The buying and selling of human beings has gone on for a long time. Slavery's shadow stretches across the face of mankind's history like a scar that refuses to fade.
As long as there's a buck to be made from the sweat of someone else's brow, it will probably be with us in one form or another, forever mocking our moral complacency.
Many millennia ago, it bloomed in the muddy quarries of Egypt. In imperial Babylon, the gods blessed slavery's institutional cruelty while gorging on sacrifices of blood. Not even the world's earliest democracies questioned whether it undermined the glory of the Greek city-states that once dotted the Mediterranean.
At the dawn of recorded history, slavery was already a folly that even the most morally astute took for granted. Its spiritual corruption covered the whole world from the lost kingdoms of Africa to the Asian subcontinent to the isthmus of the Americas. Very few cultures, if any, can boast of having escaped its dispiriting legacy.
These days, Sudan has taken center stage in the slavery spotlight. International outrage has been building against the National Islamic Front -- Sudan's ruling regime -- since media reports of slavery's "return" began filtering out of the country seven years ago.
Slavery in Sudan has all the elements of a morality play Westerners can get behind with little hesitation. The controversy features an "extremist" Islamic regime in Khartoum that many considered certifiably "evil" long before President Bush ever heard of it.
The victims of the regime are black Christians and animists from the south. Those not captured and sold into slavery in the north eventually join the rebel group known as SPLA -- Sudan Peoples Liberation Army. The war between SPLA and the National Islamic Front has been raging since 1983, with an estimated 2 million dead -- 4 million displaced -- and no end in sight to an exceptionally bloody civil war that destroyed the regular economy.
Since 1995, Western aid organizations like Christian Solidarity International have engaged in the controversial practice of "redeeming" slaves from Arab traders for $50 a head.
Raising money to buy enslaved Sudanese children has become a favorite classroom project for American school students, who are encouraged by their teachers to think of themselves as contemporary "abolitionists."
The cause is also generously underwritten by black Americans, who still identify with chattel slavery's painful past. But the primary funders of Sudanese slave redemption have been Western evangelical churches and the American Anti-Slavery Group.
Suddenly, millions of dollars generated by the kindness of schoolchildren and Christian charities in the West are circulating in Sudan, though the war-torn nation doesn't have an economy to speak of.
Not surprisingly, the ranks of "slave traders" and "slaves" waiting for redemption in camps in the north -- and increasingly in the south -- have swollen dramatically in recent years.
According to The Irish Times, CSI claims to have redeemed 64,000 slaves since 1995. With prices of "slaves" fluctuating on the Sudanese black market between $33 and $100 each, CSI is the biggest "redeemer" of slaves in the world. If recent reports are to be believed, it is an organization of well-funded dupes, as well.
Earlier this week, The Washington Post and Christianity Today.com published stories that allege that fraud is so prevalent in Sudan that it is impossible to assume the integrity of any part of the redemption process as it is currently constituted.
Extensive reporting by both news outlets leaves little doubt that rank opportunism by combatants on both sides of the civil war has turned slave redemption into a profitable game with constantly shifting rules and players.
From now on, would-be abolitionists will have to figure out how to differentiate between "real" slaves and villagers posing as slaves for a cut of the redemption money. Meanwhile, slavery -- real slavery -- continues to afflict parts of the African continent like festering lesions.
One humiliating legacy of slavery is the cynicism it engenders in those who are most exploited by it. It may be difficult to believe, but there are people alive today who are scheming up ways to turn slavery --inhumanity they or their loved ones may have experienced -- into an opportunity for profit.
The Sudanese slave scam is an example of how cynicism distorts even missions of mercy. There are people who consistently refuse to aid in their own liberation. They're the ones who make slavery possible in the first place.
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