A FORMER SLAVE SPEAKS OUT by John Elsegood

Sudanese Human Rights activist, Simon Deng, is an articulate opponent of slavery,  having had the experience of being one as a child.

Now resident in the US, Deng told an audience of 140 people at the Reading Cinema in Belmont, on November 16, that he had been taken from his family in southern Sudan by a Muslim neighbor when he was a nine year old.

Taken to the Arabic north of the country he was enslaved for three and half years.

He was beaten, worked constantly, fed scraps and slept with animals.

‘The Arabs waged a constant war on southern Sudan which was mainly Christian and African,’ he said.

“A year before independence from Britain (1956) they slaughtered one and half million. The intent was to convert all to Islam,” he said.

“ After a 1972 Peace Agreement we thought we could live in peace but in 1982 the Government decided to become an Islamic state. Africans in the South of the country felt betrayed.”

Deng said that over the next 23 years another two million Africans were slaughtered by Islamists.

“The Government mobilised to recruit all young Muslims into the National Defence Force (outside the Army) and the call for Jihad went out. As well as murder they burned down homes and seven million refugees were created, the most since World War II.”

Deng said it cost $10 to buy a human slave under the imposed Sharia Law.

“How can a person built in the image of God  be gifted away,” he asked?

Answering his own question Deng said, “it is because non-Muslims are not seen as human beings but merely as property.”

Deng in fact replaced a donkey as ‘the drawer of water’ from the Nile for the slaver that ‘owned’him, being threatened with amputation of arms and legs if he attempted to run away.

“I had to say yes to everything and was beaten if I said it too softly.”

So how did he escape?

“I met a fellow villager in the city of Kosti where my slave master had moved to, after two and half years in captivity. He knew an individual from my village and I was subsequently introduced to him. It was this man who facilitated my escape.”

This benefactor told him his family had looked for him but after two and half years had then conducted a funeral ceremony.

Deng has no time for what he calls the “United Do Nothing Nations.” He said slavery still existed.

“I am there for them (slaves) because the UN does nothing. I speak with anger because the UN is only interested in condemning, wrongly, one nation –Israel.”

“There had been no resolutions against Sudan and in fact when the UN agency UNICEF wrote a report all the Islamic countries had it withdrawn.”

Deng said he was tired of the hypocrisy that sees a democratic state like Israel, where all people have freedom, labelled an apartheid state.

“Yet nothing is said when a pregnant woman was told she was a Muslim and sentenced to death because she had married a Christian. She delivered her baby while handcuffed. This is the Sharia Law and terrorist courts of what is now the Islamic Republic of Sudan. Southern Sudan is now a separate state since 2011.”

“As a child I cried loudly but now I speak loudly,” said the man who led a Freedom March between Washington and New York to protest against slavery.

Deng said his message to Australians was clear: “you have a voice and you have the vote –use it.”

He said any products marked Halal should be boycotted by Australian consumers because it was an Islamic tax on them.