult to deny the Baggara forces access to northern Bahr el-Ghazal that the SPLA resorted to a tactic of allowing them to enter and then locking them inside the South to retrieve the abducted people and the looted cattle. In one incident, the Baggara learned of SPLA forces trying to block them from returning to the North. They withdrew into a thickly forested area about forty miles west of Dinkaland, but the SPLA penetrated the forest and attacked them and recouped most of the stolen cattle. Despite the defeat and numerous casualties, the Baggara had found raiding too lucrative to give up. There have been many incidents where the Baggara were defeated and experienced heavy losses, yet they have continued to return to the South.
With increasing SPLA ability to rebuff militia raids, the government army advised the Murahileen to use the town of Safaha inside the Southern Region’s border as its base to quickly retreat to when cornered by the SPLA. At this base, the army would be able to provide the militia with needed supplies and reinforcements. There was a small 600-man-strong government army contingent in Safaha, and the thousands of Rezeigat armed men were only too happy to receive such a strong backing by the government of Sudan. Safaha became a strong militia and army base from which the assault on northern Bahr el-Ghazal was launched in 1987. The SPLA, however, continued to attack Safaha and retrieved stolen cattle and took over the town, killing two well-known army officers, Ahmed Musa and Omar Gadim, who were staunch supporters of the militia system. There were constant skirmishes, in which the Baggara were attacking the Dinka villages and withdrawing as fast as possible into pockets of forests before the SPLA could reach them. But the Rezeigat attacks became more and more successful in avoiding head-on clashes with the SPLA because they were guided by Dinka collaborators. Some Dinka reside among the Baggara and show the Baggara where SPLA positions, Dinka dry season cattle camps, and other population concentration areas are located. This is a puzzling phenomenon that cuts across cultures and historical periods and has occurred among blacks in the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa, in the American West, where native Americans gave each other away, and during the Holocaust, where some Jews worked for the Nazis.13 It is common knowledge that the Baggara often have difficulties with the terrain and the geography of the Dinka territory and with knowing about the SPLA positions, and benefit from the help of some Dinka.
The Acquisition of Slaves and the Involvement of the Government of Sudan
The history of current slavery resembles the history of contact between Bahr el-Ghazal and alien intruders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This contact, which began in the middle of nineteenth century, was characterized by violence. The contact began with the influx of ivory and slave traders, followed by the Turco-Egyptians, the Mahdists, and the Europeans, all of whom entered the province in pursuit of either colonial or Islamic interests.14 When the slave traders first penetrated northern Bahr el-Ghazal, they tried to bring
