For sale: people.

The Swahili word for slave is mtumbwa. The Arabic is abd. Both words are heard with growing frequency in Africa. Once again chattel slavery is flourishing on a continent long scarred by such crimes.

In December the UN Human Rights Commission reported that thousands of ethnic and religious minorities in Sudan are being sold into slavery as part of a Sudanese state-sponsored war policy. Sudan, Africa's largest country, has been embroiled in a brutal - but, in the West, forgotten - civil war for fourteen years. Since 1989, when a military coup installed an Islamic theocracy in Khartoum, the government has sought to impose strict Islamic practices on the tribes and peoples of this vast country, including those of the southern third, many of them Christian, who resist Islamic rule.

Last March, after returning from a trip to Sudan, the Reverend Louis Farrakhan declared his support of the Khartoum regime and challenged the U.S. media to substantiate persistent reports that Sudan was imposing slavery on the country's Christian and animist minorities. Partly as a result of the Farrakhan challenge, the media dispatched reporters who have now clearly documented the practice.

The Sudanese civil war - one that at times has been as bloody for its infighting among factional and tribal forces as for the brutality of Khartoum's methods - has claimed more than half-a-million lives and displaced another 3 million persons. Unlike Rwanda, Sudan's vast migrations have not been shown on TV. The slavery issue, now confirmed by mainstream news agencies and international human-rights groups, is beginning to bring the calamity of Sudan to the world's consciousness.

The Baltimore Sun, NBC News, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International of Geneva, the U.S. State Department, and the UN have all provided evidence of the Sudanese government's role in the slave trade. As a U.S. State Department report comments, Sudanese militia routinely steal women and children in the south, shipping them north to perform forced labor, and sometimes exporting them for sale in Libya and other countries. Two years ago, Anisia Achieng Olworo, a Sudanese Christian, told Catholic New Times of Toronto that women and children were being sold at $35 a head. Last year, Gaspar Biro, the UN's special rapporteur on Sudan, informed the UN Human Rights Commission that slavery was one of Khartoum's weapons of war and that children were being sold for as little as $15. At the same time, Bishop Macram Max Grassis, a spokesman for the Catholic bishops' conference of Sudan, confirmed that some 30,000 people from his own diocese in the Nuba Mountains had been enslaved. And last year Kevin Vigilante, a physician at Brown University who had led a fact-finding trip to Sudan for the Puebla Institute, told a U.S. House joint subcommittee that slavery in Sudan is "one of the most shameful if hidden atrocities of our times."

To ferret out the facts, the Baltimore Sun dispatched Gregory Kane and Gilbert Lewthwaite. Reporting from the scene, their three-part series ("Witness to Slavery," June 16-18, 1996) tells how Khartoum's unpaid militias stream south by train, pillaging as they go, and then transport slaves back north for sale. The reporters accompanied members of Christian Solidarity International who made contact with go-betweens and paid inflated prices (up to $500) for the release of young boys. In December, this time using graphic documentary footage, NBC's "Dateline" told much the same story. With the dramatic beauty of Sudan as a backdrop, Sara James narrated how families are torn asunder and how parents then search desperately for their stolen children. According to James, "we discovered eyewitnesses to slavery everywhere." NBC presented some of them, and pictured the mutilated bodies of escaped survivors. When shown this documentary evidence, Sudan's ambassador to the United States, Mahdi I. Mohamed, responded feebly on camera: "It cannot happen. That is contrary to the policy of the government." But it is happening; and it is the Sudanese government that is behind it.

In a recent syndicated column (see, National Review, December 23, 1996), William F. Buckley, Jr., asked rhetorically whether there were any acts of an intracountry nature for which a national government ought to be forced to forfeit its sovereignty, at least temporarily. Countries that practice egregious human-rights violations forfeit their authority, Buckley argued. He suggested that in such cases an international force, modeled on the French Foreign Legion, was needed to enforce UN-initiated indictments.

In the meantime, the Puebla Institute has called on the UN to post a network of human-rights monitors in Sudan. It has also urged the International Monetary Fund to withhold support intended for Sudan until human-rights violations are ended. The United States Catholic Conference has called for an effective arms embargo against all belligerents in Sudan's civil war, and has asked the U.S. government to take the lead. At a grassroots level, fledgling abolitionist groups are springing up in the United States to spread the alarm. In New York last month, the Abolitionist Leadership Council - a group of clergy and civil rights advocates - called on President Bill Clinton to make the freedom of slaves in Sudan a top foreign-policy priority. As we begin a new year, it is sobering that, more than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 134 years after our own Emancipation Proclamation, trade in human persons continues and without protest from most of the world.