Sudan: A Novel (31 page)

A picture of al Bashir, in full dress uniform, flashed on the screen. Dan looked up at the picture as he spoke.

“Al Bashir’s government is controlled by a fundamentalist group called the National Islamic Front, and they instituted a program to force everyone in the whole country to convert to Islam.”

Dan stood in shadow with the light from the projector behind him, but even in the dim light, the legislators seated at the table could see the intensity on his face.

“And when the six million southern tribals didn’t play ball, the north began to systematically wipe them out—massacred them by the thousands.”

Chad flashed a more detailed map of Sudan on the screen. Dan walked over to it and pointed to southern Sudan.

“This is where the atrocities have been reported. In the last fourteen years, more than two million Sudanese, most of them black Africans, have been killed there—
by their own government
. More people have died in Sudan than in Rwanda, Uganda and Kosovo put together.”

Dan turned and walked back to the conference table. He placed his hands on it and leaned toward his listeners.

“And more than a hundred and fifty Sudanese have been sold as slaves to the highest bidder.”

He let that point sink in for a beat or two before he continued.

“The pictures I’m about to show you were sent to me by a BBC correspondent in Cairo. They’re hard to look at, but they’re reality. The photos were shot by an undercover reporter inside Sudan.”

A woman’s voice came from the darkness. “Your brother?”

“Yes,” Dan said, and he was surprised at the swell of pride he felt. “My brother, Ron, is risking his life to document the bloodbath in Sudan.”

Then the black legislators looked through the viewfinder of Ron’s camera at a nightmare world; one awful image after another filled the screen.

In one, a blank-faced child cradled the body of a dead little girl in her arms.

“See these marks.” Dan stepped to the screen and pointed to red welts on both girls’ shoulders. “Slave traders don’t brand captives. These children had already been purchased when they escaped. The little one died when she angered her master and he put insects in her ears, stuffed wax in behind them and let the bugs eat out her brain.”

Dan heard a muffled groan from somewhere in the darkness.

Another picture: bullet-riddled bodies lying in pools of blood, with huts in flames behind them.

“The government’s usual game plan is to send in fighter planes to strafe and bomb the villages, then the troops come in behind...”

An image appeared on the screen of a pile of dead bodies slashed and hacked apart, many of them missing body parts.

“...and attack the defenseless villagers with guns and swords. But their weapon of choice is the machete.”

The images flashed one after another. Dead children. Bombed villages. Burned crops and dead livestock. After a while, Dan stopped his narration and moved out of the glow of light from the screen. These people didn’t need him to tell them this was genocide.

After the last image, Chad turned the lights back on, and Ron returned to the lectern.

“General al Bashir has already massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people. I have drafted legislation to force him to stop the bloodbath or face serious consequences.” He paused. “And right now, ladies and gentlemen, that legislation doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.”

There was a murmur in the group; Dan’s candidness surprised them.

“I need your help, plain and simple. Without it, the scenes you saw on the screen will be replayed again and again and again until there are no southern tribals left to slaughter.”

Dan could have said more. But it was time to hear from his listeners. “Questions?”

The most senior member of the group was a congressman from Louisiana. “We have already made a commitment to help the U.N. raise another fifty million dollars in aid support.” Representative Charles Dubois had left the bayou but not the accent behind. “That’s not enough?”

Dan shook his head. “It would be a good start to relieve the suffering in the south, if it actually got to the people who needed it. But it doesn’t.”

Dan explained that the United Nations notified Khartoum where and when an aid drop would be made, which ensured the slaughter of anybody foolish—or hungry—enough to show up to claim it.

“And humanitarian aid doesn’t address the basic issue here,” he said. “We have to do more than provide the survivors a hot meal and a blanket after their government has bombed their villages and soldiers have hauled off their women and children to sell to the slave traders.”

His final two words drew a response from a well-groomed New York congressman. When Lamont Walters leaned forward in his chair to speak, Dan had time to think: OK, here it comes. “As you may or may not know, I am a Muslim,” Representative Walters said in a resonant baritone. “Like many other people, you condemn what you do not understand. And it is obvious to me you don’t understand Islam.”

He picked up the pen beside the notepad in front of him and pecked it on the table to emphasize his next words.

“Islamic law forbids slavery; Christianity does not. For two hundred years, American slave owners used the Bible to justify kidnapping the ancestors of every man and woman in this room.”

There were murmurs in the group, but Dan couldn’t tell if they were agreeing or disagreeing with Walters.

“Actually, I know enough about Islam to know that the Koran does not allow a Muslim to enslave
another Muslim
,” Dan fired back, a little stronger than he meant to. “But if you’re not a Muslim, all bets are off! And the people hauled away in trucks to the north to spend their lives in bondage are Christians or animists. Sharia law allows Muslims to enslave them—they’re fair game.”

The congressman from New York responded with fire of his own. “Reverend Chavis and Benjamin Grover traveled to Sudan to see for themselves what was really going on, and there were no signs of slavery. If that many people had been hauled off in bondage, surely somebody would have noticed.”

“Those men were wined and dined and shown only what al Bashir wanted them to see,” Dan retorted. Then he grabbed hold of his emotions—nothing to be gained by a shouting match—and continued in a more measured tone.

“You saw pictures right there”--Dan pointed to the screen on the wall--“of things they never saw. I didn’t invent the pictures. That’s reality, not the five-star hotel tour the government gave Chavis and Glover.”

Dan turned and asked Chad Mattingly for the bound folder the young man had carried in with his laptop.

“Representatives Burns and Johnson didn’t get a guided tour.” The two congressmen had traveled to Sudan unannounced and had gone unaccompanied to inspect the southern provinces. Dan had included their report in the information he’d dispersed in recent months to members of both the House and the Senate, so its contents shouldn’t have been news to anyone in the room.

“Right here is what they found.” He held up the dossier. “It’s all documented—everything I just showed you.”

Then Dan paused and returned to a previous point.

“If that many people had been hauled away, surely somebody would have noticed.” Dan quoted what Walters had said earlier. He paused again, and then quietly launched a single word out into the air and let it hang there.

“Who?”

A beat or two later, he continued. “Who would have noticed? Who is there to see, to come and tell the tale? If it weren’t for men like Burns and Johnson—and my brother—nobody would ever know. The victims are nobody’s favorite religion and nobody’s favorite color, and they can vanish without a trace, are vanishing without a trace, and nobody will ever notice or care unless we do.”

The congressman from New York was undaunted. “It will take more than some pictures—horrible pictures, I grant you—to convince me. Those are photos of what happens in a civil war. The two halves of Sudan are fighting each other, and people get killed in wars. It’s deplorable, but it is reality. None of that proves genocide. And it certainly doesn’t prove slavery.”

Margaret Bryan, a congresswoman from Missouri who was one of the most respected members of the delegation, took a verbal step in between Dan and the fiery New York representative.

“Excuse me,” she blatantly interrupted. “I want to talk about the elephant in the middle of the room.”

She put down her pen and aligned it carefully on the top of her legal pad, just for a moment or two, to let the dust settle. She was a veteran of many heated debates and she wanted to turn the burner down on this one. Then she leaned forward and looked all around the table.

“Can anybody say Tri-Cola and American Gum?”

There it was, out in the open. Dan knew they’d get to it eventually.

“Those guys—and some others—are heavy hitters,” she said. “They have huge investments in Sudan. Sanctions will not make them happy, and they can bury everybody in this room with their pocket change.”

Representative Dubois spoke again in his soft Cajun voice. “Tri-Cola and American Gum both have branch offices in my district. They’re good corporate citizens, models in minority hiring. Now, if I turn against them and vote for economic sanctions in Sudan, that chicken is going to come home to roost in my front yard when they start laying people off.”

There was a momentary silence while each person at the table did a mental tally of the hit he or she personally would take if they crossed giant corporations whose sales exceeded the gross national product of two-thirds of the countries in the world.

Dan walked to the window, pulled back the drapes and spilled afternoon sunlight into the room. “I know what you’re saying.” There was no boom in his voice now. “I’m up for reelection myself.”

He turned and faced the table. “And the soft drink and gum companies have put more than four hundred thousand dollars into my opponent’s campaign chest already.”

Representative Dorothy Warden from Ohio spoke for the first time.

“Why you, Dan?” Her voice that was almost too deep and husky for a woman.

Dan looked puzzled.

“You’ve grabbed hold of this Sudan thing and held on like a pit bull.”

Dan was a neighbor of sorts. Warden hailed from Cincinnati, a couple of hours upstream from Dan’s hometown on the Ohio River in Indiana. Middle America. Fly-over country. There was a bond there.

“And hanging on could very well cost you your career. I’m just curious. Why?”

“That’s a legitimate question, Dottie, and I wish I had a smooth, sound-bite answer for you. Truth is, I’m not sure.”

He stepped to the side table under the window where the coffee pot and empty cups sat. He picked up a crystal water pitcher and poured himself a glass, then slowly drank half of it. He was stalling. When he turned back around, he had made his decision.

“My family owned slaves.” He watched the surprise spread over their faces. Even Chad Mattingly looked a little shaken. “So did my wife’s family. Our ancestors in Virginia and North Carolina. We looked it up.”

The representative from Maryland, the powerful Avery Thompson, leaned forward in his seat. Dan had expected to be grilled by the politically savvy Thompson, Alonzo Washington’s mentor. But the man had not said a word, made a comment or asked a question. He had merely listened, as he listened now.

“And that would tie it up nice and tidy, wouldn’t it? Wolfson wants to absolve his guilt, cleanse the family name of shame. Case closed. And I’m ashamed to admit that’s probably at least part of it.”

Dan’s tone changed as he grew speculative. “It’s interesting...even though we’re a couple of hundred years removed from slavery in this country, we still don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to talk about it. It makes us uncomfortable.”

He spoke his thoughts as they formed in his mind. “Maybe acknowledging that slavery is alive and well somewhere else in the world forces us, as a nation and as individuals, to revisit our own trauma. And we just flat out don’t want to go there. That could be why we try so hard to pretend it’s not happening.”

He turned and set the glass down. When he turned back around, his face was hard.

“But it
is
happening. Right now. This minute. As we sit here safe in this comfortable room, on the other side of the planet, Arab raiders are kidnapping women and little kids, tying them with ropes and hauling them off to an auction where they’ll be sold, branded, beaten, raped, mutilated and forced to work against their will.” He walked back to the lectern. “I don’t need some other deep psychological explanation for why I’m so passionate. That’s reason enough. It’s wrong.”

His voice got quiet. “It’s just
wrong.”

He looked down the long table; the faces that looked back at him were unreadable.

“Sure, this is a religion issue. Absolutely! Militant Muslims in the north are forcing Islam on Christians and animists in the south. But it’s a race issue, too. Arabs are enslaving tribals.”

He put the palms of both hands on the table, leaned over and said quietly, “I appeal to you today as survivors of the Middle Passage. The question isn’t why haven’t African Americans responded to this crisis? What I want to know is why African Americans
who are descendants of slaves
won’t fight to stop the enslavement of others.”

Dan straightened up. The orator was back in his voice, not in volume but in intensity. “Rarely does history grant an opportunity to confront a tormentor lost to time and place. You, we, I, have that opportunity right now.”

No one moved. Dan reached down and picked his briefcase up off the floor.

“Thank you for hearing me out. If you need to hear any other arguments on this issue, just listen to your conscience.”