by Askia Muhammad
White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com)�The powerful human drama of American school children donating their lunch money to purchase the freedom of Black slaves in the Sudan is often part of nothing more than a corrupt racket operated by leaders of Southern Sudan�s rebel army, according to a major investigation conducted by reporters for the Washington Post, The Irish Times and The (London) Independent.

The divisive issue of slavery�perpetrated by so-called Arab agents of the Muslim-dominated government in the North against Black Christians and Animists in the South�has drawn world-wide condemnation of the government in Khartoum, but it has had a particularly strong impact among Blacks and Christian groups in the U.S.

Millions of dollars have been raised in this country for slave redemptions.

The images of lines of women and children being marched out of the African bush by a slave trader in the white robes of an Arab have been shown repeatedly in television dramas as well as in news reports.

"The more children, the more money," Mario Muor Muor, a former senior official in the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA), the leading southern rebel group in Sudan�s 19-year-old civil war, told Washington Post reporter Karl Vick, according to the Feb. 26 edition of the newspaper.

Last August Mr. Vick and reporter Declan Walsh traveled extensively throughout villages deep inside the troubled Bahr el Ghazal province, where many of the slave redemptions have taken place over the last six years. Mr. Walsh�s reports appeared in the Feb. 23 edition of The Irish Times, and the Feb. 24 edition of The Independent.

But SPLA commanders and officials have pocketed money paid to buy the freedom of captives during elaborate rituals of deception where in some instances they actually "stage-managed the transactions, passing off free southerners as slaves."

Sudan�s Ambassador Khidir Ahmed was "very happy" that the news reports were published, according to Hodari Abdul Ali, a media consultant at the Sudanese embassy in Washington. The shocking revelations "reinforced what he had been saying for months. It was good to see it confirmed by an independent source. We felt all along that people had been distorting the issue," he continued.

"Our position has been that John Garang is very much like Jonas Savimbi. He�s a war criminal. We�re very keen on wanting to have a nationwide cease fire to end the civil war and to have good relationships with the United States," said Mr. Ali.

"Wow!" responded Mel Foote, president of the Constituency for Africa," in response to the news reports. "It is truly amazing what people have done to keep the longest running war in Africa going! There needs to be a reckoning by those who have exploited the Sudanese people for monetary and political gain."

More than 2 million people have been killed in the conflict since it flared up again in 1983. The civil war began in 1955 before Sudan won its independence from Britain. Government authorities have long complained that they are unfairly blamed for the centuries-old practice of tribal abductions that happen mainly in rebel-controlled areas, and that they get no credit for the fact that 60 percent of the population of southern Sudan�some four million refugees�have "voted with their feet" by voluntarily migrating to government controlled areas in the North for safety.

The news reports reveal that America is probably distancing itself from rebel leader John Garang, according to Min. Abdul Akbar Muhammad, international representative of the Nation of Islam. "America needs to cultivate a relationship with some of (her) old perceived enemies from the Cold War days, because of oil, strategic location and influence in the area," he explained.

"Right now, (Dr.) Garang has become a liability, for England, for America and for Israel. The best way to get rid of him as a liability is to expose this," Min. Akbar told The Final Call. "They�re the ones who started it. They�re the ones who floated the story."

America, he continued "is try(ing) to woo the friendship of the Islamic government in the Sudan in this so-called war against terrorism, so it doesn�t appear as a war against Islam, and John Garang becomes expendable. In this case, the way you get to him is to expose this as a fraud," said Min. Akbar, who also feels vindicated by the recent reports, after years of feeling that he was a "lone voice in the wilderness."

Like officials at Christian Solidarity International (CSI), and other agencies which have arranged trips to Sudan and have paid for the release of slaves, at least one prominent civil rights leader who says he witnessed a redemption of slaves in southern Sudan is not prepared to forgive Sudanese Arabs or Muslims, who he says continue to practice racial discrimination.

"There is no question in my mind that the same thing happening in the Sudan today, happened 400 years ago in Black Africa, when Arabs from the north, went to villages in Black Africa at the behest of Europeans who needed slave labor in the New World, snatched them from their villages and sold them into slavery," the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, senior pastor at New Bethel Baptist Church, a former member of Congress, and a former deputy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told The Final Call.

"Today it is people who wish to clear land for some Europeans, for (some) Chinese, and Malaysians, and Indonesians, and Canadians, who want the land to extract the oil and water under it, without the presence of the Blacks who live on it.

"While there may be some truth to some people making some money out of bringing people back who�ve been taken from that land. I choose to believe that the practice of slave redemption has the effect of raising public consciousness to what is going on in Black Sudan, and then will eventually prick the consciousness of enough people to demand that it stop, and that people who are light-skinned, and Black; who are Muslims and Christians and Animists, may come together and share the wealth in a fashion that their income, education, health-care, housing and justice needs may be met, beyond race, beyond ethnicity, beyond religion."

While the Rev. Fauntroy and Washington radio talk show host Joe Madison continue to encourage donations to the charities that pay money during slave "redemptions," others have backed away from the process, and at least one United Nations agency is skeptical of many of the claims made by slave redeemers, including the scope of the problem itself.

Based in Switzerland, CSI claims that since 1995 its representatives have bought the freedom of more than 63,000 "slaves." In theory, it arranges for Arab middlemen to buy up the slaves and secretly walk them across the front line to the safety of the rebel-held south. Then the CSI representative flies in, pays the going rate�usually $50 per head but currently $35�and the slaves walk free.

The large amounts of cash transferred to rebel commanders in the slave redemptions actually fuels the market for more slaves, rather than extinguishes it, according to officials from UNICEF, quoted in the recent news reports by Mr. Vick and Mr. Walsh.

Furthermore, UNICEF and others dispute the accuracy of CSI�s claims. According to the UN agency�s Khartoum director, Thomas Ekvall: "We find those numbers frankly impossible."

One of the most damaging revelations in the news reports were several eyewitness accounts of phony slave redemptions. Father Mario Riva, an Italian missionary lived in Bahr el Ghazal for more than 40 years. He retired two years ago. In the late 1990s, Father Riva stumbled across a CSI redemption between the towns of Marial Bai and Nyamlell. The Comboni father was like any other Western observer, but with one crucial difference�he knew the Dinka people, and he speaks their language, as his own.

He saw an American CSI official standing under a tree with some slaves.

The priest recognized them as his own parishioners, according to Mr. Walsh�s reports. "The people told me they had been collected to get money," he said.

"It was a kind of business."

Interpretation was key to the deception, said Father Riva. If Mr. Eibner asked whether a slave had been taken into captivity, the interpreter would ask if they had suffered in the war. If the "slave" answered that they had, Mr. Eibner would be told they had been captured and badly treated by Arabs, and were grateful to be home. "Many times it�s a trick," said the priest.

The sheer volume of money flowing into the south made corruption inevitable. While many relief agencies took material aid into southern Sudan, only the redeemers took dollars. Some of the SPLA officials became so corrupt, they "were selling donated medicines, skimming hard currency and inflating the ranks of real slaves with impostors," Mr. Vick wrote.

"People have been making money off the war, gunrunners, people who have been making money off the food, relief operations, NGOs have been making money. Churches have been making money. Money has been raised because of the allegations of slavery and so forth," Mr. Foote told The Final Call in Khartoum during a fact-finding mission in January.

"I think that people are now seeing for themselves. The U.S. government has now looked at it a little closer and started to see that the positions they staked out have been false and untenable," Mr. Foote said.

In December 1999, the corruption issue erupted during an annual meeting of elected SPLA leaders. "Redemption to me has lost meaning," Mr. Muor told Mr. Vick, four months before he died in January. "It has become a business since people are profiting. So for me, redemption is just a scandalous act."