Slavery ignored.

Miss Southgate is a freelance writer based in New York.

NEW YORK CITY 

For several months, New York City's black-oriented media and church and community gatherings have been fiercely divided over North African slavery.

The controversy began in February, with six articles written by Samuel Cotton in the City Sun. Cotton had researched the topic at the request of Sun publisher Andrew Cooper, who had seen Charles Jacobs and Mohamed Athie of the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) on PBS. Cooper and Cotton are black.

As "you read this," Cotton began, "in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Black Africans continue to be enslaved by their Arab Berber masters. . . . In the Islamic Republic of the Sudan . . . Black women and children (mostly Christian) are being captured in raids on their villages and sold as chattel slaves."

Soon afterward, the Daily Challenge championed the cause of African slaves with ongoing coverage of the grass-roots reaction to the Sun's revelations. One front cover, headlined "The Scars of Slavery," featured a black man removing his shirt. "Mauritanian exile," the caption read, "tortured by Arab Muslims during Mauritania's murderous 1990 anti-Black pogrom, bared his scars to a horrified audience in Brooklyn's House of the Lord Church." In June, the Challenge ran a seven-part series on the roots of Arab racism against blacks.

Meanwhile, at the Abolitionist Con-ference held at Columbia University in May, black nationalists made common cause with AASG and African exiles. Sudanese Bishop Macram Max Gassis told delegates Sudan's Islamic fundamentalist regime "encouraged slavery" and had declared holy war on non-Muslim Sudanese. He was joined by Harlem activists and by historian John Henrik Clarke. The "rapidly expanding Arab slave trade" accompanied the "spread of Islamic fundamentalism," Clarke noted in videotaped remarks. "It is odd that very few people in the Western world are saying anything about" present-day slavery.

But the Nation of Islam (NOI) is speaking out -- in defense of Sudan and of Muslim enslavers. So is the black weekly, the Amsterdam News. Having rubbed elbows with Abu Nidal and Hezbollah extremists at the Islamic conference in Khartoum, Louis Farrakhan's international representative Akbar Muhammad noted that the AASG research director, Charles Jacobs, is "a Jew, maybe a Zionist"; Cotton and Cooper are therefore dupes of a Jewish plot to besmirch Islam and divide blacks.

However, chattel slavery in Sudan and Mauritania has been documented by academics and journalists, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, and Anti-Slavery International.

In Sudan, reports Gaspar Biro, a special investigator for the UN, the "Abduction of children [and] women . . . is routinely practiced. . . . [They] are kept in special camps where people from the north or from abroad come to purchase them for money or goods such as camels." Human-rights violations are rampant. The London Observer reports that some Sudanese Arabs export slaves to Libya, Chad, Mauritania, and the Gulf states. "Sudanese army officers are involved in trading young children." President Al-Bashir himself is believed to own several slaveboys, though he acknowledges only that four "students" live in his house.

The plight of these slaves has moved grass-roots blacks in New York but has yet to rouse the liberal press and the black civil-rights leaders into action. Journalists who fought apartheid are silent now that the oppressors aren't Westerners. Black American spiritual leaders are likewise passive. African exiles and refugees, Cotton notes, "are refused an audience with Black Christian ministers," some of whom "wine and dine with the Arab enslavers." The "Congressional Black Caucus, Trans-Africa, the Rainbow Coalition, the Nation of Islam, and the NAACP [have] forsaken us," complains Augustine A. Lado, president of the human-rights group Pax Sudani Network.

"For two years we tried to get Rev. Jackson on the record against slavery," says Charles Jacobs. He "returned our document packages unopened. A staff person told us that Jackson wouldn't touch the issue because it seemed anti-Arab." Jackson wouldn't even give Cotton a statement. He "is busy with affirmative action," an aide explained. "Right now, slavery is not on his agenda."

In 1993, Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.) sent Benjamin Chavis, then executive director of the NAACP, two letters about "kidnapping, slavery, and the export of women and children from . . . Sudan." "Please let me know if the NAACP is willing to step forward," Wolf wrote. There was no response to these nor to similar pleas Wolf made to apartheid foe Randall Robinson. Robinson promised exiled Sudanese that he would "do something about Sudan after Haiti."

Some Congressional Black Caucus members seem keener on seeking reparations for slavery of centuries past than on ending current bondage. When representatives of 25 relief groups met in Washington last year to step up pressure on the Sudanese government, the Caucus was noticeably absent. The AASG, Jacobs says, sent every Black Caucus member documents on slavery. "They took no public action and did not return our calls."

Things may be changing, though. In January, Black Caucus Chairman Donald Payne (D., N.J.) co-sponsored a bill introduced by Rep. Dick Zimmer (R., N.J.), which cuts aid to Mauritania until it takes action "to eliminate chattel slavery." In September, the Black Caucus declared its opposition to slavery. Time will tell whether action will follow this declaration.

The NAACP, which took no action under Chavis, passed a resolution in May condemning Sudan and Mauritania and announcing that it now stood in "the front line" of the struggle. Curiously, while the resolution exhorted the U.S. and the UN to act, it did not reveal what the NAACP itself planned to do. No action has followed since May. The NAACP's acting executive director, Earl Shinhoster, did not return phone calls.

What accounts for such inertia in those who tirelessly battled apartheid? Black leaders "have ties and friendships" in "Islamic fundamentalist countries," explains Cotton, "and sources report that Arab money funds a number of pet projects of some Black politicians and religious leaders." Black leaders also fear alienating Louis Farrakhan.

"My people are killed every day . . . enslaved . . . displaced," pleaded Sudanese exile Sheik Anwar McKeen, on New York's black radio. Most liberal journalists and black leaders have yet to respond.