“I do not know whether I am an adult or a child…All I do is eat and sleep, eat and sleep.”

— Majok, a Sudanese youth who was brutalized and castrated as a child, and who is now a freed slave. Majok does not know how old he is or what his name is.

In January of 2005, an agreement was signed to end the civil war in Sudan that raged for 21 years between the largely Muslim north of the country — where the Arabic speaking Sudanese identify themselves as Arabs — and the Christian and Animist southern region. In the months after the agreement to end the war, the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children (CEAWC), a six-year-old Sudanese organization, founded by the government, has been repatriating southern Sudanese who were enslaved by their northern compatriots. It is unclear how many southerners were enslaved; the London- and Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute has identified 12,000 abductions, 11,000 missing, and 5,000 murdered. In contrast, the controversial Swiss group, Christian Solidarity International, refers to 200,000 people who were abducted, a number generated by local southern Sudanese leaders.

The CEAWC’s repatriation of slaves is problematized and complicated; while many former slaves are relieved and delighted to return to their southern homeland, there are others, particularly of the younger generation, who feel displaced and wish to return to the northern region, which they have come to identify as home. Additionally, agencies including UNICEF and Save the Children UK have criticized or questioned CEAWC’s methodology for repatriating individuals, suggesting that some people were not clearly identified as slaves, or if they were, they were not consulted about whether they wanted to return to the south or if they even had families to return to.

Mimi Hanaoka