Ex-slave visits Israel in plea for Sudan refugees
Ben Lynfield
Jerusalem – While he was settling into his new life in the United States in 1991 Simon Deng saw a newspaper headline proclaiming that human beings are for sale in Sudan for ten dollars.
“If not for that headline I wouldn’t be here today,” he said over coffee at a Jerusalem hotel this week.” It brought out everything I had been through as a child. I almost lost it. I did not sleep for three days My choice was to live in denial or come out of the closet. I realized I had to come out and tell the world that that newspaper was true because I myself was a slave as a child.”
In recent years, Deng has been one of America’s leading activists against slavery and the mass killings perpetrated by the Sudanese government in Western and south Sudan, a calling that has led him to walk from the United Nations in New York to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to protest inaction over Darfur, to meetings with US President George Bush and other top leaders to take steps against Sudan, and, last week, to a journey to Eilat, Arad and Tel Aviv in Israel where he met with hundreds of Sudanese refugees.
Deng’s visit came as Israel hardened its position towards the stream of African refugees crossing from Egypt, with Knesset legislators passing on first reading a bill that would provide prison sentences of 5 to 7 years for those making the illegal crossings. The bill would legalize rapid fire deportations without hearings to determine the status of asylum seekers. This, despite the fact that refugees subjected to “hot deportation” to Egypt last August went missing or were forcibly repatriated to Sudan where the punishment for travel to Israel can be life imprisonment or execution.
Deng, whose forehead is marked with a series of welts that identifies him as a member of the south Sudan Shilluk tribe, recalled that his family had given him up for dead and held a funeral for him during his three years of bondage to an Arab from northern Sudan.
“When I was taken at the age of nine I was forced to do things that a human being should not do, to do things that a child at that age is not capable of. In the north donkeys are used to carry water from the river Nile, but as a slave that became my job. A human being should have the opportunity to say no when he is subject to terror, but there was no choice. I was beaten even when I did nothing wrong, just because someone decided he called me and I didn’t say yes loudly enough.”
After three years, he met a fellow Shilluk who helped him escape.
Deng has a track record of strong support for the Israeli government, including condemning comparisons of Israeli policies in the occupied territories with apartheid..
But he is dismayed with what he says is a policy of differentiating between 600 Moslem refugees from Darfur, who have been granted residency, and the about 2000 predominantly Christian refugees from south Sudan, who face possible expulsion. Deng did not take up the cause of Eritreans or refugees from other African nations during his visit. Israel, he says, should grant the southerners a haven until 2011, when a referendum is due to take place on southern independence. “These are all Sudanese. They faced the same things from the same people.”
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Israel is a relatively small country, and is probably not in a position to solve the crisis of Sudanese refugees.
However, in light of the suffering that Jews have undergone in the past, and in light of the values that Jews profess to uphold, Israel should do what it can, if only symbolically, to help as many refugees as is feasible. Some may be given asylum. Others could be helped abroad. But ignoring them, or punishing them, will not do.
When Israel acts positively in this regard, she send a message to the rest of the world as to what is right, and reminds her citizens back home that theirs is a country that stands for what is right, even when others couldn’t care less.