20th October, 2005

MARK ELLIS
ASSIST News Service

Her brother founded the Guardian Angels to fight crime in the subways of New York. After a brief career with the NYPD, she’s become a guardian angel of a different sort- one who battles the continuing existence of slavery in Sudan and other parts of the world.

“I not only speak about slavery in Sudan, I speak about 27 million modern-day slaves - including reports of slavery in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut,” says Maria Sliwa, a writer, speaker and founder of the human rights organization Freedom Now. While describing herself as an evangelical Christian, she is just as likely to address a synagogue or Unitarian gathering as she decries the evils of slavery.

In some respects, she’s found Jewish audiences to be more responsive toward persecution and enslavement issues than her evangelical audiences. “Among evangelicals, there has been almost a tendency to glorify martyrdom,” Sliwa observes. “The Jewish perspective is that if you know somebody suffering or in pain, it’s a sin to turn away,” she says. “That’s what the Jews believe and that’s why they’ve been proactive in helping people enslaved.”

Many of her listeners are stunned by the pervasive existence of the practice - officially abolished worldwide in 1927. “There is slavery in every state in the U.S. and on every continent except Antarctica,” Sliwa notes. She cites CIA estimates that 50,000 people in the U.S. are trafficked as domestics, garment, agricultural, or sex slaves.

On her trips to Uganda and Sudan she’s documented numerous examples of male and female slaves who suffered horrific mistreatment in the hands of their captors. “I found a number of boys who had been enslaved and freed that had also been raped,” Sliwa says. “This is a type of trauma that needs to be addressed and nobody is talking about it.”

Last year, she visited Pastor Sam Childers at the orphanage he runs on 42 acres in Nimule, South Sudan. His orphanage has become a refuge for children fortunate enough to escape from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which operates in the border areas between Uganda and Sudan. The LRA has kidnapped more than 20,000 children since 1988 and forced them to serve in the largest army of child soldiers in Africa.

One month before Sliwa’s arrival at the orphanage, Pastor Childers had undertaken a mission that freed 25 LRA child-soldiers aged four to 14. As Sliwa talked with these children, she discovered stories even more traumatizing than rape. Some had been forced to attack women collecting firewood in the vicinity of the orphanage. Several women were abducted, and several had lips, ears or breasts savaged by the attackers.

“They say they chop off the ears because people don’t hear the truth and they chop off the lips because people don’t speak the truth.”

In this army of child slaves, they are compelled to engage in such atrocities. “Some of the kids were forced to chop up their teachers and then cook and eat them,” Sliwa reports. “Some were so traumatized they couldn’t talk,” she says. Sliwa was grateful she spoke to a child psychologist before she went on the trip as she counseled her young victims.

When Sliwa returns to the U.S. she is dismayed by the lack of awareness in the church about these subjects. “Many churches are only praying once a year for the persecuted church,” she notes. “I know the church has been active opposing abortion and electing George Bush, but why is it so silent about persecution and slavery?”

“I don’t want to romanticize the suffering,” she adds. “My focus is trying to end it.”

Maria Sliwa often lectures on modern-day slavery, has published on boy slave rape in Sudan and is founder of Freedom Now News, (www.FreeWorldNow.com) an international human rights news service. This article was first published by ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net).

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